Michael Cuenco
Unherd, Jan. 7, 2025
“The rest of Trudeau’s rule from that point on was one long, drawn-out process of unraveling which can be described as “a political slow heat death.”
In February 1984, Pierre Elliott Trudeau took a legendary walk in the bitter Ottawa cold: there, he decided that he had accomplished all he could and announced his resignation. “To take a walk in the snow” has since become an expression in Canada to signify the solemn contemplative process by which a leader realises that their time is up. His son, Justin, who has just announced his resignation after nine years in power, did not so much take a walk in the snow as be dragged through it, kicking and wailing, by his own MPs. They had finally risen up after months of plummeting poll numbers, one regional caucus after another declaring their wish to see him go.
But how could such a figure — whose ultimate mediocrity has been laid bare — have risen so far? And how is it he came to define a whole decade in the nation’s history? Justin Trudeau had always been Canada’s Dauphin, “the Prince” — indeed, it is the title of a popular biography. But another title from the ancien régime better illustrates what he really was: “the Sun King”, who ruled through spectacle, artifice and celebrity, and who by these means was able to cover up the dire mounting contradictions not just of Canada’s Liberal Party, but of liberalism itself.
The once hegemonic ideology of the West was in the elder Trudeau’s words “not a programme… but an approach to politics”, and it arguably found its fullest expression in his son’s Canada. Humbled in the US and Europe after 2016, liberalism seemed, at least for a time, not just to be alive but thriving in the north. This was for the transatlantic establishment a necessary illusion: Canada as their “Hall of Mirrors”, a consolation and reassurance that their creed still had a fighting chance in a hostile world turned against them. Yet as with the Bourbons and their gilded splendour, Trudeau fell under his own spell, and Canadians paid the price. The story of his reign is thus that of the collision between appearance and substance — and myths, no matter how lofty and intoxicating, can never subdue reality.