President Biden with Prime Minister Trudeau.
Credit: JT, Facebook.
After almost ten years in power and months of ignoring calls for his resignation, Justin Trudeau is to back down as Canadian prime minister.
From being the most popular PM to now one of the least popular in Canadian history, the long-awaited resignation has finally arrived just days before Donald Trump is re-inaugurated as president of the neighbouring US.
In a recent poll, 73 percent of Canadians said it was time for Trudeau to go. Even 43 percent of his own party told him to just resign already. But the 53-year-old Liberal Party leader just clung on.
His image even transcended the borders of the country as Trudeau soon became a figure of global reach, in the hope of a globalist left, a kind of anti-Trump against the rise of hard-line populism.
Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau, failed to react to Trump economic threat
Calls for his resignation grew when his finance minister and deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, walked out of government, accusing Trudeau of sitting on his hands in the face of a new Trump administration threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods unless Trudeau did something to tighten border controls between the two countries. If the Trump government were to impose tariffs, the economic effects on Canada would be crippling.
Why has Justin Trudeau become so unpopular?
Canada’s post-pandemic inflation spiked at 8 percent, though it has since dropped to below 2 percent. Unemployment remains high, around 6.4 percent, and the Conservative opposition has berated Trudeau’s carbon tax program.
Housing prices in Canada have become untenable, leaving the country in a situation in which salaries would have to double for affordability to return.
Not until October 2024 did the PM claim he was going to crack down on immigration after the country had let in 3 million people over just 3 years, compounding the strain on the already beleaguered health care system and other services.
In 2018, Trudeau was accused of having groped a reporter, and in 2019 an ethics commissioner ruled that he had attempted to circumvent his former justice minister and attorney general in a case concerning a multinational he had links to. In that same year, photos of Trudeau wearing a blackface in the 1990s came to light.
And, in 2022, when thousands of truckers staged a protest against mandated vaccines, Trudeau incensed the nation when he brushed their concerns aside by calling them a ‘fringe minority’.
Justin Trudeau is said to be resigning on Wednesday, January 8.
