The New Yorker:

The Canadian Prime Minister will no longer lead the Liberal Party, and there are reasons to worry about what will happen if the Conservatives win the next election.

By Adam Gopnik

The resignation of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada—or, at least, as the leader of the Liberal Party, until a new leader is chosen, which will amount to the same thing—took place this morning in front of the Prime Ministerial residence in Ottawa. It was a very Canadian setting, with the soon-departing figure of the still young Trudeau wearing an overcoat and gloves, and the smoky breath of winter rising from his mouth as he talked. He spoke in French and then in English and back again and, for Canadians abroad, there was something oddly moving in the easy bilingualism of the occasion. Taken as utterly normal in Canada, it still signals a remarkable and too easily taken for granted co-existence of two “founding peoples” that dates back to the early nineteenth century and the country’s beginnings. Canada, from far away, has always seemed the model liberal country, and this multiculturalism—extended since to the many ethnic tiles of the “Canadian mosaic”—is part of it.

For Canadians at home, of course, this rosy picture can seem misleading, even infuriating. Trudeau fils, son of Pierre, Canada’s dominant political figure of the past thirty or so years of the twentieth century, had clearly lost the confidence and even the affection of the country, and the sheer rage and resentment that was directed at him—somewhat surprisingly, given the limited nature of the Canadian crises—has been startling to witness over the past couple of years. His fall was triggered by the resignation, in December, of Chrystia Freeland, his long-serving finance minister and once close confidant, which was in effect an internal vote of no-confidence, tied to her concerns about the growing deficit and the oncoming train of Donald Trump’s tariffs. But it had been set in motion some time ago by what have by now become the familiar complaints that citizens of democracies make about all their leaders, particularly left-leaning ones, however moderate: that they represent an out-of-touch élite, that they are unresponsive to the economic necessities of ordinary people, that they are too sympathetic to outsiders at the cost of the native population, and all the rest. The same issues that doomed Kamala Harris—a perception that prices, particularly housing prices, were crazily out of control and that the immigration policy, a Canadian point of pride, was similarly no longer rational—doomed Trudeau. (Canadian immigration policy, long focussed on the highly educated, was relaxed by the Liberal government during covid, leading to an influx of immigrants, and was, by a familiar if faulty logic, popularly blamed for the housing crunch.)

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