Justin Trudeau: fall of a woke despot

So it’s farewell to Canada’s first black prime minister.

Yes, Justin Trudeau – the man who proved that in these topsy-turvy political times you can be a liberal and an authoritarian, and painfully woke while also having spent much of your youth in black face – has finally resigned.

The writing’s been on the wall for some time now. After historically low poll ratings came the resignation before Christmas of his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, who clashed with Trudeau about how to tackle president-elect Donald Trump’s imperious threats of a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods. In the end, Justin jumped before he was pushed.

After almost a decade in power, he will step down as prime minister and Liberal leader as soon as a successor can be found. Polls suggest that, such is the hole he has left his party in, whoever replaces him will likely face a shellacking in the upcoming election.

Where did it all go wrong? When Trudeau took the reins of his nation back in 2015 – following in the footsteps of his father, Fide… sorry, Pierre – he rode on a wave of popular support and corporate-media swooning.

With the election of another pampered rich kid south of the border a year later, Trudeau was praised in the international media as the anti-Trump – progressive, pro-migration and drop-dead gorgeous, to boot!

Indeed, the next time an establishment scribe slurs Trump supporters as doe-eyed dolts dazzled by celebrity, point them in the direction of the gushing coverage of ‘hunky’ Trudeau, who seemed to govern as if he was in a budget version of The West Wing.

Soon enough, he began carrying on like an unsubtle caricature of a cringe, establishment liberal, chiding women for saying ‘mankind’, instead of ‘peoplekind’, and declaring that he was insisting on a 50:50 male-to-female cabinet ‘because it’s 2015’.

Trudeau is the apotheosis of a hectoring style of politics that assumes voters are terrible bigots in need of lecturing, and women and minorities are perennial victims in need of his paternalistic assistance.

I’m frankly amazed it took the good people of Canada almost 10 years to wipe that smug look off his face.

He’s been called a figurehead of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ – Nancy Fraser’s phrase for those who doll up the same old technocratic, establishment politics with some rainbow, pro-diversity bunting.

If nothing else, his reign has shown just how reactionary elitist ‘progressivism’ really is – enshrining ‘trans rights’ in law, banning ‘trans conversion therapy’ and in doing so taking a wrecking ball to women’s rights and helping to push more confused gay teens towards medical ‘correction’.

Naturally, he was also a Net Zero zealot, signing his resource-rich nation up to punishing eco-targets and taxes that would immiserate consumers and farmers just so he could peacock at COP conferences. (Thankfully, he’s been forced to backtrack on some of it.)

So far, so typical for today’s batch of Western leaders. But it was during Covid that Trudeau properly distinguished himself, particularly with an outrageous vaccine mandate that sparked fury among truckers, who rolled into Ottawa in protest.

When they wouldn’t budge, Trudeau shocked the world by invoking the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history, granting him sweeping powers to freeze the truckers’ bank accounts, break up their convoy and compel tow-truck firms to clear the streets. (The Federal Court later declared his crackdown unconstitutional.)

Arguably, his fate was sealed from then on. Having already hiked migration levels pre-Covid, Trudeau turned to a new influx of temporary foreign workers to prop up a stuttering post-Covid economy – loosening vetting procedures, vastly increasing numbers and putting huge strain on already strained resources.

Historically, immigration in Canada has enjoyed high levels of public support, thanks to a system thought to be welcoming but well-managed. Now, Trudeau is facing a growing public backlash, following a slew of stories about dodgy student visas and an ISIS member who was somehow granted citizenship.

As one columnist put it, ‘Justin Trudeau’s legacy will be destroying the Canadian consensus on immigration’.

Over the course of his tenure, Trudeau has responded to public outcry about immigration and asylum exactly as you’d expect: first by chiding women at corn roasts for their ‘racism’, before finally giving in and pledging to reduce the numbers.

For all the talk of the populists peddling harmful policies that appeal to people emotionally but are actually batshit crazy in practice this sounds like the Justin Trudeau platform to a tee. And we haven’t even touched on the ‘assisted dying’ horror show he has presided over.

Jacinda Ardern, Nicola Sturgeon, Joe Biden, now Justin Trudeau. One by one, the West’s woke authoritarians are being toppled. Perhaps now the technocratic, liberal-left elites will learn that insulting, lecturing, immiserating and – on occasion – euthanising the electorate isn’t necessarily a winning strategy.

But I won’t hold my breath.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater