Justin, We Hardly Knew Ya

On 6th January 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced to Canadians and the wider world that he would be stepping down as Prime Minister as soon as a new leader of the Liberal Party was elected.

Trudeau’s announcement brings to a close a tenure as Prime Minister which has lasted over nine years and led to US President-elect, Donald Trump, to taking an opportunity presented by a period of uncertainty amongst the Canadian ruling class to declare again his interest in Canada being brought into the fold by becoming the 51st state of the United States, though there are many countries other than Canada, including Great Britain, which have strong claims that they are America’s 51st state already.

Trudeau’s demise can be explained simply in two words: The economy. Or rather, the tanking of the Canadian economy, which has seen an exponential rise in the cost of living and unemployment in the post-Covid period, leading to a slump in his own popularity amongst Canadians at large and his own party in particular. His position was also weakened by the resignation of his economic minister Chrystia Freeland in December 2024, who cited Trudeau’s desire to shift her to an alternative cabinet position as the chief reason for her resignation and she is now a front-runner to replace Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party.

Trudeau’s tenure as Canadian Prime Minister will not be viewed kindly by history, and rightly so. He has not only presided over an economy which is sliding towards deeper crisis, but over the introduction of pernicious laws legalising euthanasia, the brutal and authoritarian crushing of the Canadian Truckers’ protests and the veneration of an actual Nazi in the Canadian Parliament. Trudeau and his party of liberals have over the last nine years done what all liberal parties do everywhere that they are given access to the levers of power – absolutely nothing to change the material conditions which affect the mass of the population, and instead indulge in the politics of virtue – to appear to be morally righteous in everything that they say and do, even if what they say and do is, in reality, materially meaningless.

In this article, we will examine several examples of the failure of Trudeau’s tenure as Prime Minister.

Euthanasia

In June 2016, the Canadian Parliament passed a federal law legalising euthanasia. Referred to as ‘Medical assistance in dying’, rather than the assisted suicide which it really is, Canada was not the first country in the imperialist bloc to legislate to put down ill people. However, some of the most egregious applications of assisted suicide legislation presented themselves in Canada, including the case of Amir Farsoud, a disabled man who decided to have himself put down by the state because he was made homeless. Only a GoFundMe which raised $60,000 for him made him change his mind.

The example of Canada and its assisted suicide legislation should have served as a stark example to other countries as to why they should go nowhere near legalising euthanasia, yet our own wretched and contemptible parliament did exactly that on November 29th 2024, when they carried the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill, put to Parliament by the deeply sinister Labour MP Kim Leadbeater. This monstrous piece of legislation, which split parliament across all party lines, is poorly drafted and drags judges into its implementation, despite the principle of the necessity of medical decisions being taken by medical people established again in September 2021 in the case of Keira Bell, as I detailed in my article on assisted suicide in November 2024.

Notable countries which already have introduced legislation to allow for the euthanasia of the ill, the old and the poor include Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands; all on their face liberal countries and therefore all whose ruling classes are focussed on similarly virtuous law making, which in reality manifests itself in the rolling back of laws and liberalising access to a whole raft of deleterious activities and substances, including gambling, drugs and alcohol, none of which have brought a tangible net benefit to society.

A cursory glance at the Government of Canada’s website on the topic of euthanasia shows that eligibility of persons with mental health issues to access ‘Medical assistance in dying’ has been delayed until March 2027, which is a mercy to those affected by mental health issues and certainly allows some room to have that access abolished, but serves as prima facie evidence to the ‘mission creep’ that legislation legalising euthanasia creates – it only begins with the merciful ending of suffering and ends with the putting down of the poor, the homeless and the mentally ill.

Canadian Truckers

In early 2022, Canadian truck drivers took part in protests, including blockades, in opposition to Trudeau’s government imposing Covid vaccine mandates on drivers crossing the border from the United States back into Canada. This decision, reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in January 2022, was a volte-face on the part of the government, who up until that time allowed truckers to cross the border with the United States freely. The truckers stated clearly that the Canadian economy required the movement of good across the border – to enforce them to take a vaccine in order to cross the border not only impinged on their civil liberties, but was a clear example of government overreach.

Hundreds of truckers, along with their rigs, converged in Ottawa to protest against the government’s actions. They brought some of the city’s most busy streets to a standstill and the mayor declared a state of emergency in February 2022.

It was reported that some 90% of Canada’s haulage workers were already vaccinated, however the relatively small number of truckers who were taking part in the protests posed such a severe threat to Canadian capitalism that the Trudeau government were panicked into labelling the protestors as nazis and fascists (a similar accusation levelled at the truckers by British Trotskyites at the time) and leftists supporting the Liberal Party government, including large sections of the Canadian trade union movement, attacked the truckers and claimed that they were not working class because they owned their own rigs. Disgracefully, the British trade union movement was completely reticent on the protests, just as they have been on other ground roots protests like the Gilets Jaunes in France.

Trudeau’s government resorted to out and out authoritarianism to crush the protests – this began with GoFundMe closing down a crowdfunding appeal for the truckers which had raised £5.8m in the short time it had been running. It is inconceivable that this decision by GoFundMe was taken unilaterally and must have been made under pressure from the Canadian government. Other crowdfunding organisations refused to take the truckers’ money, again arguably under pressure from Trudeau’s government, and it took a conservative Christian crowdfunding organisation based in the United States to continue their crowdfunding effort.

Then Trudeau turned to the Emergencies Act, a piece of legislation which was passed in 1988 and gave the government extraordinary temporary powers in response to a threat to the nation’s sovereignty which cannot be provided for under existing legislation. Invoking this act for just one week, Trudeau’s government used their powers to freeze Truckers’ bank accounts, compel towing companies to remove the rigs of protestors, made the parts of Ottawa where the Truckers had congregated no-go areas and banned protestors ejected from the streets of Ottawa from returning. As it was, despite the heavy-handed tactics leading to an apparent victory for the government, they were unable to enforce the vaccine mandate on the Truckers as planned, but denied that this was in response to the protests themselves.

In January 2024, a Federal Court ruled that Trudeau’s application of the Emergencies Act was unconstitutional.

A Nazi Comes to Parliament

Presumably as part of the Canadian state’s efforts to signal its virtue as a loyal and faithful servant to US imperialism, Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian World War II veteran, was invited to attend parliament on 22nd September 2023. Hunka, who at the time was believed by the Canadians to have been a brave fighter for Ukrainian independence against the Soviet Union, was to be present at the same time as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was to address parliament.

The Canadian parliamentary Speaker, Anthony Rota, recognised Hunka’s presence in the chamber, saying that, “We have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.” Rota then went on to describe Hunka as a “hero”, which prompted the assembled throng, including from Prime Minister Trudeau and President Zelenskyy, to give Hunka not one, but two standing ovations.

With the entirety of parliament patting itself on the back for what it must have felt was a job well done, the website Forward reported the following Sunday that Hunka had in fact fought for Ukrainian independence, but in doing so had served in a German Nazi volunteer unit – the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) – in World War II. He fought on the eastern front in the Great Patriotic War against the Red Army of the Soviet Union and his unit was alleged to have killed Polish civilians.

The scandal reverberated worldwide and rocked the Canadian establishment – the Speaker was forced to resign (in effect he was thrown under the bus by Trudeau) and parliament passed a motion condemning Nazism “in all its forms” (though not the form of Nazism that Canada is supporting in Ukraine). Grovelling apologies were showered left and right, while some quite legitimately asked how a Nazi war criminal was permitted to settle in Canada in the first place while Russia charged Hunka with genocide.

A Tenure of Failure

Trudeau’s decline from liberal poster boy to political outcast has been swift and dramatic. Apart from his veneration of Nazis, euthanising of poor people and deploying brutal authoritarianism to crush protests, his legacy will be one suitably befitting a western liberal politician: Fiddling while Rome burned, introducing policies which appear to be bold but in fact materially change nothing and leaving Canada after nine years in charge in a far worse state than he found it.