Trudeau Out: Canadian Prime Minister Quits

Update 2: Turdone:

As expected, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is resigning after more than nine years leading Canada, amid a collapse in approval ratings and a rebellion within his political party.

Trudeau, 53, currently the longest-serving leader of any G-7 country, announced Monday he plans to step down as head of the governing Liberal Party. He will remain as prime minister until a new leader is selected, and parliament has been suspended until March 24 while that process is underway.

The winner of the Liberal leadership contest is set to become Canada’s 24th prime minister and will have to quickly prepare for an election, which the Conservative Party is the clear favorite to win, according to public opinion polls.

A national vote is due by October, but it’s likely it will come sooner. The three major opposition parties in parliament have said they will back a motion of non-confidence in the government. If they follow through on that threat, they would bring down the government, and an election campaign would begin.

As Bloomberg notes, Trudeau’s political future has been shaky for months, as he proved unable to reverse a slide in his party’s fortunes that accelerated after an inflation shock, and the resulting jump in interest rates, took a toll on Canadian households. His departure makes him the latest leader of an advanced economy to lose his grip on power. US President Joe Biden was forced to drop his run for reelection, Rishi Sunak’s party suffered a humbling defeat in the UK’s general election, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz appears set to lose a forthcoming vote.

For Trudeau, the fatal blow was administered by Chrystia Freeland, his longtime deputy prime minister and finance minister. Once one of his closest allies, she stunned the nation on Dec. 16 by publishing a stinging resignation letter that indirectly criticized him for “costly political gimmicks” at a time when Canada is preparing for a possible trade war with the US.

Freeland’s exit ignited already smoldering discontent across Trudeau’s party. Dozens of elected members of his own caucus publicly and privately pressed for him to go in the face of dreadful polls.

Trudeau's departure is great news for long-suffering Canada according to Polymarket, which now sees a 92% chance of Pierre Poilievre becoming the next prime minister.

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Update 1: Confirming the earlier report, Bloomberg updates that Turdeau (sic) will announce Monday morning he plans to resign as leader of Canada’s Liberal Party. Trudeau’s office has scheduled an announcement for 10:45 a.m. in Ottawa. He has been under pressure from elected lawmakers in his party to quit for months; that has only intensified since Chrystia Freeland, his finance minister, stepped down on Dec. 16, saying she and the prime minister were at odds on policy.

Trudeau will stay on as prime minister until his successor is chosen, the Bloomberg source added.

After the split with Freeland, some of Trudeau’s closest advisers held the view that the prime minister would be unable to survive the political fallout, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.

Freeland, new Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc and former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney are seen by political observers as candidates to replace him.

More than 20 Liberal members of parliament have publicly called for Trudeau’s departure, and even more have said in private meetings that the prime minister has no choice but to leave. The Liberals have 153 seats in the House of Commons, including Trudeau’s.

“The country could face instability, notably from an economic threat in the potential of a 25% US tariff on Canadian imports from the incoming administration,” said a recent letter sent to the prime minister by Kody Blois, who leads a group of Liberal members from the four easternmost provinces. “Simply put, time is of the essence,” Blois said, adding that it’s “not tenable for you to remain as the leader.”

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Back on New Year's Eve, when looking at the global tsunami of resentment and loathing at establishment politics and corrupt politicians that crushed incumbent political parties and politicians around the globe, we eyed the one person that was long overdue to be swept in the tidal wave. We are talking of course about Canada's prime minister Justin Turdeau (sic)...

The global anti-incumbent wave has yet to claim its final victim https://t.co/nNi6C3gPRo
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 31, 2024

... and we are delighted to announce that his time has now also come: citing a source, Reuters reports that Canadian Prime Minister and the world's most iconic virtue signaling blackface, Justin Trudeau, is "increasingly likely to announce he intends to step down, though he has not made a final decision."

The source spoke to Reuters after the Globe and Mail reported that Trudeau was expected to announce as early as Monday that he would quit as leader of Canada’s ruling Liberal Party after nine years in office.

Following the news, odds that Trudeau would be out before April surged to 97%

Trudeau’s departure would leave the party without a permanent head at a time when polls show the Liberals will be crushed by the official opposition Conservatives in an election that must be held by late October.

Sources told the Globe and Mail that they did not know definitely when Trudeau would announce his plans to leave but said they expect it would happen before a emergency meeting of Liberal legislators on Wednesday, and could come as soon as today. An increasing number of Liberal parliamentarians, alarmed by a series of gloomy polls, have publicly urged Trudeau to quit.

It remains unclear whether Trudeau will leave immediately or stay on as prime minister until a new Liberal leader is selected, the Globe and Mail report added, although it is unclear how he hopes to continue after confirming defeat.

Trudeau, who was recently mocked by Trump who proposed that he become governor of the "51st state of Canada", took over as Liberal leader in 2013 when the party was in deep trouble and had been reduced to third place in the House of Commons for the first time. If he does resign, it would prompt fresh calls for a quick election to put in place a stable government able to deal with the administration of President-elect Donald Trump for the next four years.

The prime minister has discussed with Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc whether he would be willing to step in as interim leader and prime minister, one source told the newspaper, adding that this would be unworkable if LeBlanc plans to run for the leadership.

Trudeau, 53, had been able to fend off Liberal legislators worried about the polls and the loss of safe seats in two special elections.But calls for him to step aside have grown since December, when Trudeau tried to demote Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, one of his closest cabinet allies, after she pushed back against his proposals for more spending.

Freeland quit instead and penned a letter accusing Trudeau of “political gimmicks” rather than focusing on what was best for the country.

Trudeau propelled the Liberals to power in 2015 promising “sunny ways” and a progressive agenda that promoted the rights of women and a promise to fight climate change. But the everyday realities of governing gradually wore him down and like many Western leaders, the need to deal with the effects of the pandemic ate up much of his time.

Although Ottawa spent heavily to protect consumers and businesses, racking up record budget deficits, this provided little protection from public anger as prices soared.

A botched immigration policy led to hundreds of thousands of arrivals, straining an already overheated housing market.

The Canadian currency strengthened as much as 0.4% to C$1.4388 per dollar after the Globe report before paring those gains. The currency has been trading near its weakest level since March 2020 and has lost more than 7% against the greenback in the past year.

“Traders may be buying the loonie on the view that the worst is over for Canadian politics after all the recent uncertainty,” said Ken Cheung, a strategist at Mizuho Bank.

Finally, in a revealing sit-down interview with Daily Wire’s Dr. Jordan Peterson, Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the man most likely to succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, shed light on the Great White North’s escalating economic woes, with a particular focus on its spiraling housing costs. Poilievre also outlined a bold set of policies he plans to implement to reverse these catastrophic trends.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Our productivity is another major problem right now. Productivity sounds complicated, but it's actually extremely simple. You just take the GDP and divide it by the hours worked in the country. So, American GDP is $80, meaning that for every hour an American worker works on average, he or she produces $80 of GDP. In Canada, it's 50. That means we have to work 60% more just to make the same amount and have the same level of income to buy food and housing. Now, that sounds like a bunch of wonk speak, and it might seem like it only matters to someone staring at a spreadsheet or a graph or a chart, but in fact, it's reflected in the reality that two million people are lined up at food banks because they can't afford food. 80% of youth can't afford homes, and our quality of life—the things we can afford to provide our kids—has fallen back.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s a pretty stark and easily comprehensible statistic. If you work and you produce $80 worth of goods and services in an hour compared to working and producing 50, obviously that's a substantial shortfall. Yeah, so is there a starker indicator of the economic disparity between the US and Canada than that? Or do you think that's the primary statistic?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think housing costs are another one. I mean, there was a study out just 10 days ago that has Toronto and Vancouver now by far the most unaffordable housing markets in North America. And so, you know, housing costs are 50% higher in Toronto than they are in Chicago, even though Chicago workers make 50% more money. The same is true between Vancouver and Seattle. Seattle workers make way more than Vancouver workers, but housing is 60 or 70% more expensive in Vancouver.

JORDAN PETERSON: We're and we're paying more, paying more by a lot, right? And most of that's transpired in the last 10 years.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, and we're paying the difference by accumulating enormous quantities of debt. Our households are by far the most indebted in the G7. Even when you divide total household debt by GDP, we now have a bigger stock of household debt than our entire economy. We are more indebted as households than the Americans were right before the '08 financial crisis. So what we have as a model in Canada is we have artificial scarcity imposed by a very heavy and restrictive state that suppresses production, but in order to allow for consumption, we print money and borrow money, and then flood the economy with that money.

JORDAN PETERSON: That's another problem. So that's the inflationary problem. Now, the problem with inflation—there are many problems with inflation—but one of them is that it particularly punishes people who are thrifty and who save. Yes, right. So, inflation punishes the people who forgo gratification to invest in the future. That's a very bad idea.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Inflation is the single most immoral tax for so many reasons. One, it takes from savers and people who are trying to be responsible, thus making it impossible to be responsible. Because if you refuse to play the inflation game of borrowing money to buy things you can't afford, someone else inevitably will, and you won't be able to afford anything. So, you ultimately have to act irresponsibly. It's like Milton Friedman was asked, 'What would you do with your money in times of inflation?' He said, 'Spend it.' Like, the first thing you want to do when inflation is out of control is to make sure you get rid of this thing that's losing its value.

The second reason it's immoral is it takes from the poor, because the poorest people cannot put—they do not have the ability to buy inflation-proof assets like gold and real estate and fancy watches and art collections and fine wines and things that go up with or even exceed inflation. So, it's a very big wealth transfer from the poor and the working class to the very, very wealthy. A very small group of people actually get richer.

JORDAN PETERSON: So the socialist policies that provide goods and services to Canadians, let's say, or citizens of other countries, by printing money actually punish the poor brutally, oh absolutely, in consequence of the inflation that they generate.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, I mean all the socialist policies in practice take redistribute from the working class to the super wealthy in practice and I can prove that again and again, again in practice. Yeah, in practice, in practice, all the redistribution that happens in these so-called socialist countries ultimately goes from the working class to the super wealthy. That is the real... okay, but just one last thing on inflation, the final reason why it's so immoral is nobody votes on it. The basic principle of our parliamentary system is the government can't tax what Parliament has not voted. The people must—no taxation without representation, right? But no one ever votes to have the money printing happen, and so the inflation is adopted secretly. And you blame the grocer because groceries are more expensive, or your local gas station because gas is more, or your realtor because houses are more. In fact, it was actually the government that bid up all of those things with money printing, and you didn't even know about it. So it is silent. It's a silent thief that takes from the poor, gives to the richest people, and destroys the working class. And that's why I am—I want to crush inflation. We need a policy that seeks to stop inflation at all costs.

JORDAN PETERSON: What would you do to stop inflation?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We stop the money printing, you know, we need a... and the money printing is just a means to fund deficit spending. Governments borrow to finance the deficit. So basically, the deficit is the difference between what the government spends and what it brings in. It’s usually calculated on a yearly basis. The debt is just the accumulation of the deficits. So the deficit right now is 62 billion, and I thought it had a ceiling of 41 billion. There are very real present-day consequences for that. Deficits increase the money supply. Central banks effectively facilitate that increase in the money supply, and that causes inflation.

I have a buddy whose family moved here from Italy back in 1973. His father worked paving roads, and his mother made sandwiches in a senior’s home. They were able to pay off their home 10 minutes from Parliament Hill in seven years. Their grandchildren wouldn’t be able to save up a down payment for that home in 15 years, and they will be university-educated with all the advantages of having been here two decades. That is the consequence of the money supply growing vastly quicker than the stuff that money buys. So what we have to do is stop growing the money supply and start growing the stuff money buys. Produce more energy, grow more food, build more homes. We have to unleash the free enterprise system to produce more stuff of value.

And this is where we have to remove the artificial scarcity that the government is imposing on the population. Let’s incentivize our municipalities to grant the fastest building permits in the world to build homes. I’m going to say to the municipal governments: they either speed up permits, cut development charges, and free up land, or they will lose their federal infrastructure money. So they will have a powerful carrot-and-stick incentive to speed up home building.

JORDAN PETERSON: What’s the percentage of a new house price that's a consequence of government taxation and regulation?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: In Vancouver, it's 60%. Does that include the land and the house? Yes, that includes everything. Here's how they calculated it: they took the cost of building a home and compared it to the cost of buying a home. The gap between those two was found to be $1.2 million. This extra cost above and beyond materials, labor, land, and developer profit is attributed to development charges, sales taxes, land transfer taxes, delays in getting permits, and the various consultants, lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists that developers must hire to get approval.

In Vancouver, we're spending twice as much on bureaucrats as we do on all the other costs combined to build a home. More money goes to bureaucrats than to the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who actually build the homes. To add insult to injury, those tradespeople can't even afford to live in the homes they build.

What we need to do is slash the bureaucracy. I'm going to tell the mayors that they won't get federal infrastructure money unless they reduce development charges, speed up permits, and make housing more affordable. I also plan to remove the federal GST on new homes under a certain limit and encourage provinces to do the same.

We have so much land in Canada that we should have the most affordable housing in the world. It should be dirt cheap, given the amount of land we have; we just need to get the government out of the way. The same goes for our resource sector. Why are we still importing oil when we have the world's third-largest supply? Why can't we export our natural gas overseas?

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