In the depths of a bitterly cold and snowy January this year, Justin Trudeau, Canada\u2019s prime minister for nearly a decade, reluctantly decided to resign \u2014 a tacit admission that the sun was setting on his \u201csunny ways,\u201d the mantra that propelled him to office in 2015. <\/p>\n
Those \u201csunny ways\u201d were tested early and often, many times by Trudeau himself and for that reason his legacy is likely to be a complicated one. <\/p>\n
He could not have predicted that in his last weeks as prime minister, it would be US President Donald Trump who would help him burnish that legacy. <\/p>\n
From defiantly posting, \u201cYou can\u2019t take our country \u2014 and you can\u2019t take our game,\u201d after Canada defeated the US in the National Hockey League 4 Nations Face-Off, to pointedly telling the US president that his threatened tariffs would be \u201ca very dumb thing to do,\u201d Trudeau stood up for Canada in a way that even his fiercest critics could appreciate. <\/p>\n
Last week, he demonstrated Canadian antipathy toward Trump and his policies. With a diverse crowd behind him and babies babbling in their parents\u2019 arms, Trudeau held true to his progressive ideals announcing billions of dollars for government-subsidized childcare in one of his final policy announcements <\/p>\n
\u201cOn a personal level, I\u2019m made sure that every single day in this office, I\u2019ve put Canadians first, that I have people\u2019s backs and that\u2019s why I\u2019m here to tell you all that we got you even in the very last days of this government we will not let Canadians down today and long into the future,\u201d he said, showing uncommon emotion, tears brimming in his eyes, a lump clearly in his throat. <\/p>\n
It was a last ray of light for Trudeau\u2019s sunny ways, a creed that now seems too trite to prevail after the scandals he faced, after Covid, after Trump\u2019s second election. <\/p>\n
By chance, it was indeed sunny the day Trudeau took office in November 2015, and it\u2019s on that day that he set the expectations for himself, and his government. <\/p>\n
When Trudeau, who appointed as many women ministers as men, was asked early in his first term why it was important that his cabinet be \u201cgender balanced,\u201d he responded bluntly: \u201cBecause it\u2019s 2015,\u201d to laughter and then applause. <\/p>\n
In the frame right behind him, smiling in the sunshine, was Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada\u2019s new justice minister and attorney general. <\/p>\n
But by 2019, she would be demoted and later resigned after accusing Trudeau\u2019s staff of pressuring her to cut a sweetheart legal deal for one of Canada\u2019s largest companies amid a bribery scandal. A 2019 Ethics Commissioner report found evidence that Trudeau\u2019s behavior breached Canada\u2019s Conflict of Interest Act. <\/p>\n
Another cabinet colleague, Jane Philpott resigned with her in protest. <\/p>\n
Raybould would later write in her memoir, \u201cThis man was not the leader I had thought him to be.\u201d <\/p>\n
That incident proved an inflection point for Trudeau\u2019s tenure. He had portrayed himself as an earnest champion of progressive and just causes, and Canadians expected his actions to live up to his soaring rhetoric. <\/p>\n
More than once, they did not. <\/p>\n
Beyond the sting of the Raybould scandal, there were more breaches of the high standards he himself had set. <\/p>\n
He violated conflict of interest rules by failing to declare free vacations from wealthy friends. Photographs emerged showing Trudeau in blackface during his days as a student and a teacher \u2013 and he admitted he didn\u2019t know how many times he had done it. And he faced criticism for awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to the WE Charity, linked to members of his family, though another Ethics Commissioner inquiry in 2021 found no evidence that that Trudeau had directly influenced any of the contracts. <\/p>\n
Then, late last year, Trudeau\u2019s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned, publishing a scathing letter that accused him of wasting taxpayer money on \u201cpolitical gimmicks.\u201d <\/p>\n
With opinion polls showing his Liberal Party would likely face defeat in an upcoming election, Trudeau resigned and turned to the urgency of the moment, fighting not just a looming tariff war from the Trump administration but a possible threat to Canada\u2019s existence itself, as the US president insisted it should become the 51st state. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a nation-defining moment. Democracy is not a given. Freedom, it\u2019s not a given. Canada is not a given. None of those happen by accident. None of them will continue without effort,\u201d said Trudeau during his farewell speech Sunday. <\/p>\n
For Trudeau\u2019s period of nearly a decade in office, two accomplishments seem indelible: his efforts on indigenous reconciliation and his commitment to end child poverty. <\/p>\n
With his steady pace of indigenous reconciliation efforts, Trudeau settled land claims, strengthened indigenous autonomy, worked to improve indigenous living conditions, and enshrined a day of National Reconciliation and Truth to be observed every year. <\/p>\n
He is also credited with lifting hundreds of thousands of Canadian children out of poverty with a child tax benefit paid directly to families, among other family focused initiatives like subsidized childcare. <\/p>\n
In one of his last social media posts as prime minister, it was telling that Trudeau did not return to his mantra of \u201csunny ways.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cI leave as leader of the Liberal Party with the same belief in hope and hard work as when I started. Hope for this party and for this country, because of the millions of Canadians who prove every day that better is always possible.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the depths of a bitterly cold and snowy January this year, Justin Trudeau, Canada\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14643,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}