The Ballad of Justin and Chrystia

Trudeau II: Act V, Scene i

What can you say about the events of last Monday here in the Nation’s Capital? The spectacle of Chrystia Freeland taking Justin Trudeau out with the calculated precision of a Ukrainian drone strike had pundits and politicos reaching for their Shakespeare. Fitting, since both principals are now more likely to die (politically), and the scene set the stage for a perilous final act of the Liberal Party’s second Trudeau era.

Ms. Freeland is basking in the afterglow of an admittedly courageous act of politics. Her team feels it has done its party and country a favour by ringing a loud buzzer alarm into the ear of a Prime Minister who was sleepwalking toward electoral oblivion. They believe she will be thanked for it with his job.

I’m not so sure.

Our practice at Eurasia Group when examining moments like this is to ask simple questions: so what? What does this change? What material but previously less likely events are now more likely to occur because this happened? With respect to the fallout from the Trudeau-Freeland political breakup, those consequences are clear: Mr. Trudeau was unlikely to lead the Liberal Party into the next election and is now much less likely to do so. That election will probably come sooner rather than later, and the odds of it producing a Conservative majority government are materially greater than they were before the events of 16 December.

In short, what happened on Monday was Bad News for the Liberal Party.

In happier times, Mr. Trudeau was a scrappy young leader with an admirable sense of optimism about both his country and his party. He had an almost unimaginable appetite for the hard work needed to convince both that politics could deliver real change, that better is always possible. His diagnosis was simple: progress had stalled, the economy sucked for regular people, and government could help the middle class with measured and thoughtful policy. The agenda that grew out of his instincts (the Canada Child Benefit, Canada Pension Plan enrichment, middle class tax cut) helped him deliver an unprecedented election victory in 2015.

An agenda is words on paper until gifted proponents breathe life into it through politics. Chrystia Freeland was the first person recruited to Team Trudeau to help shape that agenda and make it real for people. A farmer’s daughter from Peace River Country who triumphed at Harvard and Oxford. A gifted journalist who knows how to tell a story so that it captures your imagination. A Financial Times Executive who championed the middle class. No wonder we on the OG Team Trudeau spent such time and energy to bring her on board. She was the charter member of Team Trudeau.

The mission was to convince Canadians that the Liberal Party had learned from its mistakes. In 2012, most Canadians believed it had stopped caring about regular people and thought only of itself. It was more interested in settling scores than delivering progress. Parties fail to clock important events when they’re too introspective. The Liberal Party was clinging to the 1990s elite economic consensus in the post-Great Financial Crisis (GFC) era, when the country faced a whole host of new and pressing problems.

Trudeau and Freeland changed the party together. Hard as it may be to believe after a decade in power, they were once outsiders with independent standing. They invested that status in building a stunningly successful political movement. But government grinds, energetic outsiders become cloistered elites, and voters leave.

Most political partnerships end in tears, but if you were to ask me to name two politicians likely to avoid that fate, I’d have been hard-pressed to name likelier candidates than Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland. I’m not sure whether Donald Trump or the pandemic was harder to manage, but they did both together. Yet, here we are. They have put their party right back into the position in which they found it. If the definition of a scientific law is that if something is true, it is true everywhere, at all times, then maybe there’s some science to politics after all.

The stakes are much higher now. If voters were skeptical of the elite consensus in 2015, they fed it into a woodchipper in 2024. We are of course focused on the chaos agents about to take power in the United States, but liberal democracies from Germany and France to South Korea and Brazil are enduring disruptions unprecedented since the end of the Cold War. Democracy’s external adversaries are both fuelling this fire and cheering it on. From billionaire tech bros in Northern California to neo-Nazis in Germany, there is no shortage of Useful Idiots for the Vladimir Putins and Xi Jinpings of the world.

These chaos agents have a lot of material to work with. Millions of people still suffering unacknowledged trauma from the pandemic were battered by inflation and have turned on their governments. We are a decade deeper into a changed climate era, and fossil energy interests are fighting the decarbonization with renewed vigour and capital. Incumbents feel like so many deer in these bright headlights. None seem able to muster the main-character energy required to plant their flag and fight.

This is the context in which the Liberal Party of Canada will choose its next leader.

This advice is worth what you paid for it, but if you’ve read through to this point I suspect you’re a Liberal looking for guidance. If, as is now widely expected, Mr. Trudeau’s resignation is imminent, the only way forward is a real leadership race. I respect and admire my friend Eddie Goldenberg, but I couldn’t disagree more with his argument that Liberals should capitalize on the sensation generated by Ms. Freeland’s resignation to anoint her—or anyone else—leader. It will confirm Canadians’ worst instincts about the party. “There’s no time for democracy” is a tell of an argument.

It’s also bad strategy. If you want to know who can play hockey, put on a hockey game. It doesn’t matter who you think you support at this moment, we’ll all have a more seasoned view if we see these people in live action. Competitions create better competitors. In politics, leadership campaigns make for better general election campaign teams. They train people, test ideas, build resilience.

Liberals are going to need all of this and then some in 2025. Ten years after Mr. Trudeau’s victory in 2015, the party is back to square one: tied for 2nd/3rd in the polls with NDP, far behind the Conservatives. And when the next leader looks over at the other bench, she or he will see an opponent who has put in his reps. Say what you want about Pierre Poilievre, the man has never skipped leg day. He is going to be a tough assignment. Liberals owe it to Canadians to give him a more difficult contest than the open-ice skate he’s currently enjoying.

The party rose from the deathbed Canadians consigned it to in 2011 because it learned from its mistakes. There is no natural governing party in Canada. No law of nature safeguards the Liberal Party’s continuance. Canadians are wise people who will not take kindly to watching a handful of apparatchiks choose their Prime Minister. If Liberals arrogate that right to a few hundred people in Ottawa, I hope they’re alert to the risk that they could be selecting the party’s last leader.

Thanks for reading.

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