The Decibel - The rise and fall of Justin Trudeau

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation earlier this week came after months of people calling for him to step down. How he will be remembered will largely depend on what comes next – how the Liberal party moves forward, what the next government does, and how Trudeau himself writes his next chapter.Campbell Clark is the Globe’s chief political writer. Today, he joins The Decibel for a look back at Trudeau’s career from the very beginning: the rise to the top, the long fall from grace, and what may come to define his legacy.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Justin Trudeau has been prime minister for over nine years. And a lot has happened during his time in office. Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways. Indigenous peoples have known for thousands of years how to care for our planet. I should have taken precautions and cleared my family vacation and dealings with the Aga Khan. The U.S. and Canada have struck a deal to replace NAFTA. Good day for Canada and we are live on the ground in Saint

John's Newfoundland to witness the first legal sale of recreational cannabis. This photo newly discovered by Time magazine shows him in brownface nearly two decades ago. It was something that I didn't think was racist at the time, but now I reckon... Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party will form the next government in Canada, but in a blow to Prime Minister Trudeau, it's expected to be a minority administration. ...crisis in his government over the SNC-Lavalin affair and allegations of political interference

being made by his former Attorney General Jody Wilson. For the past few days, we've seen COVID-19 spread around the world at an even faster pace. Protesters, many of them opposing vaccines through gravel at Justin Trudeau and stalked his campaign. We're going to trust science. We're going to trust the experts. We're going to make sure that anyone on the plane or trade Indians headed to the polls this week and Justin Trudeau has won a third term as Prime Minister. Jammed streets, blaring horns. Over the past few weeks there has been a loud and clear message from freedom convoy truckers in Canada and their supporters.

We want those great Canadian truckers to know that we are with them all the way. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau writing on Instagram, we have made the decision to separate. Between addressing labor needs and maintaining population growth, we didn't get the balance quite right. I notified the Prime Minister that I've ripped up the supply and confidence agreement. The Prime Minister wants you to know that the status quo is unacceptable. And if he finds out who's been running this place for the last nine years, there will

be hell to pay. Today we're speaking with the Globe's chief political writer, Campbell Clark. He's followed Trudeau's career from the very beginning. He'll talk about Trudeau's rise, his fall, and how Canadians might remember his legacy. I'm Maenica Rammen-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Campbell, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me here. So we started this week with Trudeau announcing his resignation, but let's go back to where it all started with him. Because I know, Campbell, you've been covering Trudeau since his early days. So looking back, what were your impressions of young Trudeau, even before he gets into politics? I think there's always been a sort of strange kind of misidentification of Justin Trudeau. And maybe it started because of the way he entered politics as a sort of young man and the conservatives were trying to paint him as not ready.

But people sort of saw him as, um, you know, a pretty boy, uh, soft on the inside. And I always thought there was a much sort of tougher, harder politician, as it turned out inside. We saw that, I think, when he was a young man and there's an old clip of a CBC piece that Neil McDonald did when he was about 18 years old. You can find the clip on YouTube and that has a young Justin Trudeau arguing in a debate about sovereignty with his classmates at College Prébeuf in Montreal. Justin Trudeau and his team were lonely voices for the confederation. Lonely.

He was, you know, essentially on the wrong side of the debate as far as the student body. And he was, you know, getting booed and hissed and he came out and sort of shrugged and said, I don't care about peer pressure. And I think that's one thing we have to remember about Justin Trudeau. And you grew up in Quebec in the 1980s and early 90s. This was a place where Pierre Trudeau was, he'd been the favourite son, but it was a very divided place and he'd get booed walking down the street. He had to be tough to be Pierre Trudeau's son growing up in Montreal,

strange as it might sound. So, you mentioned his father, Pierre Trudeau, of course, also was prime minister. How did, I guess, growing up under the shadow, maybe we can say, of his father and his prime ministership, how did that shape the younger Trudeau? Well, I think people always portrayed him as more like his mother than his father. His father was supposed to be the Cartesian thinker, and the tougher person, and his mother was the softer sort of emotional one. And I think that was really overblown. I think he did learn from his father that, uh, you know, you had to have a certain

amount of calm in chaos. You had to not overestimate sort of the challenges that you've faced and the people that are making demands. I think he always seemed pretty, uh, sort of even headed as he went into politics, like he'd seen it all before. And he learned to at least act like he didn't care what people think. He was of course initially a teacher, a drama teacher. So how did he actually make the switch? How did he get into politics? It was I think almost by accident. He had been around people

that were involved with politics obviously obviously, all his life, but he also went to McGill and he met Gerald Butts who became his principal secretary but was also one of his closest friends. They were on the debating team and Gerald Butts ended up working in Ontario politics for Dalton McGinty. Then I think the real moment when he came into federal politics was actually at the 2006 leadership convention when Katie Telford, now as chief of staff, was running Gerard Kennedy's leadership campaign.

They brought Justin Trudeau in to endorse Gerard Kennedy, that sort of gave him a feeling of momentum. I remember at that convention, he was the celebrity. People were following around in crowds and taking pictures. Even then, they wanted selfies with Justin Trudeau. I'm not sure there were selfies even existed in 2006, but people were definitely, you know, crowding around and taking pictures. It was like a rock star running through the convention. Okay.

So let's kind of move forward. He becomes an MP in 2008. He then becomes leader of the Liberal Party in 2013. And then in 2015, this is when he wins a majority government for the liberals. And Campbell, I know that you were covering that 2015 election. Trudeau brought the liberals back from third

place to win that majority. What stood out from you during that campaign? So, I mean, well, first of all, he didn't start that campaign in the lead, you know, he was the third party leader and he'd had a surge and then sort of fallen off in the summer before. So, he was in third place. If you remember, Stephen Harper was the prime minister, Thomas Mulcair was the opposition leader, the NDP leader. He was living in Stornoway. The first question was who would end

up being Harper's main challenger on the left. And what happened really was that Trudeau ran kind of on a visceral difference from the Harper years. I know, I'm going to be open, forward looking, hopeful, and he really sort of embedded that into his campaign. You know, there was a point in the middle of that campaign where he clearly sort of moved into the lead ahead of Thomas Mulcair. And I remember I jumped off of Tom Mulcair's

campaign plane, the NDP campaign plane, sort of a couple of weeks to go and I went on to Justin Trudeau's campaign plane and I remember Gerald Butts saying, oh, because I was the second Globe person on the plane. He said, oh, two Globe people on the plane, we must be doing something right and Justin Trudeau said, or something terribly, terribly wrong. So they were, that was just at sort of the moment when they realized they were pulling ahead. And Trudeau does come into power with this really positive kind of politics that you were kind of touching on there, right? The sunny ways of politicking, right?

Yeah, people have forgotten how much that was everything about Justin Trudeau, right? Openness, inclusive, not closed, you know, that I care about you. He was going to be the caring, compassionate politician. If you look at their campaign platform in 2015, you know, a lot of it was, you know, that I care about you. He was going to be the caring, compassionate politician. If you look at their campaign platform in 2015, you know, a lot of it was, you know, it was about the economy and growing for the middle-class, but it was supposed to be about caring for people, you know, an economy that includes you, the ordinary person in the middle-class, and this was a compassionate person who wanted to bring in, you know, indigenous reconciliation in Canada so that we were all included, climate change, so that we would care

about the environment. Those things were actually kind of linked sort of in the public perception. And in fact, if you look back at the 2015 platform, you could see that the section about the environment is a picture of him standing out on a sort of rocky shores of a coast with Jody Wilson-Raybould, who became the first

indigenous justice minister and there was symbolism in that. So he was supposed to be a new kind of politics. There was also a lot about electoral reform, fair elections, open government, a different way of doing things. That was the Justin Trudeau of 2014 and 2015. At least that was the image. And it's interesting, I remember I was actually in Germany that fall when he was elected and people would come up to me afterwards, once they knew I was Canadian and say, oh, you've got a new prime

minister, you have a gender equal cabinet. Like people in other parts of the world knew about Justin Trudeau and this kind of new politics. So yeah, I guess how was he seen on the international stage? Because it seemed like he was kind of making a splash beyond Canada. Yeah, he was. He was a sort he seen on the international stage? Because it seemed like he was kind of making a splash beyond Canada. Yeah, he was.

He was a sort of celebrity on the world stage. And so the first sort of couple of months of Justin Trudeau's government were travelling to, I remember Manila. He met the Queen, he was at the Commonwealth in Malta, he was, and he went to Paris for the climate change talks that led to the Paris Accords. And that really sort of had a level of power to it, I think. People were open to meeting Trudeau. They wanted to be seen with Justin Trudeau.

So he had access to, you know, world leaders very easily. And he was seen as the new politics. You know, when Emmanuel Macron was elected in France a little later, you know, he sort of ran very much like Justin Trudeau. And so of course, Trudeau had that majority government for four years. Can we take a little bit of time here and just talk about, I guess, his big wins during the first mandate? What, what did he manage to get done?

So a number of things actually. I mean, the very first things that they did from the platform were forgotten now, I suppose, a middle-class tax cut and raising taxes on higher earners. Then there was the Canada Child Benefit, which really did have an impact on reducing child poverty. There was the first efforts at bringing together some kind of consensus on action on climate change. There is an industrial carbon tax, but the biggest thing of his first term was dealing with NAFTA. And it was probably the finest hour for his government as a whole. But also like it was very shrewdly played immediately after

Donald Trump was elected. And it was a surprise if you recall, you know, he had staffers go down and make connections with staffers in the White House. And so they made those connections and then they were very cool and calm in handling Donald Trump over a very, very fractious period. They didn't respond to the Trump bait, the Trump tweets. They kept trying to build relationships. They built around Donald Trump, you know, in terms of finding allies

and states in Congress and so on. And then they were patient and not panicked when they went through the negotiation, which ended up with a deal that was slightly worse than the original NAFTA, but not terrible. And that was a big save for the Trudeau government. I want to ask you briefly about reconciliation because we touched on this a little bit. His government did talk a lot about reconciliation, also talked about ending boil water advisories on reserves.

How far do they get on those things? So they did make progress on those things and it was very slow progress, but that was one of the sort of clashes with reality that the new politics of Justin Trudeau faced in that first term. So they made that promise and I think they made that promise without really thinking through how it was going to be done. And his indigenous services minister, Jane Philpott, basically held a press conference to say, we're not going to meet this goal. It's going to be a lot harder than we thought, or at

least to change the expectations about that. And eventually later on, they admitted they were not going to meet the promise. So Trudeau started out things seem to be going pretty well. He starts getting things done in the first few years of his term. I guess, where are the first signs of trouble, if we can put it that way, Campbell? Yeah, he did remain quite popular in his first

year, but about sort of halfway through there was an incident, I don't know if you remember this, but it was Elbowgate. Justin Trudeau was supposed to be the new politics, open, compassionate prime minister, a different kind of leader. And then there was a sort of fractious debate on the floor of the House of Commons. And actually it was a bit about, you know, whether the liberal government was trying

to take too much control over the House of Commons. And it turned into a bit of a tussle on the floor and Justin Trudeau walked across the aisle. He was, he said, trying to sort of help people get through a crowd to vote, but he ended up inadvertently elbowing New Democrat MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau in the chest. And it was shocking to people. People were so surprised that Justin Trudeau would lose his temper and walk across the floor and sort of be brusquely pushing people.

This was back in the spring of 2016, so actually pretty early. This is 2016, yeah. It was pretty early. It was six months roughly into his first mandate. And he actually ended up apologizing, doing like a whole day of mea culpa. I'm sorry, we should have done this. The liberals, I should never have done that. The reason that was sort of struck people is that, you know,

he had promised sunny ways and there was this perception of arrogance that we hadn't seen before. And that was something that started to creep into Justin Trudeau's persona more and more over time was that, oh, this wasn't all the sunny ways and new politics, there's a hard boiled politician behind that. We'll be right back. And then in 2019, I think a lot of people will remember the SNC-Lavalin issue.

This was of course, when former justice minister, Jodie Wilson-Raybould was asked to defer prosecution of this company, SNC-Lavalin. Can you, I guess, talk about the significance of course, when former justice minister, Jodie Wilson-Raybould was asked to defer prosecution of this company, SNC Laveland. Can you, I guess, talk about the significance of this Campbell? Like how does this change things for the Trudeau government? Yeah, I think that's sort of part and parcel of the new politics image falling apart. And one of the symbols of that was when he shuffled

out Jodie Wilson-Raybould, the justice minister, the first indigenous justice minister, and it had been a symbol, he shuffled out Jodie Wilson Raybould, the justice minister, the first indigenous justice minister and who'd been a symbol. He shuffled her to Veterans Affairs. She was obviously unhappy and she felt that she'd been moved out because she had objected to giving SNC-Lavalin sort of an, an easy path out of prosecution for corruption charges. And so she eventually resigned.

The truth and principles must always come first and that's what I did and that's what I'll continue to do. Justin Trudeau pushed her out of the liberal caucus and so did Jane Philbot, one of Mr. Trudeau's most effective ministers. And it became a sort of standoff between himself and two of his most high profile female ministers. And I think that really affected his image. It was at that point where really he went from being a majority prime minister to trying to save his majority

and eventually becoming a minority prime minister. Yes, as you say, later that year in 2019, they could go to an election and Trudeau wins a minority government this time. And then a few months later, of course, the pandemic happens. So let's talk about how Trudeau handled the challenges that that brought, Campbell. What stands out to you? Well, I think, I mean, amongst other things, it was a moment of great panic. We've forgotten how much there was panic and there was panic inside government. You know, they saw the numbers rising and the much there was panic and there was panic inside government. You know, they saw the numbers rising and the hospitals filling up and they, you know,

there really was fear about what might happen. But in many ways, I think it sort of played into those early days, the first year of the pandemic, it played into what Justin Trudeau's sort of image and strengths were, which was that he had promised to make a government that would sort of be there for people with benefits and supports and he was willing to spend on social programs and social safety nets. So when the pandemic hit, it was a question of, are you willing to spend money to lessen the panic? And Justin Trudeau's message became, we've got your back. And that's what he said repeatedly, the government will have your back. So they rolled out CERB checks, you know, the benefit checks for individuals and they rolled

out wage supports and loan programs for small business. And, you know, essentially the message from Mr. Trudeau repeated over and over again was we are going to be there. The government is going to be there to get through this pandemic. And I think that was fairly successful. Yeah, we saw him like every day, right? Speak outside of Rideau Cottage to speak to the nation. It was a daily briefing, right? It wasn't even necessarily here's what we're going to do. It was the statistics today are better or worse.

Now there were often announcements and they definitely were rolling out new programs all the time and the one that stands out in the end was a misguided idea that was allowed to go on too far. And that was the Wee Charity program, which was the idea of paying high school volunteers to volunteer during the pandemic and having that handled by Wee Charity, which ended up being a sort of controversial mess because it was a charity that was famously tied to Mr. Trudeau and his family, also to the finance minister, Bill Morneau of the day. And they were receiving a big contract to manage a lot of money to be

handed out to volunteers. And of course, then they faced another big challenge during the pandemic, which was getting vaccines at the end of 2020 and in 2021. And they were taking a lot of heat for that because the Americans, the United States had vaccines before us, but they ended up resolving that problem relatively quickly. And it seemed like they were going to go into an election and have a strong position to win back majority. And then he calls a snap election in 2021. Yeah. How does, how does that all go?

It's funny because when he was leading up to that election, for the most part, he was, you know, fairly popular and had regained a certain amount of his popularity. But, um, you know, there was some controversy over vaccine mandates at the time. Most of the public seemed to be on his side about those things. He entered that campaign without really coming up with a narrative of why he was calling an early

election, without really providing a good storyline to Canadians about why there was an election two years after the previous one. And that really hurt him right off the bat because we were still recovering from what most people saw as a very serious crisis in the world. We weren't out of the woods yet and he lost a lot of ground in the beginning of that election campaign. He was losing for a while. Then the protesters turned out. If you recall, there was one night in Southern

Ontario where protesters started throwing rocks at them and shouting slogans at them. And he was sort of pulled away from the protest. And I remember that night he was talking about how, you know, these, these people are our brothers and sisters, our friends, our community. And, you know, we've all been through a tough time. And it seemed like that was the line he was going to take. But a few days later, when the protest started again, he was taking a much tougher line and he started to talk about

how these people who were avoiding the vaccine mandates, those are the people that are keeping us in the pandemic and keeping your children away from their schools. And, you know, they started to push the vaccine mandates as a wedge issue that they could use against their own tool that they could use as a political wedge issue. That was the current conservative leader at the time. Yeah. Correct. Yes. And then that led to the freedom convoy and, in a way, and, you know, the protests over vaccine mandates and restrictions on people's freedoms and shutdowns, which was kind of a visceral objection to all the pandemic controls and Justin Trudeau imposing the Emergencies Act, freezing people's bank accounts, which at the time were actually popular measures to sort of deal with the protesters, but became less popular in retrospect and more

an image of how contentious Justin Trudeau was and divisive instead of a unifier. And that war on the old Sonny Way's image of Justin Trudeau. But these kind of, these wedge issues that we were talking about during the election, they just, they start to kind of increase in volume, right? And then Pierre Poliev comes in as conservative leader in 2022. How does this, I guess, develop over the next few months? Yeah. I mean, part of that started in 2019 because

minority government makes you act more politically and they did deliberately set up the cabinet after the 2019 election to be more political. They named a Quebec Lieutenant and the people inside Mr. Trudeau's Prime Minister's office and his government decided to a certain extent, like we're not going to be a bunch of dreamers and idealists all the time here. We're going to take care of business and do real politics. And after the 2021 election, I think that that was sharper. And you know, wedge politics became the

modus operandi of the government. You know, most of the time it was, we are on this side, you're on that side. And when Pierre Poliev became the leader of the conservative party, I think that accentuated it all because, you know, Pierre Poliev's modus operandi was attack and like he made no bones about that.

And he also had the issue of the day, sort of right in his wheelhouse. And that was inflation, right? Because, you know, all of the sort of juice that had been poured into the economy ended up sparking inflation, not to mention all the disruptions of the economy in the pandemic. And inflation started to skyrocket. Pierre Pauliev had been warning about inflation and he ended up using that and the disaffection of people to attack Justin Trudeau and form a new

narrative about Justin Trudeau as self-interested, uncaring about how much money he wastes, having built a system that favors the elites and doesn't save the ordinary guy. And that wedge politics attack, attack, attack ended up turning against Justin Trudeau more than helping him. And Trudeau's really, of course, seen, you know, failing popularity these last couple of years. Oh yeah.

Is this, I guess, as a direct result, would you say of this, this kind of wedge politics and how this was set up? There's more than just the wedge politics. There's the fact Justin Trudeau has been in power for nine years. People do tire of their leaders. That's always the case. But inflation was clearly the thing that marked his significant decline.

When people lose 20% of their earning power, very suddenly that has a big impact on how they feel about their own stability, their own economic life and how well they're doing in life. That had a massive impact on leaders all around the world. But Trudeau had been in power for a long time, all through the pandemic and the periods after that, where there was great inflation. There was just no way for Trudeau to avoid blame for that. And Justin Trudeau was kind of the last of the prime ministers, uh, dealing with the old world from the Canada bubble, you know, that where we were sort of safely

reassured that we were part of the G7 and NATO, and we had a U S partner to the South that would protect us and trade with us and be our friend and ally. And now things are a lot more contentious with the United States. The world is a much rougher place. There's a lot of geopolitics, you know, India is accused of interfering in Canada and Canadian governments, Canadian prime ministers never had to deal with those kinds of breakups

in the world. Justin Trudeau didn't really know that that was coming or never really figured out a way to deal with it, but the next prime ministers will have to deal with a completely different world. And Campbell, when you look back on the Trudeau prime ministership, are there some, I guess, big wins and also big failures that really stand out to you? So in addition to things like renegotiating the NAFTA and the Canada child benefit, there were some sort of vibe cultural things that really probably will sort of last as just and true to legacies, you know, the

gender equity cabinet, you know, because it was 2015, if you recall. I understand one of the priorities for you was to have a cabinet that was gender balanced. Why was that so important to you? Because it's 2015. And legalization of marijuana, those things probably are going to create lasting change in Canada. And there were also some things that he failed to do, like electoral reform and bridging the divide

between oil and gas development and climate change action. And I think maybe the biggest one is grew into a problem in its third term was losing track of temporary residents in the country, which the pace of population growth was at a pace we hadn't seen since the fifties, maybe the first world war era. And it fueled a housing crisis and rent price increases and inflation. And although the government has taken sort of relatively dramatic action to try to fix it, it's going to be with us for a number of years and possibly it has damaged

the long-standing consensus in Canada on immigration and the value of it. And of course, Trudeau had face calls to step down for at least a number of months. Did his reluctance to step down tarnish, I guess, his public image and the way people do you think will remember him? Yeah, I think it probably has, at least it will for a while. Something happens, especially in this era, when people are in power a long time. And what had happened with Justin Trudeau was a feeling that the sort of open, sunny ways politician had given a way to sort of arrogant, my way politician. The fact that he wasn't willing to step aside when people were asking him to, people in his

own party were asking him to. Um, I think that made him look stubborn and like he was doing it for himself and that he wouldn't give in, that he wasn't listening to people, that he was thinking primarily of his own future or that he wasn't willing to look at the reality in the country. Now that is the way a lot of prime ministers and leaders end that they,

their public feels that they're out of touch. And that'll probably linger for a while because he ended up torturing that feeling amongst Canadians, you know, much like Brian Mulroney, who stayed into his fifth year of his second mandate and became very unpopular as prime minister. It took Mr. Mulroney years to sort of recover his reputation and be seen as a sort of popular statesman again.

So that's interesting then though. Do you think as we kind of get further away from the immediacy of everything that we've just talked about here, Campbell, do you think people are going to remember prime minister Justin Trudeau in a different way? I think they will. You know, people will not see him the way they have in this last year, when the sort of Trudeau exasperation has built up amongst a lot of people.

That will fade over time. It usually does anyway. But I think the question about his legacy will depend in part about how much people sort of remember the first Justin Trudeau period over the latter Justin Trudeau period. Because the first period was far more successful politically and in terms of, you know, consensus in the country, he will be remembered for doing

some things that changed the country amongst others, you know, he got the country through a very difficult NAFTA negotiation. He was the first prime minister that took any serious climate change measures. If national childcare funding continues through the next government, well, that will probably be a pretty lasting economic measure for Canadians they, people see his legacy will probably depend on how the country turns out in the future, but also how much of it's undone by the next government.

Kimball, fascinating to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramamin-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.