Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced to announce he was stepping down because Liberal MPs believed a different leader might prevent electoral annihilation. They were probably wrong.
The Liberals’ narcissistic internal squabbles have left Canada without a fully functioning federal government in a time of crisis.
While they argue over how Mr. Trudeau should be replaced and who should replace him, president-elect Donald Trump gets ready to impose punishing tariffs on Canadian exports, even as he vows to force Canada to accept annexation by the United States.
Who should be the next leader of the Liberal Party is not the question. The question is why the Liberals decided to abandon their governing responsibilities to pursue a leadership race during a national emergency
The voters are not likely to forgive them for it.
If Mr. Trudeau genuinely believed that he could defeat Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, then he should have called an election immediately after Mr. Trump won the presidency on Nov. 5. Had he done so, a new government with a clear mandate to negotiate with the incoming administration would have been in place well before the inauguration.
But Mr. Trudeau insisted on staying on. In that case, he needed to make negotiating away the tariff threat – even if it meant trade and border-security concessions on Canada’s side – the sole focus of his administration.
Mr. Trudeau’s initial moves were encouraging. He organized a common front with the premiers and met with Mr. Trump in person at Mar-a-Lago.
But then, as he so often does, the Prime Minister lost his focus. He schemed to replace finance minister Chrystia Freeland with former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, in hopes of increasing his party’s popularity.
When Ms. Freeland retaliated by resigning and releasing that excoriating letter, Mr. Trudeau reacted by disappearing on a three-week vacation. Pondering his own future was clearly far more important to him than the one thing that truly mattered: the tariff threat.
The Prime Minister only announced he was ready to go after caucus leaders told him he had lost the support of his own MPs. Now the party has plunged into a leadership race, with Mr. Trump’s inauguration less than two weeks away.
The premiers, and Doug Ford of Ontario in particular, are leading the effort to get Mr. Trump to stand down on tariffs. Mr. Ford said on Fox News that China was exploiting North American free trade by dumping goods into the United States and Canada via Mexico, and that the two countries should respond by creating “fortress Am-Can.”
Is abandoning Mexico now Canada’s position in trade talks? It’s Mr. Ford’s, and there is no one credible in Ottawa to contradict him.
Though Mr. Trudeau is meeting with American officials and with the premiers, he is deader than a roasted duck. Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc, now that he has ruled himself out of the leadership race, is the most responsible remaining voice of what’s left of the federal government. But everyone in Washington knows that Mr. LeBlanc, too, will soon be gone.
Barring some kind of epic climbdown by NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, the House will vote non-confidence in the government in March, leading to an election in May.
It hardly matters whether Ms. Freeland or Mr. Carney or someone else leads the Liberal Party during the election campaign. Why on earth would voters return a party to government that so egregiously abandoned its duties during a national emergency?
Two polls this week showed no change in the Liberals’ deep unpopularity. The Conservatives are almost certain to form a large majority government after the election. By late May, we should finally have in place a prime minister and a cabinet with a mandate to speak for Canada. Heaven only knows what state the economy and Canada-U.S. relations will be in by then.
Mr. Poilievre has ambitious plans for deregulating the federal state and for criminal-law reform. But much of his focus will have to be on bringing sanity back to Canada’s trading relationship with the United States. That will involve major increases to spending on the military and on border security.
How he will manage that while also restraining government spending is anyone’s guess.
But it will almost certainly be Mr. Poilievre’s problem to solve, and not the problem of the next Liberal leader. After what the party has put this country through over the last few weeks, it could be a very long time before voters trust the Grits again.