The messy, mixed legacy of Justin Trudeau

By March, Justin Trudeau will be gone and Canada will have a new prime minister. Now begins the process of sorting out the outgoing prime minister’s legacy. As all legacies are, Trudeau’s is mixed – but may be instructive for future governments as a guide for what to do and what not to do.

The introduction of the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) in 2016 was a game changer. It lifted over 400,000 children out of poverty and improved living standards, among other benefits. The next government, Conservative or otherwise, would be reckless and foolish to abolish it, and they likely won’t. The CCB will continue to help poor families with children for decades to come. That, in and of itself, is a legacy and a reminder that improving people’s material condition through state support is always a good idea.

Trudeau can also count the legalization of cannabis as a win, a blow against the punitive and senseless war on drugs that has criminalized so many people for so long. The policy change captured the spirit of the early years of his government, in 2015 and 2016, when presented a reprieve from the austerity and stodginess of the Stephen Harper years. The hype regarding the ostensible economic boom it would generate was overblown, as most hypes are, but the initial thrust of the government signalled a comparative centre-left pivot that was welcome nonetheless. 

Later, efforts, driven or supported by the New Democratic Party, yielded imperfect, yet welcome, dental care, daycare, and pharmacare programs, each at a different stage of development. Of the lot, dental care probably has the best chance of surviving Conservative retrenchment given that it’s in place and already helping Canadians pay for a critical part of their healthcare that’s been left off the socialized medicine roster for too long.

On climate, the man who introduced a carbon pricing framework – a big but insufficient swing in the fight against climate change – and a robust infrastructure environmental assessment regime is the same one who subsidized the oil and gas industry and, as the saying now goes, bought a pipeline. One might adapt Sinclair’s assessment of Trudeau’s legacy to say that the prime minister is a leader among his peers on climate action, but there, too, the bar is low. Moreover, the carbon price and environmental assessment law are likely goners if the Conservatives come to power.

During the pandemic, the government shoveled cash out the door to help struggling Canadians through CERB and other similar measures. They were imperfect loan and income substitution policies that led to confusing and unjust post-pandemic clawbacks and penalties, but which, both at the time and in retrospect, were remarkable for their speed and effectiveness. 

The government’s vaccine procurement strategy of placing many bets on a variety of development programs was world class, but Trudeau’s use of vaccine mandates as a political wedge issue between his party and the Conservatives helped fuel an anti-government movement. It led to the convoy occupation of Ottawa, an embarrassing and dangerous comedy of errors that left the federal, Ontario, and local governments snakebitten and, for weeks, useless. And while the mandates may be defensible, and certainly seemed as much at the time, treating them as a cudgel was less than productive. 

Trudeau himself would likely point to Indigenous reconciliation and climate action as markers of his legacy, each of which yielded a mixed bag. As Niigaan Sinclair said of Trudeau to Karyn Pugliese and Savanna Craig at APTN News, “For First Nations, Inuit, Métis Peoples, he is the most progressive prime minister in history, bar none,” adding the critical rejoinder that “There’s no competition, he’s the only one to really care. So therefore the bar for being the most progressive is extremely low.”

Trudeau did plenty more, good and bad that will tip the scales of judgment back and forth in the years to come. He busted strikes but introduced – at the NDP’s behest – an anti-scab law. He broke his promise to reform Canada’s electoral system, later calling that, rather cynically, his biggest regret. He reformed the Senate, trying his best to turn it into a chamber of deliberation rather than a retirement home for political bagmen. 

He left Canada without an insufficient defense policy and a feckless foreign policy. He more or less handled Donald Trump the first time, but left Canada in a weak position when the mad president returned to office. He presided over a time of, believe it or not, steady wage growth but simultaneously saw income inequality reach an all-time recorded high. That stung as Canadians struggled through, and still do, an affordability crisis.

He failed to sufficiently attend to Canada’s crumbling healthcare system – for which the federal government is at least partly responsible – and, likewise, let housing costs run utterly out of control. He let the premiers and chambers of commerce dictate immigration policy, which subsequently also went off the rails and undermined a decades-long national pro-immigration consensus. 

Roughly two months from now, Trudeau will leave office as the seventh longest-serving prime minister. We’ll contemplate the wounds he inflicted on the country, particularly those that won’t soon heal. But we’ll think, too, of the past injuries, which predate Trudeau’s tenure, that he was able to close during his time in office. With some luck and good will they may remain closed and the body politic may stand a chance at fighting off the threats that linger.