Life after Justin Trudeau for the Liberal Party of Canada

When Justin Trudeau took over as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in 2013, his job was to rescue it from political oblivion. Two years later, he accomplished that. Now, after more than a decade in charge, he’s about to send it back there. And while there are at least a handful of Liberals left in Canada who still think they can win the next election, the real job for the person who takes the reins after Trudeau will be avoiding a complete political catastrophe  — and managing the fallout from it. 

That won’t be easy. The Liberals have passed important legislation in their nine-plus years in office, from legalizing marijuana and creating a national childcare program to implementing the most ambitious climate policy in the western world. But in its more recent struggle to hold onto power they’ve also diluted many of their most important long-term achievements with near-term thinking. 

They compromised the integrity of their signature climate policy, the carbon tax and rebate, by carving out an exemption for home-heating oil that disproportionately benefited Atlantic Canada. Worse, the Liberals undermined the broader national consensus around the importance (and value) of immigration by inviting a post-COVID surge of temporary residents that was designed to juice a recovering economy but ended up adding unwanted fuel to an already overheated housing market. According to the most recent edition of Environics’s annual Focus Canada survey, 58 per cent of Canadians think there’s “too much” immigration. That’s up from 44 per cent in 2023 and 27 per cent in 2022. 

But maybe the biggest problem for the Liberal Party’s next leader is that, after 10 years of Trudeau, it’s not at all clear what the party stands for anymore. Is it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Is it an ambitious climate policy? Is it economic fairness and social justice? Unlike his father, who also left office amid widespread unpopularity but had just repatriated the Constitution and created the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it’s not clear what this Trudeau government’s legacy will be — nor how the Liberal Party should try to sell it. 

Ironically, whoever ultimately comes after Trudeau can take their lead from Pierre Poilievre. Unlike Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, who both seemed to define their political choices in response to Trudeau, the current Conservative Party of Canada leader set a clear path for himself and the party from the day he announced his intention to run for the job. He offered a vision of freedom-oriented Conservatism that would cut taxes, eliminate regulations, and liberate Canadians from the strictures of government. He refused to play defence, whether it was on his hostility towards climate policy or his embrace of the freedom convoy. And he brought everything back to his core theme with a kind of discipline that only a career (indeed, lifelong) politician can deliver. 

He also pioneered a brand of politicking that Canada hadn’t really seen before. In many situations, he was — and is — a relentlessly obnoxious sloganeer, someone who reflexively reduces issues to their most simplistic formulation. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his treatment of the carbon tax and rebate, a complex piece of public policy he artfully turned into a reliable scapegoat for all of Canada’s problems. Never mind that this scapegoating required him to deliberately misrepresent its actual impact on people’s lives, whether he was talking about grocery prices or oil and gas investment. As we’ve seen time and time again, twisting the truth has never troubled Poilievre. 

But Poilievre also engaged in longer-form communications that should have tested the patience of even the most loyal supporter. He recorded lengthy videos on wonkish topics like the housing crisis and monetary and fiscal policy, and they were by all accounts wildly successful. “It could be the beginning of a new era in political communications,” the National Post’s Stuart Thomson wrote in late 2023, “where politicians no longer assume they have to get their message across in 30-second bursts on television or in short social media videos. Instead, with a little bit of attention paid to production values, Poilievre has found a way to make lengthy and wonky arguments against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”

Liberals like Nate Erskine-Smith — not coincidentally, the government’s new housing minister — have tried to apply this style to their own substance. But tactics on their own aren’t going to be enough. The next Liberal leader needs an equally coherent and clear story for voters, one that tells a simple story about what Liberalism can offer — and why it will make their lives better. There are no saviours lying in wait, no other children of former prime ministers who can, though the sheer force of their personality, bring Canadians back to the “natural governing party.” 

Instead, that party has to do the hard work of political self-discovery that Trudeau’s leadership allowed it to overlook. Is it motivated by concerns about fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, and economic pragmatism? Or is it more interested in the pursuit of egalitarianism and moral justice? Can it find a middle ground between these two? And, most importantly, can it communicate that to Canadians in a way they understand and appreciate? 

I won’t pretend to have the answers here. It’s a conversation that Liberals have been putting off ever since Justin Trudeau showed up on the political scene more than a decade ago. Now that he’s about to leave, it’s time for that conversation to finally happen.