After several months of paralysis of the Canadian Parliament, Justin Trudeau announces his resignation while his party is experiencing an unprecedented political crisis.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, at his lowest in the polls, announced his resignation on Monday after weeks of political crisis in the country, recently aggravated by Donald Trump’s economic threats. Nearly ten years after coming to power, Justin Trudeau, 53, was under pressure from the opposition but also from many figures in his party, worried about the looming legislative elections. “I intend to resign from my position as party leader and prime minister once the party has chosen its next leader,” he declared in the capital Ottawa to the press.
The next leader of the Liberal Party (center-left) will automatically become the new Canadian Prime Minister and at the same time, Parliament is suspended until March 24. “This country deserves a real choice in the next election. It became clear to me that if I have to fight internal battles, I cannot be prime minister,” he added, moved.
The process of selecting a new leader generally takes several months, which means that Justin Trudeau should therefore still be prime minister on January 20, when Donald Trump takes office. Shortly after the announcement of Justin Trudeau’s resignation, the American president-elect estimated that Canada should “merge” with the United States, a remark that annoys this country, and which he has made several times in the latter time.
Chaos
A minority in Parliament, Justin Trudeau suffers from a low popularity rating, being seen as responsible for the high inflation hitting the country, as well as the housing and public services crisis. And in this tense context, Donald Trump’s statements after his election added fuel to the fire: the Republican threatened to impose 25% customs duties on his neighbors as soon as he returned to power in January.
In the process, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned and displayed her disagreement with Justin Trudeau on how to manage the looming economic war with the United States. This caused a large ministerial reshuffle, which was not enough for Justin Trudeau.
The current political context is “highly unusual” with a change of leader just a few months before an election, Lori Turnbull, a professor at Dalhousie University, commented to AFP. During the holiday period, several personalities have already been active behind the scenes to take the lead of the party, which meets on Wednesday.
Several challenges await his successor, experts estimate, while the Liberals are more than 20 points behind the conservatives in the polls and the next legislative elections must be held no later than October 2025. “It’s a lost cause », says André Lamoureux, specialist in political science at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). “No one is in a position today in the Liberal Party to recreate a craze, a movement of support.”
“All Liberal MPs and all leadership candidates supported EVERYTHING Trudeau did for 9 years, and now they want to deceive voters by putting on another Liberal face to continue to scam Canadians,” denounced Pierre Poilievre on Monday , the leader of the Conservatives, on X.
“Relief”
In the country no one really seems surprised: “I have the impression that it’s a bit of a relief, not only for me, but also for him, because he had a lot of pressure on his shoulders,” explained to AFP Annette Sousa, resident of Ottawa. Rob Gwett, from Toronto, for his part, would have preferred that Justin Trudeau “trigger an election” and believes that he should have left a long time ago “because of the scandals”.
Eldest son of the charismatic Pierre Elliott Trudeau, former prime minister who died in 2000, Justin Trudeau made a sensational entrance onto the political scene and quickly acquired worldwide fame, after having long searched for his path: amateur boxer, snowboard instructor , teacher of English and French…
Perceived in his early days as a modern, feminist, progressive prime minister, concerned about environmental issues and in turn triggering a “Trudeaumania”, he made Canada the second country in the world to legalize cannabis, established medical aid for die, a carbon tax… He also launched a public inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, and will sign a modernized version of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Source: Le Figaro.
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