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Exit Trudeau. The Liberals give themselves three months to save the furniture.

So that happened

He was late as usual. He sounded sad. The wind blew his script away. He said more or less what you expected. When his time in office ends at the end of March, he’ll have been prime minister for a few months less than Stephen Harper was. His party has very little chance of recovering, but more than it had yesterday. It would have been so easy to pick his own time, maybe at the end of 2022, but apparently these decisions are hard to make.

Things happen fast. It’s been six weeks, Monday to Monday, since Donald Trump threatened 25-per-cent tariffs on everything Canadian. Three weeks since Chrystia Freeland resigned from cabinet. In two weeks Donald Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States. Justin Trudeau’s resignation is a pure product of this crisis.

I see a straight line from Trump’s Truth Social outburst of Nov. 25 to this week’s events. Trudeau’s circle once thought a second Trump victory would help them make the case against Pierre Poilievre. It’s fair to say the results are not up to their hopes. With Elon Musk continuing his hobby kibbitzing in the politics of countries around the world, Canada will now stand as a warning to governments elsewhere: Trump and his crew can take you down.

Having stalled until he ran out of options, Trudeau will now become incidental to events. There’s a lot going on. Wistful tribute speeches in the House of Commons will have to wait. The Trudeau succession will play out quickly, in four arenas at once: Parliament; the Liberal Party; the electorate; and Canada’s national security. Events in each venue will influence the others.

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Parliament: Confidence game

I stayed up until 1 am writing a prediction that Mary Simon would grant any prorogation Trudeau requested. It turned out to be accurate so I’ll spare you the details. Parliament’s work is suspended until nearly April, longer than what Stephen Harper received in 2008-2009, and Harper’s break was over Christmas. The government will fall at the opposition’s first opportunity, unless a new Liberal prime minister simply dissolves Parliament in late March to beat the rush. Jagmeet Singh will have his pension, although in an ideal world, he would worry whether his party will use the next three months to replace him too.

Prorogation is deeply self-serving to Liberals who need to “sort out their shit,” in Pierre Poilievre’s words, but it doesn’t change much. Poilievre already expected an election in March. Now it will be in May, looks like. There will be nothing to stop Trump from implementing his tariffs in late January, if he remembers that he wanted to do that, but an election after Christmas would have left our net empty too.

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Party: Hoo boy

It’s a little-remarked feature of our politics that every national political party makes up new rules for selecting a leader every time it selects a leader. Spending limits, deposit requirements, membership cut-offs — there are a hundred ways to suddenly help or discourage candidacies the party brass likes or fears. Usually this bespoke rule-making is annoying at best. But the Liberal Party of Canada must not run a leadership on the rules they used in 2012-2013. They need to make substantial rule changes quickly.

The happy-face “supporter” category that allowed anyone to vote on the party’s leadership, with no history of party involvement, no commitment to its future, nor even any requirement for Canadian citizenship, can’t stand. The report of the Hogue commission into electoral interference, due by the end of the month, will explain why. The party needs to shock-proof its leadership process against mischievous or malicious vote-stacking by agents of the regimes in China or Russia, factions in India or in the Israel-Hamas conflict, or any rando with a mailing list who thinks it would be fun to take over a national political party.

Liberals I spoke to on Sunday were confident that party president Sachit Mehra, a Winnipeg businessman whose social media accounts betray not the slightest interest in the events of the past month in his own party, can handle this challenge. It will be good if they’re right. Ian Brodie, Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, is obviously a partisan, but I strongly believe his intent on Sunday was not mischievous when he wrote this.

Liberals have a long history of dismissing advice based on its source. They must not do so now. The party needs to buy back its shattered credibility with the sort of concrete, transparent choices Liberals have resisted since before Trudeau came along. If it doesn’t try, Canadians will notice.

Mehra became party president at a national Liberal convention that was characterized by idiotic policy proposals, literally nonexistent debate, and denial so deep you could walk on it. It turned out to be the last convention of the Liberals in power. If Liberals continue to act as though the biggest question facing the nation is whether Justin Trudeau gets enough credit for the Canada Child Benefit, they will even more richly deserve what follows.

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Voters: decision time

At Rideau Cottage, Trudeau emphasized that this has been the longest-lasting minority Parliament in the country’s history, more than three years. In a sense it’s been longer than that: the voters in 2021 essentially returned the same minority Parliament they’d elected in 2019, rejecting Trudeau’s attempt to trade back up to a majority. Voters put the Liberals on probation in 2019 and again, when goaded, in 2021. There is no requirement for minority parliaments to last forever. The natural answer to the question, “What happens next?” should be, “Canadians decide.”

It is fair for the Liberals to try a new leader, and tedious but not necessarily catastrophic for them to take their own sweet time doing so while the rest of us just stand around. Any indication that any of them has even the faintest intention of behaving differently in the next decade than they did in the decade now ending would be welcome.

In particular, Mark Carney was appointed to run the Leader’s Task Force on Economic Growth three months ago. He seemed pleased to get the assignment. Where’s his report?

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The nation: sea of troubles

I’ve already written here about the risk of a party leadership contest turning into an opportunity for foreign interference. But of course that’s not the only risk a country faces.

In 2011, Stephen Harper won a majority government by warning Canadians about the “sea of troubles” threatening the world beyond Canada’s shores. His claim was that he could protect Canada from those troubles. The promise worked for him electorally, but it turned out to be too optimistic. Every election since 2011 has brought its share of reminders that trouble will certainly touch Canada too. Refugee migration in 2015, Trumpism and foreign interference in 2019, pandemic in 2021, hard economic choices and exacting demands from our own allies since.

Too much of Justin Trudeau’s legacy is this: he kept acting as though the real dangers of a tough world imposed obligations only on us. To vote for him. Even though too many of the hard choices frankly bored him. It took astonishing cheek for him to complain today that nobody let him have his way on electoral reform. Sorry, I was there. I remember that he refused to name or defend his preferred option, didn’t give a single speech to explain his preference when opinion was properly moving another way, and left Karina Gould to announce he’d given up when he got tired of quietly hoping that the rest of us would come around. You don’t get to be wistful after a pathetic performance like that. Enough of this guy. Next.