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'Trudeau Is Finished': Canadian Prime Minister Resigns After Support Collapses
"Conservatives are jumping at the opportunity to take from you and give more to CEOs," said the head of Canada's social democratic political party. "You will pay the price of Poilievre's cuts."
Jan 06, 2025
After nearly a decade leading the Canadian government, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday that he will resign after his center-right Liberal Party selects a new leader—acquiescing to calls that he should make way for new leadership ahead of a federal election later this year.
Speaking to reporters in Ottawa, Trudeau said "I care deeply about this country and I will always be motivated by what is in the best interests of Canadians. And the fact is, despite best efforts to work through it, parliament has been paralyzed for months after what has been the longest session of a minority parliament in Canadian history." He also added that the country's parliament will be suspended until the end of March while a new leader is chosen.
Trudeau's announcement comes as he faces declining public opinion polling, President-elect Donald Trump's threat of 25% tariffs on Canadian imports, and the departure of the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland less than a month ago.
In her strongly worded resignation letter in December, Freeland wrote that Trudeau had told her he no longer wanted her to serve as finance minister and that she and Trudeau had found themselves "at odds" over the best way forward for Canada.
"The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25% tariffs. We need to take that threat extremely serious. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today," Freeland wrote. She also warned against "costly political gimmicks" that the country could "ill afford."
Freeland and Trudeau were reportedly in disagreement over some of the prime minister's proposed policies to tackle the country's cost-of-living crisis. The resignation was followed by calls from across the political spectrum for Trudeau to resign.
That is not the first time Trudeau has faced significant calls to step down in the past 6 months. In October, at a closed-door caucus meeting, Liberal Party members urged him to resign to avoid diminishing the party's chances in the next election.
Jagmeet Singh, the head of Canada's New Democratic Party—a social democratic political party that is to the left of the Liberals—reacted to Trudeau's resignation, writing "Justin Trudeau has let you down, over and over. He let you down on the cost of groceries. He let you down on fixing health care. It doesn't matter who leads the Liberals. They don't deserve another chance."
"Conservatives are jumping at the opportunity to take from you and give more to CEOs," he continued. "You will pay the price of [Conservative Party leader Pierre] Poilievre's cuts."
Polling shows that Poilievre, who has aligned himself with U.S. President-elect's far-right brand of politics, would likely win a majority government elections were held today.
MP Niki Ashton, an NDP lawmaker representing parts of Manitoba, also didn't mourn Trudeau's exit but warned about a Conservative government and the "anti-worker" agenda of Poilievre.
"Trudeau is finished," Ashton said, describing the Liberal leader as one "who only helped people when forced to by the NDP."
"But we know, Poilievre will be a disaster," she added. "We can't let that happen."
With Trudeau out, the Liberal Party must now select an interim leader, followed by.a leadership race to find a permanent replacement, which is expected to feature Freeland. A federal election must be held by October 20, 2025, but could be held sooner if a snap election is called.
Trump reacted to the news of Trudeau's resignation on Truth Social by saying that if Canada merged with the United States then the country would be free from tariffs, taxes would decrease, and it would be secure from what he claimed were threats from China and Russia. "Together, what a great Nation it would be!!!" he wrote.
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South Korean Parliament Votes 190-0 to Reverse Martial Law Edict
"The declaration of the martial law is now invalid—the people now can be relieved," said National Assembly Speak Woo Won Shik after the vote.
Dec 03, 2024
This is a developing story... Check back for possible updates...
Members of South Korea's parliament voted unanimously and across party lines on Tuesday to rescind a declaration of martial law by President Yoon Suk Yeol just hours earlier.
Following the 190-0 vote, National Assembly Speaker Woo Won Shik declared that the president's declaration was no longer valid and vowed that the elected representatives of parliament would "protect democracy with the people."
"Through the passage of the motion through the National Assembly, the president must immediately lift the martial law," Woo said in a statement. "The declaration of the martial law is now invalid—the people [of South Korea] now can be relieved."
The effort by Yoon to impose martial law, reports Reuters, "which he cast as aimed at his political foes, was vocally opposed by the speaker of parliament and even the leader of Yoon's own [conservative] party, Han Dong-hoon, who has clashed with the president over his handling of recent scandals."
According to the Associated Press:
Police and military personnel were seen leaving the Assembly's grounds after Woo called for their withdrawal. Lee Jae-myung, leader of the liberal Democratic Party, which holds the majority in the 300-seat parliament, said the party’s lawmakers will remain in the Assembly’s main hall until Yoon formally lifts his order.
"Democratic Party lawmakers, including me and many others, will protect our country's democracy and future and public safety, lives and properties, with our own lives," Lee told reporters.
The AP was providing a live feed from outside parliament in Seoul, where some had gathered to protest the move by Yoon:
The South Korean military reportedly said it would not stand down until Yoon officially lifted the order, as members of the opposition, including Lee and Woo, vowed to remain inside the parliament until such an order was delivered.
According to the Korean Herald: "Under the Constitution, martial law must be lifted when a parliamentary majority demands it." The newspaper reported that martial law troops had dispersed following the request of the Speaker Woo.
The parliamentary motion was passed less than three hours after Yoon first declared martial law.
"I remind [the presidential office] clearly that they must carry out the process of lifting the martial law without delay," said Woo.
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UK Voters Send 'Shout' for Change to Tories as Labour Sweeps in Local Elections
"We are probably looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years," said one analyst.
May 03, 2024
Nearly two weeks after the British Conservative Party pushed through a proposal to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda in what one lawyer called "performative cruelty" in the name of winning the general election expected later this year, the local election results announced throughout the day Friday made increasingly clear the ploy hadn't worked.
Elections expert John Curtice projected the Tories could ultimately lose up to 500 local council seats as vote counting continues into the weekend, following elections in which voters cast ballots for 2,661 seats.
The Conservatives have lost around half of the seats they are defending Curtice told BBC Radio.
"We are probably looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years," the polling expert said.
Curtice added that if the results were replicated in a general election, Labour would likely win 34% of the vote, with the Tories winning 25%—five years after the right-wing party won in a landslide in the last nationwide contest.
Labour leader Keir Starmer said the results represented a decisive call for "change" from British voters, particularly applauding the results of a special election in Blackpool South, where Labour candidate Chris Webb won nearly 11,000 votes while Conservative David Jones came in a distant second with just over 3,200.
Webb's victory represented a 26% swing in favor of Labour.
"That's the fifth swing of over 20% to the Labour party in by elections in recent months and years. It is a fantastic result, a really first class result," Starmer said. "And here in Blackpool, a message has been sent directly to the prime minister, because this was a parliamentary vote, to say we're fed up with your decline, your chaos... your division and we want change. We want to go forward with Labour."
"That wasn't just a little message," he added. "That wasn't just a murmur. That was a shout from Blackpool. We want to change. And Blackpool speaks for the whole country in saying we've had enough now, after 14 years of failure, 14 years of decline."
The Conservatives also lost ground in the northern town of Hartlepool, where they lost six council seats. The region swung toward the Tories after the party led the push for Brexit, the U.K.'s exit from the European Union.
A similar result was recorded in York and North Yorkshire, which includes the area Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak represented as a member of Parliament.
"Yorkshire voted for Brexit in 2016," wrote William Booth, London bureau chief for The Washington Post. "But long gone are the days when many Conservatives want to stand before the voters and extol the advantages of leaving the European Union, which has been, in most sectors, a flop."
Sunak, added Booth, is "betting that immigration is still an issue with resonance and has promised to 'stop the boats,' the daily spectacle of desperate migrants risking their lives on rubber rafts trying to cross the English Channel. Sunak's government plans to fly asylum seekers arriving by boat to Rwanda. No flights have taken off yet. But the Home Office last week began a self-proclaimed 'large scale' operation to detain asylum seekers destined for removal."
The Labour Party has called Sunak's Rwanda plan a "gimmick" and said it would reverse a Tory policy blocking refugees from applying for asylum.
Average wages in the U.K. last year were "back at the level during the 2008 financial crisis, after taking account of inflation," according to The Guardian.
"This 15 years of lost wage growth is estimated by the Resolution Foundation thinktank to have cost the average work £10,700 ($13,426) a year," reported the newspaper in March. "The performance has been ranked as the worst period for pay growth since the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815."
Analysts noted one setback for Labour in Oldham, where the party lost some seats in areas with large numbers of Muslim voters to independent candidates, costing it overall control of the council.
Arooj Shah, the Labour leader of the Oldham Council, told the BBC that the party's support for Israel in its bombardment of Gaza was behind its losses.
" Gaza is clearly an issue for anyone with an ounce of humanity in them, but we've asked for an immediate cease-fire right from the start," said Shah. "We have a rise of independents because people think mainstream parties aren't the answer."
The losses "should be a wake-up call for the Starmer leadership: Every vote must be earned," said the socialist and anti-racist group Momentum. "That means calling for an immediate arms ban to Israel, calling out Israeli war crimes, and delivering real leadership on climate."
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Yes It Can Happen: Populist Conservatives Led UK out of European Union
Donald Trump hails Brexit as foretaste of things to come.
Jun 25, 2016
Britain woke up to crisis on Friday that promises to reverberate across the globe, with potential implications for the fall election in the US.
After a narrow majority of the population voted to leave the European Union, Prime Minister David Cameron announced he would resign. Cameron set the referendum in motion in the first place, in an attempt to placate the "Euro-skeptic" wing of his Conservative Party and stave off the perceived threat of the populist United Kingdom Independence Party.
It was a disastrous miscalculation, as evidenced by the reaction of some of the Leave campaigners within Cameron's Conservative party. Even they seemed shocked by their own success. Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and contemporary of Cameron at the elite Eton school, appeared ashen as he greeted his victory. He went out of his way to hail the prime minister's record. So did Michael Gove, a friend of the prime minister who campaigned against him.
The vote was a reflection a growing divide between a metropolitan elite that has flourished in a globalized economy and a populist anger on the part of those who feel left behind. Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader who almost single-handedly triggered this crisis, welcomed the Leave vote as a victory for "the real people, for the ordinary people, for the decent people." The implication being that those who campaigned to remain were inauthentic, odd and even indecent.
With impeccable timing, Donald Trump arrived in Britain Friday to open a new golf course in Scotland. He praised the result, drawing parallels with his own campaign. "I think it's a great thing that's happened. It's an amazing vote, very historic," the BBC reported Trump as saying.
"People are angry all over the world. They're angry over borders, they're angry over people coming into the country and taking over and nobody even knows who they are," America's presumptive Republican presidential nominee declared. "They're angry about many, many things in the UK, the US and many other places. This will not be the last."
The isolationist, anti-immigrant movement across Europe, and indeed in the United States, will be hugely emboldened by this result.
He is not wrong. Right-wing populists in France and the Netherlands are already calling for their own referendums on European Union membership. The isolationist, anti-immigrant movement across Europe, and indeed in the United States, will be hugely emboldened by this result.
It was difficult to make an emotional case for the European Union in Britain. On the continental mainland, the benefits -- free movement across borders, and a sense of unity between nations that had previously seemed locked in perpetual warfare -- are clear. But Britons have never taken to a sense of European identity. Moreover, the ongoing refugee crisis on the continent, and the relentless onslaught of the globalized economy, has left many feeling that the UK is better off alone: in the words of the Leave campaign, this was a referendum on Britain taking back control of its destiny.
The result, with the Leave campaign winning by 4 percent, exposes deep divides in the UK. Scotland, which only last year had a referendum on its own independence, voted to stay in Europe. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, has already said the result once again throws up the question of the nation's connection to the rest of Britain.
And just as Trump is vying for disaffected working-class Democrats, the Leave campaign succeeded in peeling off some of that constituency in its victory. The opposition Labour Party, led by Britain's Bernie Sanders equivalent, Jeremy Corbyn, failed to deliver a Remain vote in its heartlands in the north of England. Corbyn faces calls to resign, with a motion of no confidence tabled by veteran MP Margaret Hodge.
And as in the United States, mainstream conservativism is in chaos. Cameron came to power in 2010 as a centrist, forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrat Party. The presence of the liberals in government made it strangely easy for him to portray himself as a tough conservative reigned in by his wooly coalition partners.
The parallels with the plight of US Republican congressional leaders are striking: When the Conservatives won an overall majority in 2015, the right of the party saw it as a chance to push through their more radical ideas -- principal among them being the break from Europe. Cameron singularly failed to convert or confront the right wing of his party, and now he is paying the price.
The American political establishment should take note of what has happened. What was inconceivable for Britain just a few months ago has suddenly become reality.
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Harper's Voter Suppression Plan: Coming Soon to a Polling Station Near You
Jun 15, 2015
Stephen Harper's re-election strategy depends on a lot of you not voting. And if you mess with his plan by showing up at the polling station on Election Day, he's prepared for that, too: he's made it a lot harder for you to vote.
The prime minister has made it so much harder that "many tens of thousands" of Canadians may be denied their constitutional right to cast a ballot in the upcoming federal election, according to Harry Neufeld, former chief electoral officer for British Columbia.
In fact, the number of disenfranchised Canadians could actually be much higher, based on the evidence from a pilot project run by Canada's chief electoral officer, Marc Mayrand.
Harper has mostly managed to avoid being accused of Republican-style voter suppression, and the lawsuits, among other tactics, employed to challenge voting lists stateside. But recent changes to Canada's election laws under the so-called Fair Elections Act will make it considerably more difficult for many low-income and marginalized Canadians to exercise their constitutional right. That could help Harper get re-elected in what is shaping up to be an extremely close election in October.
Now, in a dramatic countermove with time running out, two public interest groups have gone to court seeking an injunction to block the new voting rules, which came into effect last December.
The Council of Canadians and the Canadian Federation of Students are urging the Ontario Superior Court to set aside key parts of the new voting rules, which they say will make it very difficult for many students, Aboriginals, the homeless, as well as disabled and elderly people living in care to establish proof of residency so they can vote. People moving to a new residence in the weeks prior to the election may also be affected. The injunction is set to be heard in the first week of July.
According to the groups, a mere 6,201 votes across 14 ridings handed the Conservative party a majority in 2011. Even though he's had the support of less than 40 percent of Canadians, Harper has held power for almost a decade by focusing on getting out the vote among his loyal base, who tend to be older and more affluent.
The Conservatives put the new election laws in place ostensibly in response to the national outcry over the robocall scandal, in which party operatives were accused of using automated phone calls to direct non-Conservative voters to the wrong polling stations on election day. The misleading calls were reported in ridings across the country and appeared to be targeted based on information from closely guarded Conservative party data.
In the end, only one person, Conservative staffer Michael Sona, who worked on a local campaign in Guelph, was convicted and jailed. However, in his verdict, Judge Gary Hearn wrote that "the evidence indicates he did not likely act alone."
The scandal raised the extremely serious question of whether the governing party had deliberately undermined the legitimacy of election results. Surely what was needed was a thorough investigation and a tightening of the election laws to ensure no such thing ever threatened our democracy again.
What we got instead was a bait-and-switch that the Conservatives have turned to their advantage. They overhauled the election laws all right, but the new laws did nothing to prevent the sort of treachery involved in the robocall scandal. If anything, they make it tougher to uncover robocall-style deception in the future by preventing the release of details about investigations conducted by Elections Canada.
Having ignored the very real problem presented by the robocall scandal, the Harperites instead focused on clamping down on an imaginary problem -- people voting multiple times, which is not a problem at all, as Neufeld states in an affidavit in support of the court injunction.
Pretending that they were addressing this non-problem, the Harperites overhauled the election laws in ways that will make it harder for voters to confirm their identity instead.
Confirming your identity and address for the purpose of voting is very simple -- if you have a driver's license, which includes both your photograph and your address. That's all you need.
But for those without a driver's license -- including many low-income, disabled people or those moving from one location to another -- it's more complicated. They need two pieces of ID, including something establishing their address, which is not included, for instance, in health cards or passports.
This problem of establishing one's address could be easily solved by allowing voters to use voter information cards (VIC). The government-issued cards, which are sent to voters' homes before an election, tell them where to vote. The cards include voters' addresses.
In a pilot project administered by Canada's chief electoral officer during the 2011 election, polling stations serving seniors' residences, long-term care facilities, Aboriginal reserves and student residences permitted voters to use their VICs, along with another piece of ID, to vote. Approximately 400,000 voters -- almost half those eligible -- used their VICs to vote.
Yet, unbelievably, the new election laws actually ban this practice, raising the question of whether many of these 400,000 people will simply lose the right to vote in the upcoming election.
Harper's new election laws also throw fresh obstacles in the path of the homeless. In the past, homeless people or those with little or no identification were able to vote by having another registered voter vouch for them. The Harper government has now made this option much more complicated and difficult.
Neufeld notes that the vouching process could have been replaced with a simple procedure -- requiring the voter to make a signed declaration, which would provide a paper trail in the event the person's vote was later questioned. Instead, the new rules replaced vouching with procedures that Neufeld describes as "more cumbersome to administer and even more difficult for voters to understand."
Apathy on the part of the electorate is Stephen Harper's best shot at winning the next election. But should apathy let him down, he's ready with his backup plan to deprive thousands of our most vulnerable citizens of their most basic democratic right.
This column was first published in Now Magazine.
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