Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada announced yesterday that he will be stepping down as the leader of his party, the Liberal Party in Canada, and thus he would also be stepping down as the country’s head of government, which is to say prime minister. He has served in that role since 2015. And as you look at the history of Canada, you recognize this is a very significant transition. Justin Trudeau’s resignation statement means that Canada’s parliament is now put into a state of suspension. It is formally known as the parliament being prorogued until that date of March the 24th. And on March the 24th, some decision will have to be made. It is likely at that time that a new leader of the Liberal Party will try to put together a coalition and form a government. But at this point, March the 24th seems quite a way off and the most immediate reflections on the part of Canadians and others is what the fall of the Trudeau government means.

And this is important for Americans. It’s important that Americans understand what is going on across our northern border and also to understand that even as Canada’s government system is quite different than our own, we are looking at an allied nation and we’re also looking at the fact that there are very key cultural and moral indicators that become very clear when you look across the north.

As I have often remarked on The Briefing, if you want to see what Europe looks like in moral and political terms, you just go across America’s northern border. You’re still in North America, you’re in Canada, but in so many ways, Canadian culture mirrors, as well as its politics, in many ways, mirroring developments in Europe and in the European tradition. Even in the last few weeks, articles have been written somewhat sarcastic, at least it has to be admitted in tone, articles have been written suggesting that Canada should seek membership in the European Union. The footnote to that is that such a move, sarcastically, would be intended to protect Canada from the kinds of aggressive moves, particularly when it comes to tariffs and other trade policies that may well be undertaken by a newly inaugurated President Donald J. Trump, inaugurated of course for his second term.

Canada is bracing itself. That’s a part of the story. That’s also a part of the timing here. The fall of the Trudeau government didn’t come out of the blue, and frankly his position has become weaker and weaker over the last several years and in particular over the last several weeks. One particular leader in his party, Chrystia Freeland, who had served as deputy prime minister and also as finance minister, her very loud resignation from office was a clear signal of a lack of confidence in the prime minister himself. At that point, it was as if you had a vice president of the United States resign from the administration declaring that the president is incompetent.

Let’s just say that constitutionally we’d be entering into uncharted territory in the United States. In Canada, this is just the way government works, and that’s one of the distinctions between America’s constitutional system with our separation of powers and a very strong chief executive, unity of the head of government and the head of state and one person.

In Canada, historically and constitutionally, it’s a very different system. It is a parliamentary system far closer in terms of an analogy to the British Parliament and to that tradition. And it’s important to recognize, when you ask the question, “Who is the head of state of Canada?” my guess is that most Americans would strain to be able to answer the question. But the head of state in Canada is King Charles III of the United Kingdom and the Monarch is represented in the nation by the person appointed his governor general. It is to the governor general that Justin Trudeau offered his resignation statement.

Now, just in constitutional terms, because as Christians we recognize there are massive worldview implications and the formation of a constitutional structure, rather than the division of government with the separation of powers between the executive, the legislative, and the judicial as we have in the United States, when you look at Canada’s system, it is far more like the British parliamentary system, understandable given Canada’s history, as actually an extension of the British Empire, at one point, an extension of Britain itself. But you also understand that the strength of the parliamentary system is that you do have a unified government. And so the prime minister as the head of government, and by definition, the head of a political coalition, if not simply the head of a dominant political party, in theory, in a parliamentary system, the prime minister should never lose a vote. That means that a prime minister really loses office when either the voters reduce his party or her party to a minority status and the coalition falls apart, or you have a situation inside the party where the party decides it needs very different leadership.

In Canada right now, the likelihood is both of those things were going to happen. The question is, which happens first. In this case, Justin Trudeau largely under pressure from his own party, and the background to this is that his party is 20 points behind in polling for the national election, which can come no later than October of this year. And so the party for its own self-preservation is ditching its leader. It is ditching the prime minister.

And behind that is another very big story. Lots of stories that are embedded in this, lots of worldview implications. Justin Trudeau is in himself something of a parable of modern politics. He is the son of former Canadian prime minister, the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His father served as the prime minister of Canada, the head of the same party, the Liberal Party, between 1968 and 1979. He remained, once his government fell, as the leader of the Liberal Party. And the Liberal Party came back into a majority, and thus he came back as prime minister in the years 1980 to 1984.

Okay, think about that for a moment. Think about those two periods in the premierships of the father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who was himself kind of presented as a Kennedy-esque figure. John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States in 1960. Very flamboyant figure, considered a symbol of progressivism, very much a political liberal, center-left in some ways, even more left in other ways, the darling of the elites and the celebrity culture in the United States. That was John F. Kennedy as president of the United States. In Canada, it was Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

There are other issues in Canada including the fact that the issue of Quebec is always at least close under the surface with Trudeau, it was even closer to the surface. He was seen as a unifying figure, at least it was hoped. He was also just seen as a celebrity prime minister, a progressive, a liberal who was going to step into the scene in the 1960s with the other big wave of liberalism that was sweeping so many western nations, including as I said, the United States, at least as was perceived in the new frontier that was presented by President John F. Kennedy. And of course he began his term 1961. This is at the end of that decade when Pierre Elliott Trudeau became prime minister of Canada, very assertive, very much progressive, very liberal, very much a celebrity. He married a woman, became of course Margaret Trudeau, his wife, another celebrity. They would break up in a kind of celebrity fashion.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau would end his premiership, that second phase, in the years 1980 to 1984. Okay, what’s going on then? It is not a liberal resurgence around the world, especially on both sides of the Atlantic, in the English-speaking world. It was a conservative ascendancy. It was a failure of liberalism.

And so Margaret Thatcher is the prime minister of the United Kingdom, and you have Ronald Reagan as president of the United States. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was out of step and he was replaced with a succession of prime ministers. And at least one of them, a conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, became part of a quartet or a troika of major western leaders that would’ve included Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan put Mulroney among them. And by the way, the former prime minister at that point, Brian Mulroney, was one of the speakers at the state funeral for Ronald Reagan years later. There was a very close partnership there.

But we are now looking at the fact that there was another liberal resurgence that came and writing that resurgence was the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, that is Justin Trudeau. He has resigned, as I said, from office just yesterday. He is going to be a caretaker prime minister until his replacement is named.

Justin Trudeau is only 53. He was seen as a figure of youthfulness when he became the head of his party, and then when he became prime minister in 2015. He was re-elected. Basically his government was in elections in 2019 and in 2021, but that 2021 election was a sign of trouble to come.

And when you look at Justin Trudeau, he was a boy. By the way, at one point in a visit between the Trudeaus and the American president and First Lady, that would’ve been Richard Nixon and Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon picked up Justin Trudeau’s baby and announced he’ll be a future prime minister of Canada. It’s not often remembered that Richard Nixon was a prophet in that sense. Justin Trudeau did become the prime minister of Canada. He was seen as a resurgence of the Trudeau dynasty, but he was also seen as a new youthful form of liberalism coming on the scene. Progressivism. Big government.

Here’s the thing you need to keep in mind. The Liberal Party in Britain is akin to the Labor Party in the United Kingdom. It’s thus somewhat aligned with the Democratic Party in the United States. That’s the party of big government, big spending, and big liberalism. When it came to Justin Trudeau, you can understand that people on the left, they were absolutely excited that here you had the telegenic son of Pierre Trudeau. He is coming now as Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, and you have the Trudeau dynasty back. Liberalism is back. Celebrity is back. Justin Trudeau was often remarked on concerning his youthful appearance. He was considered another celebrity figure. He was treated as a celebrity, so was his wife by the way, his wife Sophie. They were married in 2005, but they separated in 2023. They have three children. And even when you had the father and the mother, that is Pierre and Margaret Trudeau separate, it was the father who maintained custody. Something like that has happened in the situation of Justin Trudeau. He has had, at least in large part, the custody of their three children after the marital separation.

But the big issue in liberalism here is the ideology. Justin Trudeau was a big spin liberal and you also had Justin Trudeau as very pro-immigration. Now, when you look at the immigration situation in Canada, it is very controversial. It’s not controversial in exactly the same way it is in the United States, and that is because Canada has a population of about 40 million people. It’s a vast territory. It’s the second largest country by landmass when it comes to the entire planet, and that you have a dense population at certain points, particularly along the border with the United States and on the coast. That is to say the southern coast. But beyond that, you really have a very sparsely populated country.

Canada has historically often needed immigration, but the point is Justin Trudeau was welcoming immigration at the very point when that was becoming far more problematic. And predictably, one of the big problems in Canada right now, and one of the issues of political vulnerability for Trudeau and for his liberal government is a housing crisis. And here’s one of the big lessons for governments in western nations. When you have a housing crisis, it’s not a crisis you can fix fast. And when you have a housing crisis, you often have the middle class that gets squeezed and thus gets angry and thus takes out its anger in terms of electoral politics.

Justin Trudeau was going to lead his party to absolute electoral disaster and thus he simply had to get out of the way. The resignation of his deputy prime minister was just the fuse that was lit, but the bomb was already set in that sense he was going to have to go.

Here’s something we need to keep in mind. When you think about Justin Trudeau, you also need to understand that on moral issues, we’re talking about someone who basically subverted the entire moral calculus. You’re talking about someone who pressed for legalized assisted suicide or aid in dying as it was called in Canada. And whereas in some European nations, predictably you’ve seen a slippery slope. You say it’s simply for persons in the last few days before death is diagnosed under medical supervision. The next thing you know, those criteria keep getting expanded and expanded. Once you buy into the ideology of euthanasia or assisted suicide, you’re just negotiating with death, and that negotiation leads to a downward spiral. Death wins in that negotiation, and it certainly has in Canada.

On LGBTQ issues, Canada is very liberal. On religious issues, Canada is rather weak. And in particular, you do not have the kinds of guarantees of religious liberty that in this country have led to some very significant court victories and even what we would call the reassertion of religious liberty and certainly the rights of individual citizens, but also the rights of Christian churches and Christian institutions to operate. Religious liberty is in that sense much more vulnerable there in Canada.

On the abortion question is all the questions across the moral calculus. You’re looking at a rather comprehensive liberalism, and as I said, a subversion of the Christian moral order, of the moral order that Christianity acknowledges even back to creation order. We’re talking about something fundamental.

When you look at the effects of secularization on a modern society, you can look of course to Europe, but honestly you can look across the northern border from the United States to Canada. That’s not to say that secularization is not underway here. It is to say that it has advanced in a very significant way in Canada much further than it has here in the United States. And it’s not just for historical and understandable reasons in the progression of our histories as nations. It’s also because of some basic constitutional distinctions that are a part of that history.

So worldview comes back, how you look at the organization of government, how you look at the definition of what it means to be a citizen, how you look at the definition of the limits and the responsibilities of government. As you look at issues as fundamental as life and the protection of life, you understand that the unraveling of a civilization here in a secular age is becoming more apparent in these countries.

Now, where will Canada go from here? That’s an answer only the Canadians can give, and that will take some time. As I said, the polls were indicating that under Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party was falling out of favor to the extent there were about 20 points behind in national polling. That’s very massive. But Justin Trudeau is stepping down as prime minister and his party leader in the hopes that someone who might be able to narrow that gap can be appointed.

You’re going to be seeing a political clash in Canada, but we as Christians understand it is a worldview clash. It’s going to be one very close to us, very important to us. It’s going to be one we need to watch. But when you look at the fall of Justin Trudeau as prime minister, you think back to his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, you understand there’s a big story here, and it is linked to politics and to culture, to moral questions in the United States as well.

Justin Trudeau’s resignation, the fall of the Trudeau government in Canada is just the latest. When you see liberal regimes in Western Democratic nations running out of steam, you see governments falling, you see political crises in Germany and in France. We need to understand that this could lead to a new conservative trajectory. Or it could lead, and this is true here in the United States as well, to something very different, not a conservative trajectory. We’re going to have to wait and see. And frankly, not just wait and see, but work for what we hope for.

But next, coming back here to the United States, the 2024 election was a wakeup call, particularly for the Democratic Party and for the secular left, the progressive left in the United States. One of the things we see is that a lot of questions are being asked. But the interesting thing is to note that most of these questions appear to be asked outside that party structure, outside the party authority. It’s not so much that these questions are being asked inside the Democratic Party by democratic figures as they are being noted by others. And it’s not just a partisan issue. In many ways, it is a failure of the left, of liberal governments and liberal parties, liberal candidates to deliver on their promises.

Fareed Zakaria, columnist for The Washington Post, well-known figure in foreign policy, he has offered an article just in recent days entitled, Why is the Left Flailing? Look at New York versus Florida. Now, Zakaria, who is a former managing editor of foreign affairs, he is a graduate of Yale. He received his PhD from Harvard. He was born in 1964 in India. He has become a rather influential figure in the United States. And he’s a part of the foreign policy establishment, at least in terms of commentary. He is writing this article about the domestic scene in the United States. The context is the larger crisis of liberalism in the West, but he writes here, Why is the Left Flailing?

Now, flailing is an interesting word, because that means like being in the water, drowning with your arms just flailing. You’re not making any progress, you’re just offering a lot of energy and desperation. But then the comparison he offers is the comparison between the state of New York and then the state of Florida. And as I’m speaking to you from Florida, I can tell you this is a very relevant issue.

So Fareed Zakaria begins by saying that of the 27 countries of the European Union, “only a handful have left-of-center parties, leading government coalitions. The primary left-of-center party in the European Parliament now has just 136 seats and a 720 seat chamber.” He’s going on to say, “There is a crisis in terms of these liberal governments.” And he goes on in the United States to point to the victory of Donald Trump and the recent national election. He says this, “The crisis of democratic government then is actually a crisis of progressive government. People seem to feel that they have been taxed, regulated, bossed around, and intimidated by left-of-center politicians for decades, but the results are bad and have been getting worse.”

Now he’s onto something here. He goes on to say that you can see the problem when you compare the two states of Florida and New York, and he points out that both of them are just about the same size. The two states have about 20 or 23 million citizens, so they’re roughly analogous in size and in population. But when you look at government, you look at government spending, you look at taxation, you look at other economic issues, the two aren’t even comparable.

After noting the close size of population between the two states, Zakaria then writes, “But New York State’s budget is more than double that of Florida, 329 billion versus roughly 116 billion. New York City,” he writes, “which is a little more than three times the size of Miami-Dade County is a of more than $100 billion a year, which is nearly 10 times that of Miami-Dade. New York City’s spending,” he writes, “grew from 2012 to 2019 by 40%, four times the rate of inflation.” He then asked the question, “Does any New Yorker feel that they got 40% better services during that time?”

So the population is about the same, but the spending in one state is a multiple of the spending in the other. The taxes in one state, a multiple of the taxes in the other, and government spending growing by 40% in New York, which is four times the rate of inflation.

Zakaria then asked, “What do New Yorkers get for these vast sums generated by the highest tax rates in the country?” He says, “If you’re well off in New York City, you pay nearly as much in income taxes as in London, Paris, or Berlin without the free higher education or healthcare.” He continues writing, “New York’s poverty rate is higher than Florida’s. New York has a slightly lower rate of homeownership and a much higher rate of homelessness. Despite spending more than twice as much on education per student, New York has educational outcomes, graduation rates, eighth grade test scores that are roughly the same as Florida’s.”

So you have two states about the same population, but New York taxes at a far higher rate. It spends at a multiple rate. And as you’re looking at it, it doesn’t deliver. The poverty rate’s higher than Florida. The homelessness problem is worse in New York than in Florida, and the educational problems come even as New York spends twice as much as does Florida.

He then writes this, “It’s easy to comfort oneself by thinking that these sky-high tax rates and growing government revenues are providing some crucial ingredients of progressive government, but they’re often,” he writes, “simply the toll of waste and mismanagement.” He goes on and gives examples, but he comes down to the argument that, “You know, people looking at New York and Florida will see states with roughly the same size population,” but they will look at the fact that, “Wow, an awful lot of money gets taxed in New York and then gets spent by New York’s government, and yet it’s hard to see how it improves anything.” If anything, it does the opposite. The poverty rate higher, the homelessness rate is higher. The educational outcome’s, well, about the same.

Fareed Zakaria goes on to say, “There’s another problem here, and that is that you have the political power of labor unions and others.” And this means sometimes when it comes to government workers, it’s teachers unions and all the rest that starts to pile things up. But it’s also the fact that these states have invested in massive pension plans for retired government employees. And eventually those pension plans begin to strangle the entire government because it’s very easy for politicians to enter into an agreement with workers, their government workers when it comes to these very generous pension plans. Some of them can pay out as much in retirement as they did in active work. And of course, it’s just a matter of exploding the bills for citizens and especially for future generations. And that comes with a cost, and some of those costs are showing up in a state like New York right now.

But I think Fareed Zakaria makes a really interesting argument in this article because he says, “If all of this tax money that was confiscated from taxpayers, and if all this government spending amounted to something that the government could say, ‘Look, here’s the good investment of your money,’ maybe the people wouldn’t be so upset about it.” But the failure of liberal government, and that means leftist, progressivist government in this context, the failure of liberal government here is the failure to deliver on the promises while continuing to draw huge monies and taxes, confiscate those taxes, and then spend it, and government spending that quite honestly any sane person would have to say is out of control. And honestly, it’s so out of control. It’s hard to know how it could be brought back into control.

Now, as a Christian and as a conservative, I can say that I could wish, and I certainly hope and pray for the fact that some genuinely conservative alternative could come along and be in favor by the very voters who are, well, creating the political crisis for someone like Justin Trudeau in Canada. But the fact is that when you have a failure of liberalism, it doesn’t always lead to conservatism. It can lead to something else. And here’s where conservatives need to show up with conservative arguments, with conservative evidence, and conservative policies, and continue to show conservative results.

But it does tell us something that a figure like Fareed Zakaria, and he’s not a far-left figure, but it is interesting that he would point out the distinction between New York and Florida, and it’s pretty hard for anyone to argue that what he says isn’t true. And frankly, being true, it’s also very important.

Well, okay, you may have heard a controversy related to The Washington Post. Ann Telnaes, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist to the Washington Post, she resigned in protest because her editor there at The Washington Post refused to run a cartoon she had done showing major Silicon Valley high-tech executives bowing the knee to Donald Trump. One of them happens to be a very clear image of Jeff Bezos, who happens to be of course, the founder of Amazon. Major figure in the technological world, major figure, who were the richest men in the world, who by the way, also owns The Washington Post.

Now, what’s really interesting is to see how the very liberal media has coalesced around this by saying, “Ann Telnaes did the right thing. She has resigned because of conscience. This is an impingement of the freedom of the press.” But remember the freedom of the press constitutionally is the freedom of the one who owns the press. And so it’s not the freedom of a reporter to say whatever he or she wants or a columnist to write or argue whatever he or she wants. The paper is owned by someone. And that someone may not be an individual, it may be a corporation, it may be a trust, but eventually it is those who own the entity who’ll decide who’s going to report the news, what kind of news is going to be reported.

And so when you look at this, you recognize that what has happened in the profession of journalism in so many ways has been that a progressivist notion has taken hold in which the profession believes that it, by definition, can alone define what is right and wrong in the context of journalism. But you know what? They don’t own the newspaper. They don’t own the cable channel, they don’t own the television station, they don’t own the internet site. And the person who does own it or the corporation or trust or entity that does own it, well, eventually gets to make the call. And in this case, The Washington Post editor team tried to ask Ann Telnaes to come back,. But at least according to some, she’s not going back.

Jeff Bezos hasn’t commented on this, and frankly he doesn’t have to. But it is really interesting to see how in so many professions, a progressivist, very leftist ideological worldview has so set in that, just to state the matter plainly, they believe their own propaganda.

And in this case, this cartoonist is being celebrated for her courage and all her peers are piling on with celebration. But you know what? At the end of all the celebration, she’s not going to have a job, and Jeff Bezos is still going to own The Washington Post, and history’s going to roll on.

No doubt at times it’s a righteous thing to resign and protest. But in any event, if you resign, guess what? You’re out of a job.