Watching Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announce that he was quitting on a chilly Monday morning in Ottawa, I was reminded of the moment when battered prize fighter, Roberto Duran, raised his hands in a boxing ring and said: “No mas [No more].”
It was a merciful and predictable denouement to an unexpected political career that had begun with promise and expectations and has ended engulfed by rejection and recriminations.
“I’m a fighter,” the soon-to-be-ex-prime minister said.
Clearly, the fight had drained out of Trudeau after some of his closest allies in cabinet abandoned him, and the party that once celebrated his youthful exuberance now considered the Liberal boy wonder a loser and a liability.
Faithful readers know of my longstanding antipathy and, at times, disgust of a prime minister who struck me, from the first, as a dauphin whose hollow acts of performative nonsense were a trite substitute for conviction and intelligence.
But much of the international press was smitten by Trudeau’s craven persona and empty antics, heralding him as a shining antidote to United States President-elect Donald Trump’s politics of anger and grievance.
Trudeau was a “progressive” fraud. Rather than mounting a sustained and determined challenge to the status quo, he devoted his almost 10 years as prime minister to defending it at home and abroad.
He was adept at making practised speeches about the urgent need to bridge the chasm between rich and poor and then not doing anything tangible about it.
Trudeau and parochial company only agreed to pass legislation making universal, affordable day and dental care available to struggling Canadian families as part of a deal with the New Democratic Party to keep his minority government afloat – such was the Liberal Party’s calculated commitment to fairness and equity.
Time and again, Trudeau made plain that he was an establishment man – through and through – who revelled in playing Cold War warrior vis-a-vis Ukraine and handmaiden to the Israeli apartheid regime led by an accused war criminal who is committing genocide in Gaza and razing the occupied West Bank.
On the two defining geopolitical issues of this awful era, Trudeau not only towed but parroted, to the letter, the lines dictated to him by his superior in the Oval Office – US President Joe Biden – good, obedient errand page that he was.
Still, if Trudeau had any true sense of the prime minister’s duties and obligations, he would have heeded calls to resign when his racist, black-face-wearing-well-into-adulthood days were exposed in 2019.
Instead, Trudeau and his pack of myopic handlers put the prime minister’s interests ahead of the country’s.
It was a humiliating affair that confirmed, to my mind at least, that Trudeau had forfeited the privilege of holding any public office, let alone the prime minister’s office.
True to infantile form, Trudeau and company weathered the brief storm by having the jejune prime minister issue a succession of vacuous, unconvincing apologies that compounded his disgrace.
Perhaps the episode that best established Trudeau’s essential character – and, not surprisingly, has escaped the attention of both his devoted supporters and apoplectic detractors in the corporate media and beyond – was his shameful volte-face to desert injured Palestinian children.
Anyone, at any time, who reneges on a promise to help the innocent victims of war to appease racists and xenophobes in and outside parliament is a contemptible hypocrite.
Justin Trudeau did just that, turning his sorry back on children in desperate need. That obscenity will forever stain his legacy.
As I explained in several columns, while the Liberal leader sitting in opposition, Trudeau openly and repeatedly threw his imprimatur behind an initiative organised by the celebrated Palestinian Canadian, Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, called Heal100Kids.
Dr Abuelaish had enlisted the support of provincial politicians, doctors, nurses, hospitals and other volunteers to arrange to have 100 wounded Palestinian children – accompanied by members of their immediate families – travel to Canada for treatment to mend their damaged minds, bodies, and spirits.
After Trudeau won a majority in 2015, Dr Abuelaish – who has endured the killing by invading Israeli forces of three of his daughters and a niece in Gaza in 2009 with remarkable grace – made several public and private overtures to have Trudeau keep his word.
Trudeau never responded.
Dr Abuelaish – a distinguished man not prone to hyperbole – told me that Trudeau was a liar and that history would judge his betrayal harshly.
He is right on both counts.
Trudeau has betrayed others for other telling reasons.
He betrayed his so-called “feminist” credentials when he fired female ministers, including an Indigenous colleague, for daring to challenge him at the cabinet table or defending the rule of law.
As I wrote in September 2023, the supposed “champion” of climate “action”, bought a floundering oil pipeline for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars ($3.3bn).
The supposed “champion” of human rights and the rules-based international “order”, tried, with a little help from his insurrectionist-friendly friends in Brazil, to install a malleable marionette in Venezuela.
The supposed “champion” of the plight of hurting “ordinary” Canadians, allowed predatory corporate monopolies to continue to reap extraordinary earnings while the divide between the uber-wealthy and the other, much less fortunate 99 percent, mushroomed.
Despite the anguished rhetoric of amnesiacs in the House of Commons and newsrooms across Canada, Trudeau’s departure is not evidence of a national “crisis” or that the capital is gripped by “chaos” or “paralysis”.
It is further proof that, given the inexorable cycle of politics, prime ministers – Liberal or Conservative – have a natural life expectancy.
Trudeau’s Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, lasted a little shy of 10 years as prime minister before voters soured on him.
Harper’s Liberal predecessor, Jean Chretien, spent a decade as prime minister before voters soured on him.
Chretien’s Conservative predecessor, the late Brian Mulroney, also held office for approaching a decade before, you guessed it, voters soured on him.
I suspect the same fate awaits current Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, who looks poised – if the consensus among pollsters is accurate – to win a handsome majority during the next federal election that is likely to occur in the spring.
In the meantime, frantic Liberals will choose an eager sacrificial lamb – not named Trudeau – to take on the repellent, schtick-addicted Poilievre in a futile effort to stave off the inevitable.
So, to borrow a phrase made famous by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, “welcome to” 2025, Justin.
Good riddance to you.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
