Trudeau’s Weak Legacy Makes Carney’s Job Easier

On Polls And Policies

The last time I managed to take a swing at the legacy of Justin Trudeau’s time as Prime Minister, I was enraged as he was resigning as PM in January. I tried to take another swing at it in March, as he officially departed, but I shelved it mostly because he had had a good week as PM handling the Trump of it all, and because I didn’t want to get yelled at by Liberals feeling one last surge of good sentiment towards the man who won 3 elections.

The problem is, Trudeau’s legacy is being airbrushed in parts of the progressive movement and the Liberal Party but also in the country as a whole, and it’s causing a distortion of a lot of things. Yes, it’s unlikely that the Liberals will get the political gift of Trump ever again right at an election time. But I think people assuming that the Conservatives are on the march and they’re just one more heave away from government are ignoring a fairly important point - Justin Trudeau was a pretty shit PM in a lot of ways.

David Coletto just tweeted a post-election poll asking people how they would have voted if Trudeau was still leader, and the answer was 46% for the CPC and 28% for the Liberals. Therefore, Mark Carney was worth about 20% on margin for the Liberals, given where we ended up. And there’s a lot of reason for that.

Yes, the Child Benefit and Child Care deals are excellent, and the Dental and Pharma should be helpful to those who benefit from them, but the record is pretty fucking bleak otherwise. Crime has returned as both a governance and political issue, immigration decisions have fucked every level of state capacity across the country and thrown the housing market into another level of crisis, and he failed to embed his signature environmental policy into the political fragment and it’s already been tossed overboard. If you don’t own a house, don’t have kids, and have benefits from work, this government’s cut your taxes by maybe $1500/year while its decisions have made you pay many multiples more of that in higher rental costs. Hell, even if you did buy in the last couple of years, the price you paid for that house is a joke compared to what it should be worth.

The Trudeau government got a few things right, especially during COVID, but they’ve gotten many more things wrong than they have right. And that’s a big problem. It was a wildly corrupt government, one where the Prime Minister and his apparatus leans on the Attorney General to ensure favourable outcomes for preferred companies, that tries to outsource contracts worth nearly a billion dollars to a friendly charity that had paid the PM’s mother six figures, and where the PM was routinely accepting free trips he had no business taking.

It was a government that has an ass backwards view of economic growth most of the time, focussing more on how to divide the spoils of growth than on spurring more growth. Had the government been more focused on growth and less on redistribution, it’s likely we’d be able to afford many of the things we have now in a more sustainable way. But we can’t, because the pivot to growth came too late.

I’m not litigating all of this for fun, I swear - it’s actually worth keeping in mind all of the headwinds Mark Carney had to overcome. Yes, Trump, and the fact he wasn’t Trudeau, were two immensely valuable tailwinds for Carney. But the record of the Trudeau government was a huge headwind too. And the bar for Carney being better isn’t exactly very high.

If Carney undoes the stupider parts of the Trudeau legacy on immigration and crime, cuts taxes, approves a bunch of new money for the various parts of the housing agenda, and sits back while housing starts outside of Ontario continue to tick along well, he’s going to be a better PM than Trudeau. If all he does is spend the next two years bullying Ford into cutting DCs, clears encampments with a shit ton of government bought modular and prefab shelter housing, and keeps announcing cool new defence partnerships and procurement deals, he’ll be a better PM for the people in Trudeau’s Zone Of Disinterest than Trudeau.

If he can actually do the bigger stuff he’s promised - deliver big infrastructure projects on reasonable timelines and budgets, leverage public dollars to get huge amounts of private sector investment, and diversify our energy sector to be a leader in clean energy - then Carney has a chance to be a great PM. But so long as he just doesn’t repeat the really fucking stupid stuff JT did, he’ll be better than JT. And that’s important.

The immigration point is incredibly important - if we had just followed the population growth rates of the Trudeau majority years, we’d have 40M people as of the end of 2024. We have 41.5M people. For all the people talking about jurisdiction, do you think these 1.5M people just don’t exist? They don’t exist in the housing market, or in ERs, or in any of the places where we interact with state capacity? Cause they do, and pretending the massive increase in people isn’t a decent part of why housing costs are up and health care capacity is stretched thin is nonsensical. So yes, Justin Trudeau does have to wear some of the blame for the consequences of his government’s decisions.

If you’re Carney, however, this is a fresh slate and a low bar. It will read like I’m only slating JT like this because it’ll make Carney look better in 2 years but let’s be real, I am a connoisseur’s publication and no normal person knows who the fuck I am. I’m not important enough to even pretend that I can set these narratives. What I do know is it’s true. Trudeau was a mediocre PM with great highs and absolutely horrible lows. If Carney can fix some of the most egregious mistakes, especially on crime, and comes through on the housing and immigration fixes currently in progress, it’s not hard to see the next election having neither the Trump tailwind for Carney, but also not the headwinds of stagnant growth, increased crime, and a dogshit housing market. And at that point, anything is possible for the Liberals.