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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resigned, a sign of yet more changing of the times as the Prime Minister since 2015 marks the end of an decade of Liberal Party rule of Canada, and possibly yet another political dynasty scalp Donald Trump may claim. While Trudeau's critics and issues go far beyond Trump, the internal-party revolt since the US 2024 election will put another person on the podium right as Donald Trump assumes office, part of a broader realignment in the West as governments including Germany, France, and others have seen falls- several deliberate- to re-roll priorities and mandates in (temporal) alignment with the change in the US presidency. (Canada's 2025 election, much like Germany's, is/was scheduled for October. Canada's parliament is suspended until 24 March where a new PM will (hopefully) be chosen.)
Broadly associated with the more progressive-woke politics, Trudeau's liberals are expected to face a shellacking, though whether that's as part of Canada's experience of the anti-incumbant wave of the last decade, a backlash to progressive politics, or Trudeau's own personal contribution. (Last year, 49% of respondents in a Canadian survey characterized the PM as 'Arrogant,' which is often just the first and more polite words in some lists.)
A (much) longer political obituary can be read here for those who are curious. Regardless of one's views of the man, the sun will continue to rise, the earth rotate, and life will go on.
But we may never get another world leader on camera in blackface.
Canada was the great laboratory of democracy that we needed. Trudeau's political obituary will be written with one word: immigration.
Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.
This has had disastrous and likely permanent consequences. While leftists might have cheered the new, vibrant additions to the nation's food and street culture, even right-leaning Canadians were generally pro-immigration. The consensus was that Canada's points-based admissions system would lead to incredible economic gains if nothing else. We now know that that is false. Canada's economy has been stagnant over the last 10 years while the US economy has soared. In fact, on a per-capita level Canada's economy has been in a recession now for over 6 quarters.
Canada's population has increased by large amounts since 2015. The country now groans under an influx of millions of new immigrants. Since Trudeau took office, Canada's population has increased from less than 36 million to over 41 million. Nearly 100% of the gain has been as a result of immigration. Housing prices have soared, making owning a home an unreachable dream for almost all young people. Rents for apartments have seen similar increases. Wages, on the other hand have stagnated, and remain at levels far below those of the US. Far from the fever dream of immigrants doing useful labor such as building new housing, the new arrivals are competing aggressively for the same sort of high wage sinecures and government benefits that native-born Canadians previously thought they were entitled to. The frog is being boiled much too quickly, and people are noticing.
Mass immigration is now proven a failed policy. It remains to be seen whether it is possible for Canada to recover. I fear it might not be. With the Conservatives in charge, things will get bad less quickly, but it will take years for the consequences of the Trudeau years to be fully felt.
Prior to Trudeau, Stephen Harper was Prime minister for 9 years. There's pretty much an unbroken trendline that started in the 90s between Chretien/Martin/Harper's time in office and Trudeau's in terms of the proportion of the population that are immigrants. Ditto for the fraction of 'visible minorities'. The graphs like this one, which I imagine gets spread in your circles, conflate temporary workers with immigrants. After COVID, the government panicked due to inflation and a labor shortage a brought in a bunch of temporary workers before clamping down on it late last year and announcing reductions in immigration over the next few years.
Am I missing something? Do you have any data showing that Trudeau was significantly different from Harper, Martin or any of his other predecessors in recent history?
Harper faced significant legal battles over his attempts to reform immigration an asylum claims.
One major case was "Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care v. Canada" where the Government tried to cancel extended prescription drug coverages rejected refugee claimants received while appealing their rulings. Keep in mind that Canadian citizens didn't get drug coverage.
The judge ruled that cutting the program was "cruel and unusual treatment" and thus a charter violation. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld that.
Things are a little more interesting if you look at immigration by year by country,
https://x.com/AmazingZoltan/status/1875985574429184020
There were prior trends, but Trudeau vastly increased immigration from India and Pakistan.
Instead of total number of immigrants, the key fight is really "how many poor Muslims?".
The left sees bringing in poor Muslims as key to their political success. They end up dependent on government programs and are loyal voters, or at least were before the split over October 7 in the US.
Harper did various things to tilt the balance towards economically viable immigrants. He upset a lot of Liberals by resetting the immigration backlog queue. I could go on but it was really mostly minor things that he could do with out the left going to the courts.
Trudeau tried to flip that around. Early on he brought in large numbers of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan without giving any thought about how to house them. He ended up paying for hotels and upper-middle class homes in some cases. Per head spending was enormous.
Ultimately Trudeau's problem was that he's one of those people who believes leftist academics have everything figured out and we just need to what they say. Mass immigration is always good. New housing construction is bad. So Canada has an incredible housing crisis. Also infrastructure wasn't expanded to support the additional population, so there are problems everywhere.
At least previous Prime Ministers could muster up a better response to "we need more housing for this immigration" than "shut up you racist".
What sort of leftist academic would say that new housing construction is bad? I would think that, almost by definition, if you think that new housing construction is bad than you are not a leftist.
Those that believe in the labor theory of value.
Is there a concrete example where self-defined Canadian marxists/communists/socialists have been against building new housing?
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Lots of "leftists" and actual leftists (i.e. people following an ideology derived of Marx or Bakunin) oppose new building done for-profit. That means big corps, small landlords, whomever. If it is for-profit, it is exploitative. They say that building some big new apartment building isn't going to make housing more affordable, it's just more money for landlords and developers. And if it's city housing or low-income or whatever, they'll protest that it's not the right neighbourhood, of course it's a great idea but not here, there are heritage concerns, etc.
If you go to into community development meeting you will see these types. Very often they own multi-million dollar homes.
I'd be happy if you could provide any examples - news articles, maybe even social media posts. The reason I'm asking is I've been to community development meetings in multiple cities in Canada and I've never seen anyone but nimbys opposing new builds and rezoning changes. The main concerns I've heard in those meetings is that high-rise buildings bring crime, put less tall houses in their shadow, change the character of the community, pose threat to children due to the increased traffic.
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