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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?
Declaring something does not make it so. If a car salesman calls a car "a great bargain" nobody batts an eye if you say prove it, but somehow if it's the government it's considered true unless proven wrong. After their visa runs out, they have the choice to stay in a first-world country illegaly or go back to the third world legally. Would you go back? I certainly wouldn't, so I don't even blame them very much. Are they incentivized to go back? Not really, since not giving them support in line with first world standards despite their illegal status is ruled inappriopriately cruel by the courts. Are they getting deported? Not unless they cooperate, since they have first have a long time to legally fight any deportation order (unless the government can prove they have money, the government will have to pay both legal sides, which will be horrendously expensive) and even if they lose they still have a long time to vanish before a deportation order is processed (and of the already-existing illegal immigrants most aren't ordered to begin with, anyway). It's obviously hard to prove how many exactly it's going to be, but the legal realities in canada mean that any temporary worker who wants to stay will simply do so. And similar experiences from other western countries have shown that this will often be a large percentage, and unfortunately usually the least desirable to boot. It's just terrible incentives all-around.
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