Sorry, Not Sorry: Liberals Urge Trudeau To Go

OTTAWA — Canada’s Liberals are done with Justin Trudeau and there will be no more "please" or "thank-you's" as they work to hustle him out the door.

The federal party lacks a mechanism to oust its leaders, so lawmakers are trying a range of tactics with Trudeau. Discontented backbenchers had hoped he’d notice the polls and take them personally. When that didn’t work, they initiated a quiet revolt and behind closed doors presented him with a letter encouraging him to leave.

“No one is out to humiliate the prime minister,” one member of Parliament told POLITICO at the time.

Now the demands are public and emphatic.

“Relinquish the leadership,” Toronto lawmaker Rob Oliphant told Trudeau in a letter posted to X — one of about 20 MPs in the past week to add his name publicly to the list of caucus members who have urged Trudeau to step aside.

Catherine McKenna, who served in Trudeau’s Cabinet from 2015 to 2021, was the first prominent Liberal to go public over the summer, calling for “new energy and a new leader.” Last week, she was far blunter: “Every Liberal MP should be calling on the Prime Minister to resign.”

The House is scheduled to reconvene Jan. 27, a week after Donald Trump returns to the White House. There is growing fear that chaos in Ottawa is impeding Canada’s readiness for the tariff war the president-elect has threatened to start on his first day back.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has made an unorthodox appeal that Parliament reconvene before the end of the year for a no-confidence vote that would topple Trudeau’s minority government.

“The Prime Minister continues to cling desperately to power,” Poilievre wrote Friday in a letter to Canada’s governor general, who is not likely to grant the request. “That would be wrong at any time, but these are not normal times. Canada faces a serious and potentially crippling trade threat from the United States.”

CBC News and the Toronto Star report that 51 members of the Ontario caucus gathered virtually on Saturday agreed to tell the prime minister they want him gone.

The dissenters have been emboldened by the abrupt and surprise exit of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland on Dec. 16 — a staggering departure interpreted by many as the beginning of the end for her boss.

Liberal MP Wayne Long first spoke out against the prime minister in June — and he continues to do so. “We all have a political shelf life,” he said.

Trudeau, who turns 53 on Christmas Day, remains in the Ottawa area and is said to be considering his future. The Globe and Mail reports via a Liberal insider that he’s heading to British Columbia to ski and is not expected to resign over the holidays.

Although the observation is not perfect, Trudeau is being compared to President Joe Biden — dooming his party by bungling his exit. Canada’s three-term prime minister is one of a band of embattled G7 leaders that includes now-former U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who last week lost a confidence vote.

Trudeau insisted through the fall that he was staying put. “I’ve got a fight to lead against people who want to hurt this country,” he said ahead of the fall session.

Now his party is in turmoil with Trump’s return weeks away.

“How we deal with the threat our country currently faces will define us for a generation, and perhaps longer,” Freeland warned in her resignation letter.

Trudeau ended a chaotic week in Ottawa by changing up his Cabinet, although Freeland’s exit obliterated any hopes of revamp and revitalization.

“I understand there’s going to be a short runway,” Nate Erskine-Smith said after agreeing to replace Trudeau’s housing minister, who also quit last week — a blip in a bonkers news cycle.

The prime minister convened his new team Friday afternoon. “We just had an excellent Cabinet meeting that was almost entirely focused on the Canada-U.S. dynamic,” Trudeau said as he jetted by reporters on his way off the Hill. “We have a lot of work to do and that’s what we’re focused on.”

On Monday, Trudeau participated virtually in a meeting of a special Cabinet committee preoccupied with Canada-U.S. relations.

Canada’s next federal election was always going to be about change for a three-term Liberal government that has been in power since 2015. The existential and now losing challenge for Trudeau is to manage party members who want change to start right now — with him.

The prime minister has been under growing pressure since the Liberals were defeated in a special election on June 24 in a Toronto stronghold his party had held since 1993.

Rookie Conservative candidate Don Stewart scored a 590-vote squeaker over Leslie Church, Freeland’s former chief of staff. Liberals everywhere considered the loss a harbinger. If they could throw everything at a race in “Fortress Toronto” and lose, then no Liberal riding was safe.

While pundits speculated on what the loss would mean for Trudeau’s feature, Liberal lawmakers recognized what it meant for theirs.

In September, the Liberals lost another long-held seat in a Montreal by-election. On Dec. 16, they surrendered one more in British Columbia. They weren't expected to hold on to Cloverdale-Langley City, a swing riding outside Vancouver, but the decisive loss offered yet another preview of the 2025 federal election.

Polling from Abacus Data this fall found that 57 percent of Canadians living in a Liberal-held riding want their member of Parliament to call on Trudeau to resign and not run again.

A new survey last week revealed 45 percent of committed voters ready to vote for Poilievre’s party, “the largest Conservative lead in our tracking history and the lowest Liberal vote share since 2015.”

The last Conservative leader to charm that much of the electorate was former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who collected slightly more than 50 percent of votes in the 1984 election.

Trudeau’s chief rival is a shrewd communicator who excels in sound bites. A seven-term MP, Poilievre has boiled down his pitch into four emojis and 12 words.
The top priority is to “axe the tax,” which is shorthand for rolling back carbon pricing. Conservative MPs pledge at every turn and in every social media post to also, “Build the homes. Fix the budget. Stop the crime.”

In fundraising appeals and town hall rallies for almost two years now, Poilievre has been stoking the desire for change with the charge that “Canada is broken.” Poll after poll would suggest a majority of Canadians agree.