Justin – Has He Built A Sufficient Legacy To Justify Resignation?

Patrick Gossage • February 27, 2024

This is the real question to examine for those many Liberals that wish he would have his own “walk in the snow” and resign like his father did almost 50 years to the day – February 28, 1984. Pierre Trudeau told a confidante the day of that fateful moment: “I don't  have the energy anymore for the job." His close staff also felt he was convinced he had done what he set out to do. The list was long: He had repatriated the constitution with a charter of rights and freedoms, beaten Quebec separatism, and established his Peace Mission on the hot button nuclear issue. He felt there was no new agenda to inspire him to stay on.

Justin is surely starting to think about his own legacy – has he done enough to change and modernize Canada in a progressive and inclusive way to say he had accomplished enough to step away? Unlike his feather at age 65 there is no question that Justin should have lots of energy. Leslie Church, a well-connected would-be Liberal candidate for St. Paul’s riding in Toronto, in a recent speech gave a very articulate resume of Trudeau’s accomplishments – including the child benefit which has lifted 300,000 children out of poverty, $10 a day daycare and gender equity. She could have added his role in huge investments in Canada by international companies like Volkswagen and Stellantis for battery plants in St.Thomas and Windsor, Ontario, and a $20-billion investment in rental housing; taking the GST off rental housing construction plus big housing accelerator grants in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and other Canadian cities. Not to mention most recently with dental care and promised pharmacare.


Yet despite these populist moves, the Trudeau Jr brand has tanked among the electorate. A recent Abacus poll shows the Conservatives with 19-point lead, the largest the company has ever given the party. Only 14 percent of respondents thought that the Liberals deserved to be re-elected. Worse, Justin Trudeau, the sunny ways hero of 2015 now has favorability rating at minus 33, while Poilievre scored a plus two. The government’s approval rating is a mere 24 percent. As for Trudeau, 59 per cent of respondents disapproved of his job performance.


Can Justin make a comeback? It will be very hard for him to recapture his easy-going popularity now as an overexposed divorced dad who constantly gives us a correct lecturing about how Liberals are “continuing” (uttered ad infinitum when challenged) to invest in the middle class - whatever that is. Then there is his love of being on camera, his preference for the symbolic photo op over the substantive deed as one commentator noted. These tightly scripted predictable smug performances on camera are strangely unconvincing when you compare them to his genuine daily reports to Canadians outside his home during the pandemic. The hair remains good, but the rest needs a very challenging makeover. 


Add to the serious problem with his personal appeal the Arrivecan App scandal which is being compared justifiably to the sponsorship scandal which brought down the Martin government, and tone-deaf evidence of privilege in his Jamaica holiday and his Prime Ministerial career could appear to be heading to its close. But when? Does he wait to be defeated in 2015, or take his own walk in the snow?   


Many believe him when he says repeatedly he is staying on, and relishes beating the smart communicator Poliviere whom he despises for his angry and divisive Trumpian ways. He was most convincing in a year-end radio interview with his old friend Terry DiMonte who he asked, “do you actually think I could walk away from this fight right now?” There seems no successor and little caucus unrest. 


Some months ago in my blog I argued that politicians were human beings too. While Trudeau remains plucky and confident and enjoys his travels as a senior member of the Group of 7, he is also endlessly attacked by the opposition and cannot do events in Canada without facing angry crowds. It is tough to see the opposition endlessly accuse him alone of being responsible to just about everything that ails Canadians. Surely his poor personal popularity must grate on him. The long slide into a public that is simply tired of him and the Liberals. His accomplishments, however important and durable seem to make no difference to public attitudes. 



I leave you with the sad predictions of a very smart friend who is convinced he will be gone by June and of two commentators. The first - Michael Harris in the Tyee simply says at the end of a long insightful article:  “For Justin Trudeau, the options at the moment are the stuff of which political nightmares are made. He must either go, or go down with the ship.” The veteran Globe pundit John Ivison put it more bluntly in a recent podcast: “The electorate has made up its mind and there is nothing Trudeau can do to change them…they’re done. They want him gone. ” 

Patrick Gossage Insider Political Views

Well-meaning Assault Weapons Ban and Buyback victim of poor timing and major opposition

By Patrick Gossage • April 14, 2026
In contrast to US inaction after almost weekly mass killings, it took one horrible shooting rampage at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, in 1980, to start the drive for public policy changes around gun control. But years delays between the mass shooting outrage and actual policy to rid the country of assault rifles doomed the eventual gun buyback program. The polytechnique horror was huge news in our relatively massacre-free nation. That December day, 25-year-old Marc Lépine stalked the hallways and classrooms of the École Polytechnique de Montréal with a semi-automatic rifle and murdered 14 women and injured another 13 people before killing himself. A year later, the Coalition for Gun Control was formed to push for stricter gun laws, led by survivors of the Montreal massacre. Later that year, the federal government passed Bill C-17, which imposed safety training and a mandatory waiting period to get a firearms licence-- not an effective means of controlling automatic rifles. Much later, in1996, Parliament passed the Firearms Act, Bill C-68, driven in part by a push for stricter gun laws following the Montreal massacre. The act created a national firearms registry and imposed new rules for obtaining a gun licence, including background checks. The former Conservative government, under prime minister Stephen Harper, abolished the long-gun registry, which it said placed an unnecessary burden on law-abiding gun owners. Quebec subsequently created its own provincial registry to replace it. It took another horrific killing nine years later in Nova Scotia to force Ottawa to take real action on miliary-style guns. On April 18 and 19, 2020, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman committed multiple shootings and set fires at 16 locations, killing 22 people before he was killed by the RCMP. On May 1, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following through on a 2019 campaign promise, announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of assault weapons.. The Canadian government sought to follow New Zealand's lead when at the same time it announced the ban it promised a plan to force gun owners to surrender military-style firearms. But while New Zealand acted quickly, in 2019, Ottawa only launched a long awaited buyback program in 2026. In contrast, the government of then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda announced its firearms buyback program shortly after a white supremacist killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in March, 2019. In order to move quickly, New Zealand set up mobile units where firearm owners could get refunds in exchange for their firearms. They worked hard to get co-operation from gun owners. Meanwhile, here, the firearms industry and individual gun owners vigorously opposed the project, and it was delayed for years. The program was finally initiated this year with little of the sense of urgency it could have had right after the Nova Scotia killings. It has not been going well. In April, the federal public safety minister's office said more than 67,000 assault-style firearms have been declared by 37,869 firearm owners across Canada. That's just under half of the 136,000 firearms the government had budgeted for when it set aside aside $248.6 million for the program. The precise number of banned firearms in Canada is unknown due to the end of the long-gun registry in 2012. There are other deeper problems. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have indicated they will not assist with the program, meaning police are not co-operating as in New Zealand. Conservative MPs and firearm owners say the buyback is a wasteful exercise that targets law-abiding citizens. The original gun-control advocacy group, PolySeSouvient, blames “weak political leadership” for what it calls “poor participation” in the compensation program. It looks like Ottawa - to put it mildly - has blown the opportunity to really reduce the number of people-killing guns in this country.

Two Opposites – Mark Carney and Donald Trump

By Patrick Gossage • March 12, 2026
One of the major differences between these two men is that Carney understands the value of well-thought-out strategy, abundantly clear in his Davos speech, which laid out one for middle powers to deal with the end of a rules-based international order and the rise of hegemony. Trump's lack of strategic understanding is clear in his bumbling attempts to justify the billion-dollar-a-day Iran war. His overall tactic of “flooding the zone” – mounting a new initiative or major announcement every day, or even several times a day to ensure press and opposition can never catch up. This tactic has served him well – confusing the world and his would-be opponents into submission under a valley of activity and harsh opinions from the leader of the world. Contrast this approach to leadership from Carney. He is systematically building a nation less dependent on US trade by travelling the world building new alliances and trading partners. And in the scare of Australia giving substance to his idea of alliances with middle powers. All laid out in the Davos speech. It is instructive to appreciate how much Trump was irritated by the Davos speech. Carney got a standing ovation; Trump’s rambling lengthy diatribe did not. He won’t soon forget being so upstaged. He surely recognized an intellectual power he could never match. Carney is a realist and pragmatic when he stated recently “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He is dealing with the world that is being reshaped by an irrational power-mad president, a world the powerful Stephen Miller said “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Does Carney sometimes err on the side of supporting Trump likely to ensure that critical talks on free trade and tariffs have some chance of finding a sympathetic ear? Yes; first he seemed to fully support Trump’s war with Iran. He later made his support more nuanced, saying Trump’s actions were against the rules-based international order. He now says we will not get involved unless a NATO ally is threatened. But generally, Carney is highly rational in contrast to Trump’s self-centered irrationality. Take Trump’s bizarre ill-informed letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, who had no role in deciding if he got the Nobel Peace Prize: “I no longer feel obligated to think purely of Peace (he subsequently engaged in an ever expanding war against Iran). He then reiterated his demand for “complete and Total Control, of Greenland. Thank you!”. His late-night rants, complete with caps, on social media show a mind out of control. Thay are dutifully reported on US news media and often astonish with their non sequiturs and nastiness. One of his more unpresidential quotes came as he fingered White House drapes: “I chose these myself. I always liked gold." The big question for Canadians who are more and more disillusioned with the antics of the President: could these two opposite ever sit down and do a deal that works for Canada. The two do text, and Carney has admitted that in private Trump does listen. But there is also evidence that the trade people in the White House do not like Canada, and as Trump has said, we owe our very existence to the US. And we are “difficult”. They have said that the current trade deal is not good for the US and could be trashed entirely and -deals with Mexico and Canada could be separate and the current trilateral deal may be dead.  Canada was at the brink of reducing the heavy sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber when Premier Ford’s unfortunate ads during the Rose Bowl that featured President Reagan speaking against the usefulness of Tariffs led To Trump suspending talks. They only recently resumed. So can our world-renowned businessman and banker hope to sit down with the unpredictable and unstable President and cut a deal? Some hope that if we extend talks, the President, weakened by the midterms, the bad economic fallout from an unpopular war, and the fragmentation of the MAGA movement may be easier to deal with. On the other hand he may badly need a “win,” bullying big concessions out of Canada and reaping so-cabled benefits from a weaker free trade deal. There is a scenario where Trump gets a black eye if Carney simply walks away with the conviction, perhaps easily shared with an increasingly nationalistic and confident Canada that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” In any case, what a decisive and challenging future we face with Canada at play. Can Carney win for Canada against his opposite by losing a deal?"
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