The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What's Next for Canada After Trudeau's Resignation?

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Justin Trudeau has acknowledged it was the burgeoning calls from his caucus that ultimately convinced him it was time to step down. What is his legacy as prime minister? And does his departure give the Liberals a chance to refresh the brand before the next election? We ask: Tonda MacCharles, parliamentary bureau reporter for the Toronto Star; Jeffrey Simpson, for more than three decades, a national affairs columnist with the Globe and Mail; and Ontario's 25th premier Kathleen Wynne, who now teaches public policy at Victoria University and Trinity College at the University of Toronto.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries, In Good Faith, a TVO original podcast.

Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. For the father, it was a walk in the snow in February 1984. For the son, it seems it was some skiing on the snow that convinced Justin Trudeau he could not hold out any longer. And in fact, the prime minister acknowledged yesterday it was the burgeoning calls from his caucus that ultimately convinced him it was time to go. What is Trudeau's legacy and does his departure give the Liberals a chance to refresh the brand before the next election? Joining us on that let's

welcome Ontario's 25th Premier Kathleen Wynne who now teaches public policy at Victoria University and Trinity College at the University of Toronto. In the nation's capital, Tonda McCharles, Parliamentary Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star, and Jeffrey Simpson, for more than three decades, a national affairs columnist with a Globe and Mail, and author of eight books, and it's great to have you, Premier, back here in our studio. It's great to see you again, and to our friends in Points Beyond. Thank you again for joining us tonight on TVO. I want to start with the one of you who has basically had to give that speech before.

So you know who I'm talking about here, Kathleen Wynn. The speech that essentially says, I really love this job. I would love to have kept doing it, but it looks like my time's up. How hard is it to give that speech? Extremely. It's extremely hard. When you have loved the work, when you have believed in what you're doing,

when you've been part of a team that has been doing that work, it's very, very hard. And the piece I wrote on the day that Justin Trudeau stepped down was about that, that he was having a rough day. And we'll talk all about the issues surrounding that and how long it took and the weakness of the country and responding to a team that was falling apart, all of that.

But in that moment, when he had to sit down, he talked about it in his speech, he had to sit down with his kids and tell them that he was stepping down. Those are hard human moments, you know? And yeah, my heart went out to him in that moment as a human being. Jeffrey Simpson, let me take the ex-premier's advice here

and ask you whether he should have given that speech six months ago. 18 months ago, actually. That far back? Oh, sure. I mean, a couple of historical notes or comparative notes. One is in a presidential system, there are term limits. So, you know, the Mexican president gets six, the American

president gets eight, the French prince on in our system. It's largely dependent upon the party itself and the parties have extremely weak mechanisms for reviewing their leadership. So you get messy situations like the conservatives getting rid of John Diefenbaker that dragged on for a long time. You had at the end of the Mulroney years people saying, you know, it's time we go but it's got to come this this internal incoherent pressure builds and the leader almost always convinces herself or himself that if I just soldier on, if times get better, if the economy improves, if whatever, I can do it again.

And it's very hard to look yourself in the mirror. Another point, look at history. Ever since Mackenzie King, Canadians have given their governments about eight or nine years if they start with a majority. Sometimes it's two majority, sometimes it's one majority and two minorities. If Turtault stuck around, he was asking the Canadian public to give him a fourth mandate, which has not been done since the time of Sir Wulford Laurier and Sir John A.

MacDonald. So he was bucking history in a gross way. If he'd left 18 months ago, he would have come out of COVID, which by and large people thought they did quite well. I certainly did. And he could have left with seven and a half years of being prime minister and, you know, not have to deal with the force of history, which as I just said, means that in the eighth or ninth year of a government,

the worst thing a government can face is this notion that it's time for a change. And when time for a change takes hold, you're done. Tondama, Charles, I wanna ask you, I wanna ask you this. He acknowledged Justin Trudeau in his farewell speech that one of the reasons he was stepping down, I guess the main reason he was stepping down,

was because his caucus wanted him to. He didn't say, I want to spend more time with my family. He didn't say, I've essentially achieved everything I got into public life to do. He acknowledged the elephant in that caucus room. And I wonder if that surprised you, because you don't hear that often. No, it didn't surprise me, because I think it very much is the reason why he's leaving. I think that up until three weeks ago, he was still convinced that he was the best person

not only to lead the Liberal Party against Pierre Poièvre in the next election, but that he was the best person to lead the Canadian government into what is a coming battle with the US Trump administration that will hit Canada very hard economically. I think he believed that up until about three weeks ago, when he was trying to move the chairs around so that he could bring Mark Carney into the government as finance minister and allow Freeland some other role. He revealed yesterday actually for the first time to us publicly that he had asked her to stay as deputy prime minister. Previously, Freeland's version was that he had only asked her to stay in some ill-defined role on the Canada-US file. But I think the real catalyst for

what got us there yesterday was this absolute sort of inferno that erupted after Freeland resigned with the bomb she lobbed at his leadership in doing so. When she, you know, she said that they were utterly at odds over how to deal with Trump, how to deal with the economy, how to spend public finances. And that, I think, not only was a huge broadside to the government, to him personally, and to his leadership, it brought out of the woodwork caucus colleagues who up until that point had kind of, only a few, if you'll remember, there's only about a dozen or so had actually spoken out up to that point, post the loss in Toronto St. Paul's. But suddenly, many more were willing to put their name to the cause for him to go and in private, behind caucus closed caucus doors, you know, to see the Ontario

Atlantic and Quebec caucuses, a majority as far as we know, we don't know if it was, you know, a unanimous call, but certainly a majority of those caucuses coming out against him made it impossible and he realized this to continue. So I don't think he described himself yesterday as a fighter and someone who doesn't back down from a fight. I think that he was willing to keep up those two big fights until that time. Yes, it had been hard. Yes, he successfully, he thought, maybe quelled the previous caucus dissent after the by-election losses.

But I think this was the catalyst that got us there. Premier Wynne, I've got to ask you, because I presume you've thought about this in the past. Why do we have a 50-50 cabinet? Because it's 2015. He's a guy who, you know, made a lot of his chops in politics on being a feminist and giving women a chance that perhaps previous prime ministers didn't give them. And yet his worst confrontations as prime minister, Jodie Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott, now Krista Freeland, are all with strong

women. Help us get our heads around that. How do you understand that? I don't think I can. I don't think I have any particular insight into that. I certainly don't have any insight into what happened with Christia Freeland. I have no idea why the prime minister or the people

around him would think that they could have that conversation with her on Friday and expect her to deliver, you know, unflappably on the Monday a fall economic statement that she didn't agree with. So I don't, I really don't have an explanation for that. I think that maybe there was an expectation that in all of those cases that they would just go along, you know, that they were good soldiers, that they would carry on and I don't know whether that had anything to do with them being women or not. I just don't, I just don't know but it is, it's particularly problematic because of exactly what you said, you know, that that he made part of his reputation on this

equitable view of the world. And putting Chris Yafreeland particularly in that position, you know, that I agree with Tonda, that was the turning point. That made it impossible for the team to hang together. Jeffrey, do you agree that— I would just— Oh, yeah. Sorry, Tonda, go ahead. Well, could I just quickly on that point,

I would just say that Justin Trudeau has actually got a very hard-nosed, ruthless political streak when it's called for, and he hasn't just dumped women. He dumped Bill Morneau when he was ineffective. He's dumped, for example, Randy Boisnoe when he became an embarrassment to the government. He was ruthless about ousting Liberal senators initially way back when he first came into the leadership role of the party. And so he's shown a ruthless streak when it's called for, but he also, I

think, thought that, and made a mistake, perhaps, that of thinking that those women would have been loyal team members, as Kathleen said. But I think, you know, notably in the Wilson-Raybould-Filpot cases, they were, I would say, not long-time Liberal Party activists, members, organizers, party members, MPs, then ministers. They came in from the outside of the Liberal Party politics and didn't perhaps behave the way maybe Liberal types of thought they might have or should have. And in Freeland's case, you know, at least she was an outsider until she became very much an insider to Justin Trudeau and a very trusted lieutenant. So I think she's the more interesting case.

And does it tell us that he's not a feminist? I'm not convinced of that, actually, simply because of the other examples I've given you. Jeffrey, you want to come in on this? Well, he recruited hard, both the former minister of indigenous affairs and Christie of Readland. I mean, they were not in the Liberal Party. He went out and got them and to his credit brought them into the Liberal Party. And unfortunately, they came out, came a cropper.

Hubris, hubris. It goes with being in politics too often. became a cropper. Hubris. Hubris. It goes with being in politics too often. You don't know when the time has come. Now you talk about these caucus members, okay? Those caucus members, God love them, in all parties go home every weekend or when there's a parliamentary break and they talk to their constituents and they hear from their constituents. And those liberal MPs have been going home now for some months and getting pounded when they knock on doors because Trudeau was so unpopular and the party was becoming extremely unpopular more and more so with every passing week. So

they come to Ottawa this week or in the weeks before this, having heard this on the doorstep in liberal writings, not just in hardcore conservative or NDP writings. And they say, I'm done in the next election if I run. And some of them are already saying, I'm leaving. Okay. So it was the public opinion that pressed themselves, itself rather, on those MPs. And they overcame the prime minister's hubristic view that somehow in the face of overwhelming opposition in the country to him staying and almost certain catastrophic defeat for the liberal party, that he somehow could rescue the team.

that he somehow could rescue the team. I mean, this was hubris of a kind that one sees from time to time, and it usually leads, as Shakespeare tells us, into tragedy. I want to do something now that I actually have not seen a lot of coverage of, because so much of the coverage has focused on the prime minister overstaying his welcome, frankly, I guess is the way to put it. And that is he thinks he's got a good story to tell. He thinks he's made some historic achievements during his nine years in power.

And Tonda, I think maybe with the exception of a piece that you wrote the other day, which did go through some of the victories he enjoyed over the years, we should spend a moment here saying we got as as a country, this because Justin Trudeau ran the government for the last nine years and two months. Kathleen Wynne, what's on your list? So on my list is putting in place a child care program that has been talked about for

decades. On my list is changing fundamentally the conversation between indigenous and non-indigenous people. And we can argue about whether those policies were successful and whether the expectations were met. I would suggest the expectations probably weren't met. But the path to reconciliation or the process of reconciliation has been advanced

by the conversations, by the processes, and the policies of this government in a way that I think we haven't seen before. I think there's been an expansion of health care in terms of dental and pharma, particularly pharma, which he advanced. I think that those are significant changes. and those things are going to be, I think, difficult to roll back. I don't think Pierre Poliev is going to be able to undo the

advances that were made on the Canada Child Benefit, for example. You brought in a PharmaCare program and Doug Ford cancelled it in 10 seconds. He didn't cancel it entirely though. He modified it. So it's important, you know. He modified it because all those young people in OHA Plus who would have lost their free pharma, those families would have reacted. So he didn't do that. He took it away from the people who didn't have a plan. Anyway, that's a technical detail.

But he didn't repeal it. So you're kind of making my point that it's going to be hard for him to do. The Canada Child Benefit that's lifted hundreds of thousands of kids out of poverty, that's a significant. Now it was an improvement on what Stephen Harper done, so Stephen Harper brought it in, but those are significant changes that I think in the history books will be attributed to Trudeau. Jeffrey, is there anything on your list that we didn't just hear from Kathleen Wynn? No, I think those social programs are the ones that will be the ones that he will

be most remembered for and probably thanked by a lot of people thanked for. So I'm quite prepared to give him credit for that. He was a much more, and I use this word advisedly, radical leader of the liberal party than people I think understand. What do I mean by that? I mean that the genius, and it was a genius, of the liberal party pre-Trudeau, including in his father's time, by the way, was to have a party in Ottawa that was balanced

between let's call them social reformers and people who wanted to make progress in that area and what you might loosely call business liberals. Pierre Trudeau had a whole bunch of those people, Donald S. MacDonald, John Turner, Barney Danson, Alastair Gillespie, Ron Basford, names many people have forgotten, but that was the liberal wing, the business wing. And then he had the spenders, the Jean Marchands and so on and so forth. And that prevailed all through the Craigshend years and the Paul Martin years. This prime minister had a cabinet with, by my count, two people with extensive private

sector experience and a whole bunch of people who are active on the social files. So that the wing of the liberal party that was there and part of it from the time when it became a very important party back at the beginning of the last century atrophy. And the result I think, and this will be controversial, is that they were pursuing a series of policies, not necessarily those, but identity politics. They're very in vogue in the English-Canadian universities and cultural world these days,

but which have very little resonance with the ordinary people. What the great Keith Davy, the great liberal organizer of the Pierre Trudeau period, used to call garden variety Canadians. They looked at these policies, including gender and indigeneity, and they said, well, where am I in this? We just saw this in the United States in a very extreme way. And we seem to think in Canada, or at least the Liberals did, that we would be immune in Canada for people feeling that they were being left out because

of all this attention being paid to particularistic groups. Well, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. And I think the liberals have paid a very substantial price as a result of those approaches, which by the way, if you just look at the polls, they're not in the top 10. I can tell you that they might be 13 the polls, they're not in the top 10, I can tell you that. They might be 13th, but they're not in the top. Let me get Tanya McCharles to weigh in on whether you think anything ought to be added

to the list of accomplishments that we've heard so far. Well, I would just, I guess, I would agree with everything Kathleen said. I would add perhaps a couple of things. Pensions are on a solid, public pensions are on a more solid footing. And I guess even while the carbon taxes become a point of friction across the board now, and while I expect we'll see a lot of liberal leadership contenders distance themselves from the planned increases to the consumer carbon price. I think that the liberal government has made a significant advancement in,

I guess, making it table stakes for any party buying to become government to have a plan to deal with the environment. And here's why I say that, because the industrial emitters, the heavy polluting industries do have a carbon price under this government that I have not heard one conservative say should be ditched. And I expect that will have a lasting impact. It has staying power. And so let's put that on the positive side of the ledger. And to a certain extent, while the this government never met 2% of the GDP target for defense spending, it has significantly increased defense spending in raw numbers. So I think, you know, to expect that any conservative government will come in and start, you know, dialing back those two aspects, defense spending

and an industrial heavy polluting heavy emitters sector. I don't think we should expect to see that. Now, on the negative side of the ledger, while Trudeau put forward an open borders, Canada is a welcoming country to immigrants brought into Syrian refugees when he first got into power, they have stumbled badly on immigration levels and they have lost, they've lost the room on, you know, increasing numbers of temporary residents. So they've tried to dial that back, you know, immigration numbers and population growth didn't keep up pace with housing infrastructure and the ability to absorb that number of immigrants. So that's a negative side of the ledger. And I think that's a pretty significant factor in their downfall and I think in public opinion.

And I think going forward, it's going to play a big role in both our political debate and policies going forward. So yeah, I think Kathleen's list is a pretty good list. And I just add those two. Good. Less than five minutes to go here. I do want to put one thing to you, Kathleen Wynne, which I was kind of surprised when Mr. Trudeau made this revelation, I think, yesterday, when he said, the one regret I have

is that I didn't get electoral reform through. He wanted to go to a more ranked ballot system. He was insistent in his first term that first pass the post. We were never going to have another election like that ever again. And he didn't do that one. And he let a lot of people for whom electoral reform

is a big deal, he let a lot of them down. Could he, in hindsight, have just pushed through a system that he preferred? So I heard that as a bit of revisionist history, actually. I don't actually understand why, if he had really wanted to do that, he couldn't have. At the time, I remember thinking, well, why the heck don't you do a referendum the way we did in Ontario? You know, we'd laid the groundwork, there'd been one in BC, so resurrect that process. So I didn't actually take that at face value. I think it's something that maybe he regrets now.

Well, he said he didn't have a second party in the House of Commons who would have backed it and he didn't feel he could go unilateral. But I don't think there was enough time taken to try to build any kind of consensus. That all happened very quickly after he was elected. And I remember at the time thinking, oh, OK, this is going to come back to bite you. And I think it did. So again, I just didn't take it at face value.

I think there was a revision there. OK. Remember, Sars-D. Yes, Jeff, go ahead. I was going to say, remember, there was no proposal put forward. It was that we were going to change the electoral system in a way that nobody knew. And there had been referendums on changing the electoral system, as Kathleen

Wynne just noted in British Columbia, it lost and in Ontario, it lost. And Quebec was thinking about it and then the government pulled back. So the experience in Canada at the provincial level had not been propitious for the federal government to succeed in a national effort, especially when they didn't have a particular proposal to put before the people. What they could have done was create a group of people, come up with a plan, put it before the country, and see what they see what the country thinks. But the status quo in this country has always prevailed when put up against ideas for change. Okay, minute and a half to go here,

and I'm going to ask Tonda, you kept an eye on this guy, obviously, for the, you know, probably more than everybody else here, because that's your job. What's the number one big takeaway, lesson learned from this first minister that whoever replaces him, regardless of what party it is, needs to understand? Hmm. I mean, that's a really tough question. I would say two things.

There is a long, there's a lesson to be learned about how Ja, uh, Brian Mulroney managed his caucus, and many prime ministers say they learned it, but I don't think anyone learned it as well as he did and he kept his caucus behind him to the very end until he plummeted in the polls and had to do his own walk. Justin Trudeau paid lip service to some of that so caucus management is very important not just to keeping you know your enemies and your friends close but to keeping an eye on the electorate and how responsive a government has to be. So if the knock against Trudeau is that he didn't listen to Canadians

when they weren't being, they weren't able to make their household budgets work and they were feeling the pressure, the gas tanks and the grocery store and when they went for their mortgages or tried to pay rent. Those are real concerns that, like Jeffrey said, caucus members heard. But at some point, you know, you have to hear it, not just from, you know, through the eyes of the opposition lens. If your own people are telling you, and as we understand, his caucus has been pressing that issue. You know, he did.

Justin Trudeau did a carve out for Atlantic heating oil, which became sort of a death knell for them because it undermined one of their key policies, the carbon pricing. But the caucus, there was another way to go at that to address affordability concerns. The caucus had been pressing for it. And so I think that's a takeaway for me.

It comes, I think Trudeau would have benefited, his government would have benefited from listening more carefully to caucus, insulating yourself a little bit from your inner circle of close advisors and the PMO who tell you what is important and equally from finance department officials who have their own version of what's important.

It's a closer connection to the street, if you will, and to your constituency, and I think to policy making and decision making. So I would say that's the takeaway from me that any future party leader, Pierre Pauli, I've included, has to kind of pay attention to. You know, caucus is not just, I mean, sure, there's a lot of people we never remember the names of,

but there are a lot of people doing a lot of hard work and merit listening to. The care and feeding of caucus, as they used to call it in Mr. Mulrooney's days. I want to thank Tana McCharles from the Toronto Star. Sounds trying a bit, but. Tana McCharles from the Toronto Star, Jeffrey Simpson, so many years at the Globe and Mail, Kathleen Wynn,

25th Premier of Ontario, Kathleen and Jeffrey, I'm going to ask you to hang around. We've got one more segment for you. Thanks so much to everybody. Appreciate it. Thanks, Bob. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, Steve.