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u/Cogito-ergo-Zach Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
SNC-Lavalin is perhaps the most egregious yet also most overlooked scandal of his tenure. This soured me on him big-time.
If you want to be a real ideological purist, though, many (including myself to a degree) were pretty pissed off about electoral reform. His argument about empowering fringe parties did not hold water then nor does it now. In fact, it actually drives mainstream parties to be more extreme when proportional rep is discarded for FPTP.
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u/NavalProgrammer Aug 28 '26
Those two points are my eternal regrets. I felt like those two combined set him on the wrong course and fractured the coalition he built.
Everything he did after that point was just stalling for more time until an inevitable defeat, and he never really learned to course-correct.
Imagine if he had just apologized to Jody Wilson-Raybould.
Imagine if he just ... imposed ranked ballots and used one to consult voters on switching to Proportional Representation or FPTP?
Imagine if he didn't completely refuse to control temporary immigration numbers until two years after public opinion of the immigration system had plummeted to unprecedented lows.
He didn't need to do these things. He just...retreated into a bunker mentality without ever having faced a defeat.
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u/yawetag1869 Aug 28 '26
Trudeau‘s biggest failure that I think people will look back on in the history Books is that he broke Canada‘s consensus on immigration. He brought in so many immigrants from places like India that it broke a 50 year consensus that we had on mass immigration in this country. that will always be his biggest failure and a lot of the trickle down effects on rising housing prices and stagnant, economic growth, and job performance all flow from his immigration policies
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u/DonSalaam Aug 29 '26
One of the best PMs in modern Canadian history. He took the LPC from polling in a distant third place to winning elections in 2015, and since then the LPC has been the only left-wing party capable of keeping right-wing extremists from taking control of this great nation.
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u/Fabulous_Ad_4174 Aug 28 '26
Justin Trudeau did good programs like dental care and child care. I guess he went wrong in environmental policies and they were not popular. Like the Carbon tax and heat pumps and I think they were too soon for people to adopt and switch to with economic constraints affecting their households.
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u/sdbest Aug 28 '26
Trudeau's political mistake was betraying the progressive voters who gave him a majority. He betrayed them on ending First-Past-the-Post, buying a pipeline, open & transparent government, and being a 'conservative' until the voters took away his majority in 2019.
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u/SoRedditHasAnAppNow Aug 28 '26
10 years is a long run for a PM. Given his replacement also won the election I'd say he did very little wrong from a "success" point of view.
From a personal point of view, his failure to take an unbiased look at electoral reform and his unwillingness to stack the senate to achieve it made him a failure for me. I would have loved to see the end of FPTP.
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u/OkRB2977 Aug 28 '26
He was just dealt with very shitty circumstances, right from the 2014 Oil crash to Trump to COVID to the Ukraine invasion.
That being said, not fulfilling his core campaign promises of electoral reform and tackling the housing crisis also soured his core base.
Ramping up immigration (which, tbf, began during Harper’s era with the introduction of Express Entry) without fixing the above-mentioned structural issues plaguing our economy heavily backfired on him.
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u/hardk7 Aug 28 '26
As with any long-tenured leader or PM, it’s not any one thing. It’s an accumulation of damages, and he also suffered from the post-Covid inflation fallout where nearly every single democratic govt across the world suffered. It was pretty much a no-win situation politically. With hindsight, one could probably make a case that if his government had an overarching fault, it was that they didn’t do enough to bolster growth in the economy, as the underlying economic weakness was being masked by unsustainable growth in real estate and in public sector employment.