Monday brought a sigh of relief to the long suffering citizens of Canada: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his plans to resign, signaling an end to quite possibly the worst administration in the history of the country. Though Trudeau, who was elected in November of 2015, started off his administration with a sunny disposition full of progressive bona fides (his cabinet featured full gender parity because "This is 2015!" as he explained at the time), he leaves a legacy of failed leadership, especially during the COVID years, when his policies ripped the country apart.
Trudeau's disastrous COVID regime was fueled by the routine smearing of his own people, often justified by libelous comparisons with the January 6 perpetrators (it's no small irony that he announced he is resigning on January 6). Trudeau is most infamous for his heavy handed response to the Freedom Convoy, a wildly popular citizens revolt against his government's COVID authoritarianism. The protest involved truckers and other working-class people traveling to the nation's capital of Ottawa to air their concerns peacefully and even joyfully in massive convoys of trucks from every corner of the country. Yet before those convoys even made their way to the capital, Trudeau, his ministers, and their contacts in the media, were conspiring to smear the protesters as violent extremists bent on bringing a January 6 north to Canada.
When the Freedom Convoy did arrive in Ottawa, Trudeau, having a narrative to live up to, skipped town to hide out at a cabin in rural Quebec, showing himself to be the coward so many already believed him to be. What he ended up hiding from was the largest peaceful protest in Canadian history, marked by no violence at all; it was instead the best party Ottawa has ever seen, and may ever see (it may be rivaled by the partying that will occur when he does finally step down as Prime Minister, though the bouncy castle and hockey games may not be brought out to celebrate his exit).
Trudeau leaves the Canadian economy in shambles, with a dollar in free fall that hasn't been valued this low in years. He leaves behind some of the highest real estate prices on Earth, a solid middle class life now out of reach for many. He leaves a shocking number of homeless people on the streets of Canada, which now has thousands of people living in tent encampments, a scene many Canadians would once believed only possible in an American city such as San Francisco.
Beyond mere economic policy, Trudeau's approach to immigration has also contributed greatly to the misery of Canada's citizens, and those who hope to become one. Canada's various student and temporary foreign worker programs have come under great scrutiny, with questionable diploma mills taking advantage of international students who often live together in fairly cramped conditions and are regularly exploited in horrific ways. Abuse of these programs has lead to a job market that makes it increasingly difficult for young Canadians to find work, and just like the United States, it has proven quite difficult to get people whose visa have expired to go home.
Before punishing the truckers of the Freedom Convoy, Trudeau was already debasing their wages by forcing them to compete with would be immigrant truckers to Canada by allowing what amounts to a widespread indentured servitude program within the trucking industry to take root. Reported on in 2019 by the Globe and Mail, this network of immigration consultants and dodgy truck driving schools place poorly trained recent arrivals behind the wheels of trucks, with many having no idea that this is the job that awaited them when they arrived. All this program has served to do is bring cheap labor to Canada at the expense of experienced truckers who already live here and increase the risk of accidents on our roads. Yet in the five years since that investigation, Trudeau and his government have done nothing to stop any of these scams, and the cost has been measured in many lives.
While my fellow truckers are looking forward to the end of Trudeau and a turning the page to a hopefully brighter future, it is unfortunate he is choosing to resign, rather than heed widespread demands that he call an election. Defeating Trudeau at the polls would give Canadians a way to fire him directly for the many crimes he committed against us, regardless of which party they would choose to replace him.
In testimony at the Public Order Emergency Commission, the inquiry into the government's invocation of the Emergencies Act that was used to crush the Freedom Convoy, Trudeau was asked point blank, "When did you and your government become so afraid of your own citizens?"
His resignation and refusal to go down with the ship of his own party at the polls, shows us once again that Trudeau is in fact afraid of his own citizens, and fears the legitimate accountability of putting his administration to a vote, proving once and for all that his is nothing more than a coward and vainglorious narcissist.
Gord Magill is a trucker, writer, and commentator, and can be found at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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