How Trump’s tariff threat pushed Canada’s Trudeau to brink of resignation 

Montreal, Canada – For weeks, Justin Trudeau has tried to reassure Canadians that his government has everything under control.

US President-elect Donald Trump’s threat late last month to slap 25-percent tariffs on his country’s northern neighbour has dominated the headlines, with Canadian business leaders and politicians hammering the prime minister about how he plans to respond.

This week, the simmering crisis took an unexpected — and escalatory — turn when Canada’s finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, announced she was stepping down from her post because she and Trudeau were “at odds about the best path forward”.

“The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 per cent tariffs. We need to take that threat extremely seriously,” Freeland wrote in her resignation letter on Monday.

“That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.”

Freeland’s surprise resignation — and the letter criticising her longtime political ally — have sent shockwaves across Canada.

They have also sparked renewed calls for Trudeau, already weakened by months of internal divisions and plummeting public support, to step down as leader of his Liberal Party in advance of elections next year.

“Everything is spiralling out of control,” Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre told reporters on Monday in the Canadian capital, Ottawa.

“We cannot accept this kind of chaos, division [and] weakness while we’re staring down the barrel of a 25-percent tariff by our biggest trading partner and closest ally,” said Poilievre, adding that Trump is “a man who can spot weakness from a mile away”.

‘Appetite for change’

Even before Freeland’s shock announcement, or Trump’s tariff threat, Canada was at a fraught moment, politically.

The country has been gearing up for a federal election next year that is widely expected to end a decade of Trudeau-led Liberal Party governments and usher in Poilievre, a hyper-partisan, right-wing populist, as the next Canadian prime minister.

It is also grappling with a housing crisis, rising costs and increasingly divisive political rhetoric.

The Liberals also lost the backing of the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP) in September, when NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announced his party was withdrawing from a 2022 agreement to prop up Trudeau’s minority government.

While the NDP has continued to vote alongside the Liberals so far, the government is more vulnerable if a no-confidence vote is triggered in the House of Commons. The result of that vote could force Trudeau to call an early election.

“They’re fighting themselves instead of fighting for Canadians,” Singh said of the Liberals on Monday. “For that reason, today, I’m calling on Justin Trudeau to resign. He has to go.”

Most recent polls have also shown Trudeau facing a difficult — if not insurmountable — challenge in trying to win back public support in advance of the looming election, which must be held before late October 2025.

A Leger survey from November found that 42 percent of Canadians said they planned to vote for the Conservatives in the next election, compared with 26 percent who backed the Liberals and 15 percent who picked the NDP.

Nearly seven in 10 Canadians also said they were dissatisfied with Trudeau’s government, the same survey found.

“There’s an overwhelming appetite right now for change,” Laura Stephenson, a professor of political science at Western University in Ontario, told Al Jazeera in an interview before Freeland’s resignation and the new calls for Trudeau to step down.

“And the faith that Canadians have that change is going to come from the government that’s been in power for so long is very low.”

Trudeau has served as prime minister since 2015, when he and his centrist Liberal Party won a majority government. That election brought an end to nearly a decade of Conservative rule under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

With Trudeau’s tenure now nearing the 10-year mark, Canadians have grown weary of his government — and like many electorates around the world, there is “incumbent fatigue” in Canada.

But more than that, Trudeau has personally become a target of growing anger in recent years around key issues, from his government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to the cost of groceries and the housing crisis.

“We’re in a very different place I think than we were when Trump was first elected” in 2016, said Barbara Perry, director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University, noting that right-wing talking points have gained ground across Canada in recent years.

She also pointed to a recent Abacus Data poll that showed Canadians viewed Trump more favourably than Trudeau — 26 percent to 23 percent — as evidence of a general shift.

“For [Trump] to be that popular is really disturbing and, I think, does suggest that there is room for right-wing forces to emerge in the Canadian context,” Perry told Al Jazeera.

“We saw little glimmers of right-wing political narratives [in 2016], but I think we’re seeing more than glimmers now,” she continued.

“It really does bode well for the far right [and] bode ill for those who would prefer to see much more progressive and inclusive policies and discourses.”

US-Canada ties

Against that backdrop, Trump’s tariff threat has loomed large — as have questions about how the Trudeau government plans to deal with the incoming US administration.

In a Truth Social post on November 25, the president-elect said he would impose the 25-percent tariff on Canada and Mexico until both countries stop the flow of drugs and migration through their borders.

“Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem. We hereby demand that they use this power, and until such time that they do, it is time for them to pay a very big price!” Trump wrote.

Trudeau — who was prime minister during Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021 — responded to the threat by promoting a united, non-partisan “Team Canada” approach to the incoming US administration and stressing the importance of strong US-Canada ties.

The two countries share the longest international border in the world, stretching 8,891km (5,525 miles), and they exchanged nearly $2.7bn ($3.6bn Canadian) in goods and services daily in 2023, according to Canadian government figures.

The Canadian government promised to enact stricter border measures, and the prime minister also made a surprise visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in late November to discuss the way forward.

“Thanks for dinner last night, President Trump. I look forward to the work we can do together, again,” Trudeau wrote on X after the talks, in a nod to his familiarity with the US leader.

During Trump’s first term, the Trudeau government’s view was that it could protect Canadian interests by negotiating “from a position of allyship, not from a position of enmity”, said Christine de Clercy, a political science professor at Trent University in Ontario.

Despite the changed political landscapes in both countries, Trudeau has appeared to be continuing with that approach, de Clercy told Al Jazeera in an interview before this week’s developments in Ottawa.

“And this time around, he’s not the rather inexperienced prime minister that he was in 2017 when Mr Trump was first sworn in,” de Clercy said.

“That has value because Canadians quite correctly are rather worried about the future of the Canada-American relationship for the next four years.”

Right-wing alignment

Still, the Trump administration of 2025 is expected to be different from its first iteration.

Trump has largely eschewed centrist Republicans for a crew of die-hard, MAGA believers, and he is coming into the White House with a clear plan on the economy, immigration and foreign policy.

At the same time, Trudeau has been the target of heated criticism from Trump supporters, right-wing US media outlets and even some of the figures who will play key roles in the president-elect’s new administration.

On December 11, for instance, Trump adviser and billionaire Elon Musk used his social media platform X to call Trudeau “an insufferable tool”. He added that the Liberal Party leader “won’t be in power for much longer”.

That kind of sentiment is typical for many in Trump’s orbit who view Canada under Trudeau as a “communist land with mandatory COVID vaccinations and government lockdowns”, said Asa McKercher, a professor who studies Canada-US relations at St Francis Xavier University.

“Canada is a part of the American culture war stuff, and Mr Trudeau is really a figure of hatred for a lot of people in the [Make America Great Again] world,” McKercher told Al Jazeera.

“A lot of the charm offensive that Canada was able to do with people in the White House [during the last Trump administration] is not going to fly this time.”

Meanwhile, like Trump, Poilievre — who was first elected to the House of Commons two decades ago, in 2004 — is hyper-partisan and prone to ad hominem attacks.

He regularly lambasts journalists, the “woke” left and other perceived opponents. He also makes sweeping statements about defending “freedom” and blames Trudeau personally for Canada’s ills.

“There are a lot of commonalities between them,” McKercher said of Trump and Poilievre.

“Mr Poilievre portrays himself as this macho, alpha kind of guy — very much fitting the manly, macho attitude of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement.”

Trump as line of attack

Trump’s return to the White House — and his tariffs plan in particular — have also given Poilievre and the Conservatives an opportunity to attack Trudeau as weak in the face of the Republican leader.

When asked how he would deal with possible US tariffs, Poilievre said on November 15 that he would “fight fire with fire”.

“Trump wants what’s best for American workers. I want what’s best for Canadian workers. And we’re not going to be suckers any more,” the Conservative leader said in a radio interview. “Trump would love nothing more than to keep Trudeau in power because he can walk all over him.”

Conservative politicians at the provincial level have also been hitting out against Trudeau, using Trump as a line of attack.

Some have called Trump’s concerns about irregular migration at the US-Canada border “valid” and urged the prime minister to do more.

Right-wing Ontario Premier Doug Ford, for example, said the federal government must take a more proactive approach to the border, calling Ottawa “slow to react” and “stuck on its backfoot”.

Amid that rhetoric, recent polls show that many Canadians now believe Poilievre is better equipped than Trudeau to deal with Trump.

An Abacus Data poll last month found 45 percent of Canadians said Poilievre had a better chance of getting positive results for Canada during a second Trump presidency. Only 20 percent said Trudeau was better positioned.

Another more recent poll (PDF) had the two leaders effectively tied on the question of who was better suited to manage Trump, with 36 percent choosing Poilievre compared with 34 percent who picked Trudeau.

The CBC News Poll Tracker, which aggregates federal election polling data across Canada, also had the Conservatives with a 21-percentage-point lead over the Liberals on Monday.

“The numbers are just stacked against either the Liberals or the NDP and in favour of the Conservatives,” said Perry.

“The negative messaging coming from the Conservatives — about everything being broken and the federal government’s responsible — that has become so firmly embedded in our psyches.”

‘End to the Trudeau era’?

So far, Trudeau has yet to comment publicly on Freeland’s resignation, including whether it will affect his plans to lead the Liberal Party through the next election.

The prime minister held a meeting with his cabinet on Monday evening in Ottawa, where several Liberal MPs urged him to step down, according to a report by CBC News. Sources told the public broadcaster that Trudeau has yet to make a decision.

While it remains unclear what happens next, Trudeau is on arguably shakier political ground than ever before and many experts are questioning how long he can stay on as leader after losing one of his top political allies in Freeland.

“This episode cannot help but shake those most loyal to Trudeau. Not sure he survives the end of 2024,” Stewart Prest, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia, wrote on social media on Monday.

“By the end of 2025, we’ll be reflecting that a single post from Trump put in motion the events that will have finally brought an end to the Trudeau era.”