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CANADA
News
John
Moulder
Ottawa
November 20, 2024
In 2015 the firm had been charged with corruption and fraud stemming from allegations that it had used bribery to win contracts from the Libyan government during the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi. A change to the Canadian criminal code—promulgated in September 2018—established plea-bargain-like deferred prosecution agreements (DPA) that allowed corporations facing prosecution to enter into “remediation agreements” under which they could forestall prosecution by paying fines and taking steps to redress previous wrongdoing. SNC-Lavalin had applied to negotiate a DPA even before the legislation that changed the criminal code had been enacted, and the firm had been turned down by the Public Prosecution Service. Conviction threatened SNC-Lavalin with the possibility of being banned from competing for government contracts, a potentially catastrophic consequence for the huge company, which provided thousands of jobs for Canadian workers.
On February 7, 2019, The Globe and Mail newspaper reported that Trudeau aides had tried to pressure Wilson-Raybould into interceding in the SNC-Lavalin matter and that her refusal to do so had played a role in her reassignment in January as veterans affairs minister as part of a cabinet reshuffle. Trudeau claimed that there had been no improprieties and that, in his own discussion with Wilson-Raybould about the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, he had left the decision on the matter to her discretion. Having resigned from the cabinet on February 12, Wilson-Raybould told the House of Commons justice committee on February 27 that there had been a “consistent and sustained effort” to pressure her to intervene to obtain a DPA for SNC-Lavalin. She also testified that she had received “veiled threats” relating to the matter from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office, and the finance minister’s office. Among those whom Wilson-Raybould said had sought to unduly influence her were Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick and Trudeau’s close friend and principal secretary Gerald Butts, who had resigned on February 18. When Butts testified before the justice committee on March 6, he said that he had interpreted his conversations with Wilson-Raybould very differently from the way she had characterized them, and he denied that her refusal to intercede in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin had prompted her change of cabinet portfolio. Two days earlier, Jane Philpott, the Treasury Board president and one of the most respected members of Trudeau’s cabinet, resigned her post, saying, “Sadly, I have lost confidence in how the government has dealt with this matter and in how it has responded to the issues raised,” an indication that Trudeau’s integrity was being increasingly questioned by members of his own party. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer had already called on Trudeau to resign.
Following parliamentary testimony by Butts, Wernick, and the deputy justice minister, Nathalie Drouin, on March 7 Trudeau, whose public approval rating had dipped considerably in recent opinion polling, held a press conference in which he attributed the controversy to an “erosion of trust” between Butts and Wilson-Raybould and to a general breakdown in communication. Short of issuing an apology to Wilson-Raybould, the prime minister explained that he had asked members of his staff to raise the matter of the SNC-Lavalin prosecution with Wilson-Raybould and to emphasize the potential ramifications of her decision on the matter but that, in hindsight, he should have engaged with her personally. Trudeau acknowledged that he had not been aware of the erosion of trust and that it was his responsibility to have been so. He also raised the possibility of separating the positions of attorney general and justice minister to remove the political dimension from the former.
In August the affair returned to the headlines and further damaged Trudeau’s reputation when a 58-page report issued by Canadian Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion found that Trudeau and his staff had indeed pressured Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case, thus violating Canada’s conflict of interest law for public office holders. The harshly critical report said, “The authority of the Prime Minister and his office was used to circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions as well as the authority of Ms. Wilson-Raybould as the Crown’s chief law officer.” It noted that Trudeau had flagrantly attempted to influence Wilson-Raybould in the matter both “directly and indirectly.” Responding to the report, Trudeau said, “I take responsibility for the mistakes I have made,” but he did not apologize for his actions, claiming that they had been taken to prevent the loss of Canadian jobs that would result from legal action against SNC-Lavalin.
This was not the first time that Trudeau was judged to have violated the ethics law. In December 2017 Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson found Trudeau to have broken the law by vacationing with his family on an island owned by the Aga Khan IV. The two instances marked the first time that a Canadian prime minister had been found to have broken the ethics law. Dion’s report did not offer potential sanctions for Trudeau’s actions, but Scheer called on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to open a criminal investigation of the matter.
The report threatened Trudeau and the Liberal Party’s prospects in the imminent regularly scheduled federal election. In mid-September 2019 Trudeau chose to call for that election to be contested on October 21. At the time, opinion polls showed the Liberals and Conservatives to be effectively in a dead heat, followed distantly by the NDP and the Green Party.
Just days into the campaign, on September 18, Trudeau’s reputation as a progressive suffered another hit when Time magazine published a photo from the 2001 yearbook of the Vancouver private school at which Trudeau taught, showing him wearing “brownface” as part of his costume as Aladdin at an “Arabian Nights”-themed party. A contrite Trudeau repeatedly apologized to the country, saying “This is something I shouldn’t have done many years ago” and “It was something that I didn’t think was racist at the time, but now I recognize it was something racist to do, and I am deeply sorry.” The incident prompted Trudeau to acknowledge and apologize for another photo taken of him as a high-school student in the 1990s while he was wearing “blackface” during his performance in a school show. Shortly after Trudeau’s apology a new video, also said to be from the 1990s, emerged in which Trudeau was again shown wearing blackface. For critics, these images brought into question the authenticity of Trudeau’s outspoken championing of inclusivity and tolerance. Scheer accused Trudeau of lacking judgment and integrity and of being unfit to govern Canada. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh, characterized Trudeau’s Aladdin costume as “insulting” and questioned whether the public and private Trudeau were the same person.
When voters finally went to the polls, Trudeau and the Liberals were left breathing a sigh of relief, as they held on to power, albeit as a minority rather than majority government. Although the Conservatives narrowly won the popular vote, capturing about 34 percent of the vote compared with roughly 33 percent for the Liberals, Trudeau’s party won enough first-past-the-post races to secure 157 seats in the House of Commons, 13 seats shy of a majority and 27 seats fewer than they won in the 2015 election. The Conservatives won 121 seats, 22 more than they took in 2015. Opinion polling before the election had shown the NDP on the rise, but, when the votes were counted, it lost its status as the second opposition party to the Bloc Québécois, which trounced it in voting in Quebec, where the Bloc jumped from 10 seats to 32. Nationwide the NDP saw its representation in the House of Commons fall from 44 seats to 24.
More than a few pundits noted the similarity between these results and those of the 1972 election, in which Trudeau’s father saw his own majority government reduced to minority rule after four years in power. The 2019 election marked the fourth election in the last six to result in a minority government. Henceforth Trudeau would have to rely on support from other parties to advance his policy objectives.
In addition to the challenge of navigating minority rule, Trudeau, like leaders throughout the world, was soon to be confronted with a public health crisis that he would refer to again and again as “unprecedented”: the global coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that sprang from China in December 2019 and turned life upside down across the world. In March 2020, just after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic, the virus hit home for Trudeau when he was forced to go into brief self-isolation in the prime minister’s residence, Rideau Cottage, after his wife contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Even after she recovered, Rideau Cottage remained the backdrop for Trudeau’s daily morning al fresco press briefings as he sought to coordinate Canada’s response to the pandemic. Although the federal government was slow to stress mask-wearing and social-distancing measures, it did enact significant restrictions on travelers entering the country. Moreover, it sought to limit the economic consequences of the pandemic by providing monthly payments of Canadian $2,000 each to individuals who lost their jobs as a result of the lockdown of the economy undertaken to stem the spread of the virus.
One government program, the Canada Student Service Grant initiative, which was mounted to provide funds for postsecondary students who were unable to find work because of the pandemic, sparked a political scandal for Trudeau. Without pursuing competitive bids, the government gave the multimillion-dollar contract for administering the program to WE Charity. As was later revealed, that organization had close connections with the families of both Trudeau (whose mother and brother had made paid speaking appearances for it) and Finance Minister Bill Morneau. Responding to accusations of having a conflict of interest, Trudeau initially defended the government’s contract award but then apologized for not having recused himself from discussions related to the contract and WE Charity. As ethics investigations were pursued, the government and WE Charity ended their partnership, and Morneau resigned.
Meanwhile, though Canada’s Atlantic provinces—New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, along with Newfoundland and Labrador—took a particularly aggressive approach to combating the pandemic, most of the country’s other provinces took a more lenient approach, especially after the first wave of the pandemic began to recede during the summer of 2020. This more lackadaisical application or willful disregard of social-distancing and mask-wearing practices and a rush to reopen the economy contributed to the emergence of a second wave of COVID-19 cases, which crested in mid-January 2021. Ultimately, under Trudeau’s leadership, Canada responded to the pandemic better than some countries and worse than others. By early March 2021 more than 870,000 Canadians had contracted the disease, and about 22,000 had perished from causes related to it. By comparison, in the same period, more than 515,000 people in the United States had died from COVID-19-related causes, more than 123,000 had died in the United Kingdom, roughly 1,600 had died in South Korea, just over 900 had died in Australia, and only 26 had died in New Zealand.
The Trudeau government’s roll-out of its COVID-19 vaccination program got off to a slow start, partly because it chose to contract with seven different vaccine providers, with options to procure more than 400 million doses, instead of pursuing early delivery by banking on any one provider’s ability to successfully develop and deliver a vaccine. Canada was also hindered by the fact that none of the providers had headquarters in the country. Moreover, Canada was relatively limited in its ability to produce the vaccines that had been developed elsewhere. Nonetheless, by mid-July about 49 percent of Canadians had been fully vaccinated and some 70 percent had received at least one dose, thus surpassing vaccination rates in the United States, where the quick-starting vaccination effort was plateauing. With the number of reported cases, hospital admissions, and deaths from COVID-19-related causes on the decline in Canada, public opinion polling indicated not only widespread approval of Trudeau’s handling of the public health crisis but also a significant lead for the Liberals over the Conservatives in preference polling.
On August 15 Trudeau announced that he was calling an early federal election. Describing the challenges that Canada was facing as it sought to rebound from the pandemic as the most momentous changes in the country’s life since it had emerged from World War II, Trudeau said that he wanted to give Canadians an opportunity to choose whom they preferred to lead them at this pivotal moment. Cynics and many in the opposition characterized Trudeau’s decision as a thinly veiled exercise in political opportunism. There is little doubt that he was desirous of capitalizing on the moment in the hope of regaining majority rule.
Trudeau and the Liberals stood on a platform that promised the creation of a comprehensive childcare program, new construction and structural revitalization to address the country’s worsening housing shortage, and an aggressive plan to tackle climate change. Trudeau’s principal rival, Erin O’Toole, who had replaced Scheer as the Conservative leader in August 2020, staked out a position as a moderate, departing from some of his party’s past policies by acknowledging the need to confront climate change, guaranteeing the availability of nationwide abortion services, and reaching out to the LGBTQ community. In addition, he rescinded his earlier support for the right to possess assault rifles. By presenting himself as a different kind of Conservative, O’Toole opened up his party to a challenge on the right from the People’s Party of Canada, led by Maxime Bernier. On Trudeau’s left, the NDP continued to be led by Singh, and a fractious Green Party was guided by Annamie Paul. The Bloc Québécois entered the contest under the leadership of Yves-François Blanchet.
As the ensuing 36-day campaign—the shortest allowable by law—unfolded, Trudeau watched the Liberals’ lead in preference polling evaporate. O’Toole and other opposition candidates accused him of naked ambition and of endangering the lives of Canadians by holding a snap election at a time when a new variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the so-called Delta variant, was sweeping the country. Meanwhile, Trudeau attacked O’Toole for advocating that federal civil servants, workers in federally regulated industries, and travelers by plane, ship, or interprovincial train be free to choose being tested for COVID-19 instead of being vaccinated. As many Canadians seemed to be questioning Trudeau’s motivation for calling the election, the Liberals’ lead in preference polling was reversed in favour of the Conservatives. On the eve of the election, opinion polling found the two parties to be in a statistical tie.
Because of the pandemic, an unprecedented number of Canadians cast their ballots early by mail. Those votes were not to be tallied until the day after election day, September 20, but relatively early on election night the media was able to project that the Liberals would fall short of a majority and yet would once again be poised to form a minority government with Trudeau as prime minister. Although the Conservatives had outpolled the Liberals in the national popular vote, about 34 percent to about 32 percent, the Liberals had held steady in their urban strongholds in Ontario and Quebec, which would enable them to achieve a plurality in the new House of Commons. Indeed, when all the votes had been counted, party representation looked much as it had after the 2019 elections. The Liberals would have 159 seats, the Conservatives 119, Bloc Québécois 32, the NDP 25, and the Green Party 2.
Although an overwhelming majority of Canadians approved of the Trudeau government’s policies regarding COVID-19 vaccines, mask-wearing protocols, and vaccine passports (proof of vaccination that granted admission to businesses and various other venues), far-right opposition to those policies swelled around a protest organized by truckers against a mandate requiring that those hauling cargo across the Canada-U.S. border be vaccinated. In late January, convoys of tractor trailers and other vehicles began converging on Ottawa in a protest effort initially financed by more than $10 million in GoFundMe donations, many of which came from American sources. According to some police estimates, as many as 3,000 vehicles and 15,000 demonstrators were involved in the act of civil disobedience in Ottawa at its peak.
First demanding the removal of the vaccine requirement for truckers, then an end to all COVID-19-related restrictions, and ultimately Trudeau’s resignation or ouster, the participants in the so-called Freedom Convoy clogged the streets of Ottawa—especially in the area around the Parliament Buildings—for weeks, impeding the flow of traffic and generally disrupting life in the capital. A racist subtext was also part of the proceedings, as some of the protesters brandished Confederate flags and swastika-emblazoned banners. Similar blockades were staged elsewhere in the country, most notably at the Ambassador Bridge—between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan—over which nearly one-fourth of U.S.-Canada cross-border trade was conducted. By stalling that traffic, the protesters eliminated some $300 million to $360 million worth of Canadian-American trade per day.
Local government and police struggled to defuse the protest. Meanwhile, opponents of COVID-19 restrictions in other countries mounted copycat protests. Response to the convoy divided Canadian Conservatives and played an important role in the resignation in February of party leader O’Toole, who, in the minds of some Conservatives, had been too slow and too understated in his endorsement of the protest. His interim replacement, Candice Bergen, was more vocal in her support of the convoy. Trudeau, for his part, refused to be “intimidated.” Instead, for the first time in Canadian history, on February 14, he invoked the Emergencies Act, which granted the federal government broad powers to restore order, including the imposition of fines, the arrest and incarceration of protesters, and the towing of road-blocking vehicles. By February 21 nearly 200 protesters had been arrested and some 115 vehicles had been towed as the back of the protest was broken.
In mid-March Trudeau announced that the Liberals and the NDP had reached a formal confidence-and-supply agreement that promised to keep his government in power until the next fixed federal elections, in October 2025. In exchange for its support of the Liberals, the NDP won promises regarding the pursuit of dental care and pharmaceutical care programs. The two parties also agreed to work together on policy objectives related to climate change and housing, among other issues.
Liberal Party of Canada, centrist Canadian political party, one of the major parties in the country since the establishment of the Dominion of Canada in 1867. The Liberal Party has been the governing party at the federal level for most of the period since the late 1890s, bringing together pragmatic social policy reformers and advocates of free enterprise, the balance between them shifting as leaders and context changed. The Liberal Party traditionally has been described as a “brokerage” party, in recognition of its success in appealing to a range of interests divided by region, language, ethnicity, and social class.
The Liberal Party originated in the reformist opposition groups that emerged in the mid-19th century in what are now the provinces of Quebec and Ontario—“Rouges” (Reds) in the former and Clear Grits in the latter. The looseness and instability of all party formations at the time were especially persistent on what came to be called the Liberal side.
Both before and after the 1867 creation of the Canadian federation, the Conservatives under Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, were more successful than the Liberals in forging a durable coalition. In 1873 Alexander Mackenzie did become the first Liberal prime minister, but his parliamentary group was undisciplined and lacked policy coherence. The party was swept from office in 1878, largely because of its support for unpopular free-trade policies. In 1887 Wilfrid Laurier assumed the Liberal leadership and was able to unify the party around a centrist platform and bridge the linguistic and regional divisions that had previously fragmented the party. Laurier became the country’s first French Canadian prime minister in 1896 and held power until 1911.
William Lyon Mackenzie King became party leader in 1919 and two years later was elected prime minister, a position he retained for all but five years until his retirement in 1948. Under his leadership, the Liberals had some success in mediating French-English and regional differences, and, by fashioning pragmatic centrist policies that included some social reforms, the party was able to draw votes from a growing social democratic constituency without diminishing its business support.
Louis Saint Laurent replaced Mackenzie King as party leader in 1948 and served as prime minister until the Liberals’ defeat in 1957 by the Progressive Conservative Party. Saint Laurent oversaw significant expansion of the welfare state in his early years, but the party also retained pro-business policies and a complacent attitude toward increased economic integration with the United States. Led by Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Lester Pearson, the Liberals narrowly regained power in 1963. They once again expanded social insurance programs, introducing a comprehensive national health-care system. Pearson’s government also sought to accommodate the growing nationalist movement in Quebec, allowing the province to opt out of some federal programs and extending the recognition of official bilingualism in federal government operations.
Pierre Trudeau, who had been an elected politician for only a few years, replaced Pearson as party leader in 1968 and was prime minister for all but a brief period in 1979–80 until his retirement from federal politics in 1984. Trudeau turned away from the party’s previous attempts to accommodate Quebecers’ desire for special status in the federation in favour of policies reflecting a Canadian nationalist wariness of American domination. He also focused attention on the defense of individual rights, engineering in 1982 the inclusion of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian constitution. Nevertheless, the party was swept from office in 1984 by the Progressive Conservatives, a defeat fueled by an overall shift to the right and the intensification of discontent in Quebec and western Canada with the Liberal government’s record.
Quebecer Jean Chrétien returned the party to office in 1993. He presided over a pragmatic policy mix characteristic of the party’s history but one in which the balance between welfare and business liberalism shifted in favour of reduced social spending and a diminished governmental role in the economy. Chrétien’s focus on cutting the federal government’s budget deficit led to significant reductions in financial transfers to provincial governments for social services. His views on Canadian federation and Quebec’s place within it mirrored those of Trudeau. Aided by a fragmentation of conservative forces at the federal level, Chrétien led the party to successive election victories in 1997 and 2000.
In December 2003 Chrétien retired from office and was succeeded as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party by Paul Martin, a former finance minister. Martin’s selection signaled a reinforcement of the focus on balancing the federal budget. In 2004 Martin called early federal elections as he sought a public mandate for his leadership. Despite allegations of corruption against the party and the uniting of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party into the Conservative Party of Canada, the Liberals maintained their hold on government. Nevertheless, the party lost nearly a quarter of its seats, and Martin oversaw a minority government. In the subsequent election of January 2006, however, the Liberals were swept from office and Martin stepped down as party leader.
Martin was replaced in December 2007 by Montreal-area MP Stéphane Dion. Dion worked to revitalize the party, but his efforts gained little traction. The Liberals lost another 27 seats in the election of October 2008 and registered their poorest showing ever in the popular vote. Dion resigned as party leader in December 2008 and was replaced on an interim basis by Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff, a prominent author and literary critic, had won a parliamentary seat representing suburban Toronto in 2006, and his rise within the party represented one of the few bright spots for Liberals since the fall of the Martin government. Ignatieff was confirmed as party leader in May 2009. He sought to move the party in a more fiscally conservative direction while still preserving the social programs that Liberals had traditionally supported. However, he was unable to reverse the party’s slide. In the 2011 federal election, the Liberals placed third for the first time in the party’s history. Winning just 34 seats, it finished behind the Conservatives and the New Democratic Party. Ignatieff subsequently stepped down as Liberal leader.
Party stalwart Bob Rae served as interim leader until he was replaced in April 2013 by Pierre Trudeau’s eldest son, Justin Trudeau. The youthful, charismatic Trudeau fils brought the party back from the political margins by dramatically leading it to a surprising landslide victory in the 2015 federal election, in which the Liberals garnered 184 seats, allowing them to establish a majority government with Trudeau as prime minister. Although his reputation was tarnished by an ethics scandal, Trudeau led the Liberals to another victory in the 2019 federal election; however, the party went from majority to minority rule. In 2021 Trudeau called a snap election, hoping to regain a parliamentary majority; however, the Liberals fell short of that goal, gaining just two seats but achieving another plurality to preserve minority rule.
Since its founding, the Liberal Party has lacked a clear ideology. Along with the Conservatives (later the Progressive Conservatives), the party was composed of diverse regional, ethnic, religious, and class interests. For most of its history, the Liberals have been somewhat more supportive of social welfare spending than the Progressive Conservatives, though at times they were drawn toward that position by the electoral threat posed by the New Democratic Party.
Reform liberalism (e.g., favouring greater spending on social welfare) was prominent in the 1960s and early ’70s, but since then the party has adopted a more pro-business orientation, particularly since the early 1990s. The party reduced its social policy commitments and abandoned a briefly held opposition to free trade. However, it retained a centre-left position on some rights issues (e.g., abortion and gay rights).
As in most other Canadian political parties, policy making is dominated by the leader. The party has local constituency associations, which are particularly important during election campaigns and have long played a prominent role in the conventions that choose party leaders. However, the party’s permanent national organization is small, quiet between elections, and subservient to the parliamentary party. Although at times the parliamentary party has been fragmented by intraparty conflict, the leader exercises great leverage over legislators and can usually secure unanimous support in parliamentary voting.
There are Liberal parties in each of the provinces, and the federal party is formally distinct from them both organizationally and in terms of policy. This federal-provincial division is reflective of the continuing decentralization of the country’s political system and contributes to the segregation of federal and provincial political systems. The federal Liberals traditionally have been strongest in Ontario; the party also generally runs well in Quebec and the Atlantic region. The Liberals have performed significantly less well in the western provinces, where a sense of alienation from the federal government is widespread.
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