The Most Likely Trudeau Successor

Chrystia Freeland precipitated Trudeau’s resignation as leader by stepping down as finance minister and deputy prime minister on December 16, the same day she was scheduled to provide the government’s belated fall economic update. It was glaringly obvious that Freeland’s dramatic departure from cabinet was intended to spur Trudeau’s resignation and mark the start of her leadership bid.

In an open letter to Trudeau, Freeland pointed to growing policy disagreements, particularly regarding US president-elect Donald Trump’s threat of a 25 percent tariff on all Canadian imports. In Freeland’s view, Canada must keep its “fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war.”

She lambasted Trudeau’s “costly political gimmicks,” a thinly veiled reference to Trudeau’s proposed — but unrealized — $250 rebate to Canadians who earn less than $100,000 a year, and a short-lived federal sales tax rebate on items such as restaurant meals, children’s clothing and toys, books, newspapers and Christmas trees. While there’s room to criticize these measures as short-term economic relief — the political equivalent of paying people to be your friends — Freeland isn’t advocating for long-term social programs. She’s advocating austerity.

A staunch Ukrainian nationalist, Freeland shows no interest in cutting Canada’s military spending. As finance minister, she committed to increasing military expenditures to 2 percent of GDP, in line with NATO guidelines.

At November’s fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress in Edmonton, Freeland boasted of Canada’s $19.5 billion in aid to Ukraine — including $4.5 billion in military aid — and called for even bolder measures to counter what she called the “fight between light and darkness.”

“We have to continue, continue every day to find new ways to support Ukraine and to stand with Ukraine,” she said. “The time has come for us to be decisive about pushing Russian oil out of the world market.”

Freeland didn’t say how she plans on preventing the world’s two most populous countries — China and India — from purchasing Russian oil, but she did suggest oil from Alberta’s tar sands could help replace Russian oil on the global market.

Austerity at home? Militarism abroad? Climate catastrophe? Check, check, and check.

Carbon Tax Carney

On January 3, the Toronto Star reported that former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney was preparing a bid for the Liberal leadership. Carney has long been rumored as a potential Trudeau successor, and by April, Poilievre was already positioning himself against him, dubbing him “Carbon Tax Carney.”

Carney, who’s never been elected to office, is something of a blank slate. A Globe and Mail op-ed he wrote in late December, filled with vague calls for Canadians to embrace “change that brings us together,” provides few clues as to where he would take the Liberal Party.

But one header — ”Enforce real rules on government spending” — hints at a possible policy stance. “Governments can’t give into reflex spending that treats the symptoms of our problems, rather than curing the disease. But we also cannot slash our way to prosperity,” he wrote. “We need a government that keeps its word to spend less, so we can invest more.”

Poilievre, who has dabbled in globalist conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, would have a field day running against Carney, who is the perfect embodiment of the global elite the Conservative leader rails against.

The Wild Card

Another rumored Trudeau successor is Christy Clark, who served as British Columbia’s Liberal premier from 2011 to 2017. Unlike the centrist federal Liberals, BC’s Liberal Party (now known as BC United) has historically been right-wing, much like similarly named parties in Australia and Japan.

Clark’s premiership reflected this political alignment, moving the party further to the right than her more centrist predecessor, Gordon Campbell. She presided over stricter welfare eligibility requirements and frozen rates, cuts to income taxes, cuts to childcare benefits and funding for women’s shelters, the doubling of postsecondary tuition, and the revocation of free bus passes for people with disabilities.

Clark’s answer to any problem was one word — “jobs.” By the end of her tenure, Clark boasted that she had created 222,000 new jobs. However, this ignored the increasing precarity of work in the province, which had Canada’s highest part-time employment rate at 21 percent.

Unlike Freeland, who has been referred to as Trudeau’s “minister of everything,” and Carney, who Trudeau courted as a candidate, Clark is untainted by affiliation with the current Liberal government. This lack of affiliation could be a definite advantage — one lacked by Canada’s historically left-wing New Democratic Party, which faces lingering political fallout from its now-abandoned 2022 pact with the Liberals to secure measures like low-income dental care subsidies, universal free contraceptives and diabetes medications, and anti-scab legislation.

Other rumored contenders for Liberal leadership include foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly, minister of innovation, science and industry François-Philippe Champagne, minister of energy and natural resources Jonathan Wilkinson, minister of transport Anita Anand, and finance minister Dominic LeBlanc.

However, it bears repeating that these names are essentially irrelevant. Whoever becomes the next Liberal leader will almost certainly be remembered by history as the lame duck who lost to Pierre Poilievre. And no matter how much they pivot rightward in their doomed-from-the-outset campaign, expect the Liberal Party establishment to mimic the Democrats’ response to Kamala Harris’s defeat in the US presidential election — there’s always room for centrists to move further right.