Mr. Trudeau Goes to Washington

John Ibbitson

Politics, Americas

America can learn a lot from the battles along Canada's left-right political divide.

Canadians, by nature a self-effacing lot, find themselves bemused by America’s obsession with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The New York Times, Vogue, 60 Minutes and now a state dinner at the White House. We’re so sorry.

Trudeau has spent much of his first four months offshore, wowing the world from APEC to Davos to Washington. But Canada’s twenty-third prime minister faces mountainous challenges: a turbulent economy, rising regional tensions and a plethora of election promises that he plans to keep by upsetting the balanced federal budget. Once the party ends in D.C., the prime minister needs to come home and get to work on something more substantial than photo ops with heads of state and pandas.

The Liberals returned to power after ten years of the most conservative government in Canada’s history. Stephen Harper lacked charisma, and then some, but he cut taxes so aggressively and generally disturbed, dismantled and disengaged on so many fronts that the federal government’s fiscal footprint today is back to where it was fifty years ago.

The Conservatives adopted a more muscular foreign policy, toughened the criminal justice system, curtailed federal interference in provincial jurisdictions and clamped down on fraudulent refugee claims. They did not, however, cut the flow of immigrants into Canada; in fact they increased that flow, to 285,000 a year. (Think of the United States, which has about ten times Canada’s population, bringing in nearly three million legal immigrants annually.)

Today, 21 percent of Canadians, including half of the people living in Greater Toronto—by far Canada’s largest city—were not born in Canada. Most of them come from Asian and Pacific nations, and they tend to be more socially and economically conservative than native-born Canadians. Harper forged a conservative coalition of suburban voters—including immigrant voters—and voters in the traditionally conservative Western provinces, before the inevitable accumulation of arrogance, complacency and scandal broke that coalition apart.