Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. Courtesy of Flickr.
By Amelia Luo ’23 & Sophie MacDonald ’25
Global Editor & Staff Writer
Justin Trudeau will remain in power after being reelected as Prime Minister in Canada’s parliamentary elections on Sept. 20. Despite claiming victory, Trudeau and the Liberal party won only 158 seats in the House of Commons, failing to pass the 170 majority line, as reported by The Guardian.
According to CNN, the current Canadian government has only been in power for two years, but Trudeau called an early election starting mid-August in an attempt to win a majority based on his handling of the pandemic. Contrary to his expectation, the House of Commons came out of the election looking roughly similar to its old state, leaving Trudeau, again, with a minority government.
According to AP News, members of the oppositional conservative party expressed anger with Trudeau’s decision to hold an election two years premature. In response, Trudeau claimed it would be beneficial for Canadians to have a government that supports scientific methods, as the Conservative party’s objection to lockdowns and vaccine mandates would only further endanger the nation.
Iyko Day, chair of critical social thought and a Canadian citizen, commented, “Perhaps it was self-serving of Trudeau to call an election only two years after the last election, though he ultimately failed to win a majority.”
“Canadian elections grant power to the [Prime Minister] to call an election, which obviously benefits the incumbent. Seventy-one percent of incumbent [Prime Ministers] have won reelection this way,” Day explained. “One could say that incumbency has advantages regardless of the power to call elections. In the U.S., incumbent presidents have won 2/3 of reelections. Many pundits have complained that the recent election was a waste of time and money, costing 470 million Canadian dollars.”
Desmond Fitz-Gibbon, associate professor and chair of history at Mount Holyoke, is also Canadian. “I grew up in a period when minority governments were fairly rare, but they have become much more common in recent years thanks to the emergence of new parties and the diversification of the Canadian electorate. Majority government, which every politician wants, gives a great deal of power to the party in control, and to the leader of that party, the Prime Minister,” Fitz-Gibbon said. “I actually like minority governments, since they seem, to me, to force governments to consider a wider range of policies, and by nature, they tend to represent more of the electorate. Trudeau didn’t want to share power with another party, so he gambled on being able to leverage his success in managing COVID[-19] into a majority government.”
Fitz-Gibbon also noted that unlike many other countries, the U.S. included, Canada doesn’t allow citizens living abroad to participate in elections. As such, he has been only observing Canadian electoral politics for fifteen years.
According to data from the Angus Reid Institute, Trudeau’s approval rating has sunk to 36 percent as of Sept. 21, 2021 compared to 54 percent back in July, 2020. The discomfort felt by some voters, and the unexpectedly competitive race caused a decline in the politician’s popularity.
“I have always considered [Trudeau] duplicitous and contradictory. While he projects an image of being a proponent of climate justice and in solidarity with First Nations peoples, his policy says the exact opposite,” Day commented. This is exemplified in his handling of the climate crisis, Day explained. “One day he will proclaim a national climate emergency, and the next day he will throw government support behind two controversial pipeline projects that will devastate Indigenous lands and waters in western Canada,” Day said, referencing the Trans Mountain Pipeline and the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which Indigenous groups, namely the Secwemek, Wet’suwet’en, Tseil-Waututh and Squamish Nations, alongside climate activists, have been challenging for the last decade.
“In 2018, Trudeau spent 4.5 billion Canadian dollars of public money to nationalize the Trans Mountain Pipeline. This action has far more environmentally devastating consequences than any action Trump took when he was in office,” Day said.
This recent election triggered leadership changes in other parties. Annamie Paul, the first Black and Jewish Canadian woman to lead a federal party, and the head of the Green Party of Canada, announced her step down as the result of losing the federal election and struggling in the Green Party’s internal division, according to both the BBC and Al-Jazeera. The Conservative party and their new leader Erin O’Toole won 119 of the parliamentary seats. It was described by the BBC as being “a disappointment” for the party, since they aimed to expand their support and build a larger conservative tent.