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As a result, Canada is somewhat isolated in Nato. While Canada remains a member of the Five Eyes Intelligence-sharing group, it was not included in the Aukus defence agreement between the US, UK and Australia. Canada’s exclusion from this cornerstone of the Anglosphere’s security architecture promoted soul-searching in Ottawa.
It is the same story on the environment. Trudeau talks a lot about net zero, but in 2023 on his watch Canada endured the worst wildfires in recorded history – some 4pc of all the country’s forests burnt down. Toxic smoke from these fires has caused hazy skies as far away as Europe, while carbon emissions are also at record levels – 160 megatonnes in six months.
Naturally, Trudeau blames climate change, but he ignored warnings about poor forest management and refused to allocate the necessary resources.
Seasoned Trudeau-watchers notice a pattern of behaviour: extravagant rhetoric, followed by periodic bursts of hyperactivity. However, solid achievement is vitiated by a short attention span, a reluctance to face down opposition or to follow through.
A good example is the monarchy. Trudeau’s younger supporters would like him to press ahead with a referendum to create a Republic of Canada. Polls suggest that a majority of the electorate would support the replacement of constitutional monarchy by an elected president, although only the separatist Bloc Québécois actually proposed and voted for abolition in parliament.
After the late Queen’s funeral and the Coronation of King Charles III, Trudeau expressed lukewarm support for the “steadiness” of the institution. At the same time, he subtly undermined it by proposing a redesign of the crown that appears on bank notes and other official documents.
The new crown seems innocuous enough, with Canadian maple leaves instead of the Anglo-French fleur-de-lys, plus wavy blue lines to evoke the nation’s maritime past. But the arrows on the ermine base are reversed, pointing left instead of right. The Maltese cross that traditionally surmounts the crown has gone, replaced by a stylised snowflake to represent Canada’s arctic climate and pay homage to the indigenous peoples.
The choice of a snowflake suggests a sense of humour failure of epic proportions. Did nobody in the Trudeau entourage dare to say: “Mr Prime Minister, a snowflake? Really?”
And so the Christian symbol of self-sacrifice has been supplanted by the religion of ecology, with a consecrated snowflake emoji to proclaim the political correctness of the new secular order. Trudeau loves such gesture politics, but a bolder leader might have seized the opportunity of the Queen’s death to reopen the constitutional debate. Trudeau would doubtless love to stamp his personality on Canadian history, as his father did, by abolishing the monarchy.
Unlike Pierre, though, Justin is just too timid – a bit of a snowflake, in fact. Rather than a republic, Trudeau the Younger will bequeath a feeble bit of heraldic wokery.
Then there are the family matters. The collapse of their marriage has broken the spell of the Trudeaus. Together, Justin and Sophie were more than the sum of their parts; without her, he looks diminished, deflated and tired.
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