Michael Ignatieff, who was a bad politician but is a very clever man, had the measure of Justin Trudeau, his successor as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, when he said that prime minister of Canada is “the role he was born to play.” It was a neatly double-barbed put-down that managed to skewer both Trudeau’s nepotistic privilege and his notorious penchant for amateur dramatics. 

For most of his career, it was Trudeau’s theatricality that made headlines. The son of a prime minister, he won national attention in his 20s with a histrionic eulogy delivered at his father’s funeral. Later, when he ran for office, he was dismissed as a drama teacher out of his depth in federal politics. The judgment was rash, but forgivable when his every public utterance seemed to have been rehearsed in front of a mirror.

After he became prime minister, the New York Times gushed about his “sock diplomacy,” but he took his taste for dress-up too far when he used an official visit to India as an excuse to don a series of increasingly garish outfits that were deemed “too Indian, even for an Indian” by the locals. More infamously, global attention turned from his wardrobe to his make-up when photos and video of Trudeau mugging in black-face came to light.

The black face stories would have destroyed any other politician, but that is where the other half Ignatieff’s gibe kicked in. Trudeau, who inherited his father’s arrogance and his wild-child mother’s insouciance, had glided through life as a careless son of privilege shielded from consequences by his inherited celebrity, and the 2019 election during which the story broke was no exception.

How else to explain that neither shame nor censure slowed him when his past minstrelsy act came to light during the Black Lives Matter moment or when he was accused of “an improper physical interaction” with a female reporter at the height of the #MeToo movement? (“I fully respect her ability to experience something differently,” was the most he would allow in the latter case.)

If anyone experienced life differently from the rest of us, it was Justin Trudeau. It explains how he was able to brush off a string of scandals any one of which would have sunk a man of lesser hubris or more integrity. A full accounting of these would require a much longer article, but the lowlights include pressuring his Attorney General to intervene in the criminal prosecution of global engineering firm SNC-Lavalin and repeated violations of the federal Conflict of Interest law.

On the personal side, his casual willingness to discard longtime friends and allies at times bordered on the pathological. Who else would fire his Finance Minister and Deputy Prime minister over a video call on the Friday before she was supposed to deliver a mini-budget and expect her to go out and perform on Monday? At least in that case, for once, the intended victim, Chrystia Freeland, refused to be sacrificed quietly. 

This week, in part thanks to Freeland’s resignation, Trudeau’s record finally caught up with him — even if it took him months to see what has been plain to everyone else for months. He should have stepped down in June or September after party lost by-elections in two of their safest seats and it became clear, not least to Liberal MPs nervously eyeing their own vote margins, that there were no more Liberal redoubts between him and a catastrophic wipeout in the general election scheduled for October. 

Yet even as he improvised a resignation speech on Monday (his notes having been blown from the podium by the gelid Ottawa wind), he didn’t sound like a man who understood why he had to go. He called himself “a fighter” but couldn’t explain why he was throwing in the towel. He blamed an intransigent Parliament and infighting colleagues, but there can have been no doubt in anyone else’s mind that what they were watching was an overdue reckoning of his own making.  

There is nothing so destructive in politics as good intentions, and while Trudeau may have had the best of intentions they were unencumbered by anything as mundane as reality or prosaic as common sense. With supreme self-confidence, he set out to kill the golden goose of cheap energy, repeal criminal restrictions, legalise hard drugs, embrace every vanguard social cause, delegitimise the country’s history, and — as either penance or indulgence — fling open wide Canada’s doors to the world. 

He arrived in 2015 promising “sunny ways” but leaves a Canada that is by every measure poorer, weaker, more divided, dangerous, and depressed

Few of us are inclined to pin failure to our own chests, but even by the self-deceptive standards of a narcissistic profession Trudeau’s refusal to accept his ruinous record is impressive. He arrived in 2015 promising “sunny ways” but leaves a Canada that is by every measure poorer, weaker, more divided, dangerous, and depressed. His economic failure is particularly stark when compared to American growth over the same period. 

It seems to have come as an honest shock to Trudeau that without economic growth the budget doesn’t actually “balance itself,” as he once blithely promised. Or that criminals, scroungers, and hostile foreign governments would take advantage of social latitude and loose immigration policies. Only in the last few months has his government begun belatedly and half-heartedly to correct its early errors, and only after it smeared anyone who opposed them as heartless, bigoted, and racist.

Perhaps it is part of the natural cycle of things that even a sober society like Canada will occasionally chafe at the dull habits that keep us safe and rebel with a spasm of profligate hedonism. Or maybe Stephen Harper made good government look so easy that after almost a decade of quiet competence and a rebalanced budget Canadians were too-easily tempted into a fling with a callow charmer promising consequence-free fun. 

Whatever the reason, the cycle has since taken another turn and Canadians seem to have woken up and recovered their senses. Now it is up to Trudeau’s successor to fix the broken country he will inherit. Or as Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre told Jordan Peterson in a wide-ranging and sobering end of year interview, “They get the party. I get the hangover.” Someone should put on a strong pot of coffee, because Trudeau’s political bender has left one heck of a mess for him to clean up.