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Come and unleash your potential as a customer support expert at Sage. This is a CBC Podcast. Canadian politics has been building to this moment for months. So I thought it might be fun for us to do this again. Bon matin. Every morning I've woken up as Prime Minister.
I've been inspired by the resilience... Justin Trudeau standing outside Rideau Cottage announcing he's stepping down as Prime Minister. It comes at an incredibly tense moment for Canada's economy, even an unsettling one for our sovereignty. They should be a state. That's why I told Trudeau when he came down, I said, what would happen if we didn't... Something Trudeau himself was forced to tacitly acknowledge just a few days later. You know...
When it comes to Canada being looked at as the 51st state, let me just state it again, that's never going to happen. I'm Catherine Cullen and this week on the House, Christy Clark on whether she'll run to be the next Prime Minister and how she would deal with Donald Trump.
Plus, a New York Times White House correspondent who was at Mar-a-Lago when Trump made those remarks, does he believe Canadians should be concerned? And from pot legalization to polarization to reconciliation, how has Justin Trudeau changed Canada? But we begin with the race to replace Canada's 23rd Prime Minister. The House is now in session.
Questions are swirling about who will run to replace Justin Trudeau. We know it won't be Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Jolie or Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc. But what about former Finance Minister Christia Freeland? Or former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney? Another name getting a lot of attention.
is Christy Clark. She was the Premier of British Columbia from 2011 to 2017. She led the B.C. Liberals, which weren't affiliated with the federal Liberals. And in the last federal conservative leadership race that elected Pierre Polyev, Clark publicly said she'd be voting for his opponent, Jean Charest. I spoke to her on Friday for her first interview since the Prime Minister announced his resignation. Christy Clark, welcome to the House.
Thank you for having me. Your team has said to the media that you have an organization in place, a national organization. You're ready to run for liberal leader depending on the rules. Well, we now have a pretty good sense of the rules. So are you running? I am very seriously thinking about it. We're going to take a little bit of time to consider what the rules mean. I mean, and when I look at them, the thing about it that...
is disappointing is that we don't have enough time really to build the party. A leadership campaign is the biggest opportunity our party and the Liberal Party has to grow our community, our Liberal Party. And we're going to miss out on a big part of that because it's a very short timeline for it. But I understand, you know, they've got time constraints that they need to live with. So this is the deadline, January 27th, to sign up new members. And you're saying that that essentially hurts your chances a bit if you decide to jump in?
No, I think it hurts the party's opportunity to grow. We really, these opportunities, and it's true across all parties, when you're choosing a new leader, having a few months to sign people up and get people excited is always a big part of the goal because you want the party at the end of it to be much, much stronger. You want the grassroots to have had an opportunity to have a say. I think, you know, we're looking at the rules now before I make a final decision, but I think, you know, we can make this work in the timeline that we've got.
It's just, you know, it's too bad that the circumstances were different. The flip side of this is the concerns about foreign interference, certainly around this race, but around politics in general. The rules that have been put out by the Liberal Party state that someone has to be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to vote. That's a change. There's no more non-permanent residents participating. That's pretty much what other parties do. Do you believe it's sufficient to protect the Liberals from foreign interference?
I sure hope it is. I think that's so vitally important. Now, I mean, it's always been important because Canadians need to know that the potential future prime minister, and in this case, whoever's elected leader will become prime minister, is chosen by Canadians. We can't have foreign influences out there.
deciding who the leader of our country is going to be. And that's the problem that we've got. And I think, you know, when you look around the world today, we see all the conflict, all the instability. We see so much foreign interference across all kinds of different sectors. We have to protect our party. And I think, you know, we need to acknowledge that in protecting our party, we are really protecting our country.
You have called yourself a lifelong liberal, but you voted in the last federal conservative leadership race. That would have required you to cancel your Liberal Party membership in order to join the Conservative Party. How long were you a member of the Conservative Party, Christy Clark? Never. But you voted in the race, did you not? No, I didn't. I didn't. And I never got a membership.
And I never got a ballot. What I did, though, is... I will say, Christy Clark, we reached out to the Conservative Party who told us, in fact, that your membership was cancelled. Oh, well, why don't they come out and show my membership or my ballot? They never sent me any of those, although I wouldn't put it past them to manufacture one of them. Okay, so help me understand what happened here. Well, what I did is I came out and I supported Jean Charest. And the reason I did this is simple. I thought...
it was vitally important that we stop Pierre Polyev. I knew that there was only one person, one candidate in that race that had any chance of stopping him from becoming leader of the Conservative Party because, and I knew that as leader of the Conservative Party, he had odds to become the Prime Minister of Canada. So I felt it was really important as someone who cares about the future of Canada to find another candidate to obstruct his path to victory. And, you know, I worked with Jean Charest.
When he was the liberal premier of Quebec, we had a great relationship. He worked really hard.
I think like a lot of Canadians, I remember what he did and the hand that he played in helping save Canada in the midst of a national unity referendum. So I said I wanted to support him. I said I would join the party. At the end of the day, I never did. I will say, so I have a statement from the Director of Communications from the Conservative Party of Canada that they sent to the CBC on Thursday. Christy Clark purchased a Conservative Party membership through Jean Charest's leadership campaign. That membership is no longer active. You're saying the Conservative Party is lying about you.
I actually went and asked the Conservatives multiple times why they did not send me a ballot before the voting day. And nobody ever, ever got back to me. I mean, I didn't get a membership. But if you expected a ballot, then you would have had to be a member. Well, if I had gotten a ballot, I probably would have been a member. But it doesn't work. You have to sign up to be a member in order to get a ballot, though. Exactly. And I didn't.
And you never cancelled your Liberal Party membership at any time, which the Conservative Party would have required of you to become a member of that party. Nope, I did not. Did not cancel my membership. But, you know, I mean, these are the kinds of games that Conservatives are going to play. People should, I mean, I think Canadians know that about Pierre Polyev and his pals. They are going to say and do anything.
anything in order to win. And I think they should spend more time thinking about whether or not they can help the country. If they could get focused instead on how we're going to grow the economy, get focused on how we're going to protect the environment, start thinking about what are the policies that we need to build our country into one that supports families and family-supporting jobs from coast to coast. But instead they spend their time manufacturing news.
doing really quick and dirty video clips with very little information for Canadians. I mean, they come across as mean and ugly in their conversation. And I think a lot of Canadians want to change from that. And I'd be prepared to put it to Poliev, should we get into an election campaign?
Because I'm not sure he's used to having somebody on the other side of the microphone when he's standing up there calling names. We are going to get back to Pierre Polyev and the names he has for you specifically in a moment. But I do want to talk about one of the other things that's been happening in the Liberal Party vis-à-vis your candidacy. A lot of talk about the need for the next leader to be bilingual. Some people have interpreted the fact that you have cabinet ministers coming out and saying this as calling you out to some extent. So, Christy Clark, how's your French?
It's not bad. It's improving. And you will never find another Canadian who's working harder on improving their French than me. That's for sure. I mean, I'm working very hard at it and I speak French every day. But I have a ways to go in that. And they are right. The leader of the Liberal Party of Canada...
Absolutely must be bilingual because our country is a bilingual country. Quebec is an essential part and francophones are an essential part of what makes this nation great. And that's why I'm working toward it. So they must be bilingual. You are not bilingual right now. Well, I mean, I can speak French, but I'm not at the level of French that I'm intending that I will get to, but I'm getting there fast. Okay. And you're going to put that to the test sometime soon?
I will. Yeah. Okay. Let's go back to Pierre Polyev. He already has a nickname for you. Take a listen to what he said about you on Thursday. Oh, great. Okay. Here it comes. And then there's Carbon Tax Clark. She's the queen of the carbon tax in British Columbia. She was the carbon tax queen before Justin Trudeau.
even got the idea. In fact, she might even have been the inspiration. Of course, BC had the first and the worst carbon tax. BC was the first province to introduce a carbon tax in 2008 before you were premier, but ahead of everyone else. Christy Clark, do you believe in carbon taxes? I don't think we should keep the carbon tax that the federal government has.
I think that the Trudeau carbon tax isn't working. It's very different from what we did in British Columbia and what Gordon Campbell introduced in our province. You know, when I was the premier of British Columbia, we took that carbon tax that had a series of automatic increases. And we got to about 30 bucks in my tenure. And I said, you know...
I'm concerned, first of all, that this is starting to really impact families. And second, I was concerned that it was hurting our competitiveness with the rest of the country and therefore going to have an impact on people's jobs. So we froze the tax at that point. But, I mean, I won't take the...
15 minutes or 20 minutes it would take to explain exactly how it was different, but it was very different from what the Trudeau government has implemented in a carbon tax. And should I be elected leader of the party and prime minister of the country, we would scrap that tax. Are you going to offer an alternative plan to drive down emissions, though? Absolutely. Because unlike Pierre Polyev, I believe that climate change is happening and that...
As human beings, we are part of the problem and we need to address emissions. So absolutely, we want to make sure that Canada is playing the biggest role that it can in the world to contribute to what's really a global problem. And I think that's going to be a very different approach from the Polly F Conservatives. A carbon tax isn't the only answer to fighting climate change. There is a whole range of other tools in the toolbox and we would be committing to figuring out which...
tools we want to put to work, but also with a mind to making sure that they aren't things that will hold people back, that will hurt our economy, that will kill jobs in the country. Because it is possible, and we proved it in BC when we had the fastest growing economy in the country and the only, well, and a carbon tax in our province. We proved that you can find a balance between investment, growth, jobs.
and making sure we're finding a way to fight climate change. Now, this was a defining political issue, but these days I think we can acknowledge that the biggest issue, it seems, hanging over the country right now is the president-elect in the United States. Do you think this liberal leadership race is going to be decided based on who can best handle Donald Trump? Well, I think we stand in...
stark contrast to Pierre Polyev. I mean, some people are calling him Pierre Pushover. Because if you look at his group of people... Is that pushback for a carbon tax clerk? The only people in Canada who support Donald Trump are Pierre Polyev conservatives. And we need to be guarding this country's integrity and we need to be fighting for jobs.
The threat that the American negotiators and the president of the United States is posing for Canada right now is very grave. And I think what Canadians and liberals need to be thinking about is who is it that's going to be able to stand strong in the face of American pressure? And who is it who has experience in managing trade relations?
and has experience in government. I mean, I think I bring a lot of those things to the table, and I don't think that anyone would ever say I was a pushover. So, you know, I think if Canadians are asking themselves who best is going to be able to sit across from Donald Trump and get a good deal for workers, small businesses, large businesses, and communities across the country, I hope they'll say it's me. You talk about your experience.
Trump keeps talking about Canada as the 51st state. He threatens to use economic force to make that happen. How seriously do you think Canada needs to take that threat, joke, whatever you want to call it? Well, I wouldn't call it a joke. I would call it a threat. And I think we do need to think about it very seriously. But we should keep in mind we have some assets here. We ship a ton of absolutely necessary economic goods to the United States. Food.
cars, you name it, oil and gas, and they need us too. We don't just need them. So, I mean, we certainly have some assets at the table when we're in these negotiations, but I think we need to do everything we can to try and resist just caving, folding like a cheap tent at the table, which I think is the inclination that the MAGA conservatives behind Polyev...
have these days. Somebody needs to really fight for the country. And I think the Americans will respect us if we stand strong, but recognize we still have a lot in common. Now, I understand why you want to take the fight to Pierre Polyev, who did lay out a plan the other day, but I just want to understand a little bit.
better what it is you are proposing. You know, you say we have assets. It sounds to me like you're talking about more than just counter tariffs. Are you talking about withholding something from the United States, perhaps energy the way Ontario Premier Doug Ford has talked about? Well, I think we need to be united in the country. I think that the premiers and the national government need to be working hand in hand, which we haven't seen enough of yet in the country. But further than that, I'm not...
You know, I'm still thinking about running my full economic platform and my strategy for dealing with Donald Trump isn't quite fully baked yet. But so for today, what I will say is I think what Canadians want at the table is somebody who's a proven leader who knows how to stand up and fight for Canadians. I did that when I was Premier of British Columbia and I...
You know, I'm not going to bend in the face of American pressure. We are going to make sure we fight for jobs, the economy and people's livelihoods in Canada. I got to say, Christy Clark, those sounds like the words of someone who is campaigning. I guess we'll wait and see. Thank you very much for taking the time. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Former B.C. Premier Christy Clark.
Clark's team later told us she was not a registered Liberal during the Conservative leadership race. And the Conservative Party sent us a screen grab of what they describe as proof of her membership purchase on their data management system. It suggests she was a Conservative for about a year. A party spokesperson added that the, quote, kick-off to her leadership campaign is about misleading not just Liberals, but Canadians.
Lots more coming up on the House podcast, including Donald Trump saying he'd use economic force to make Canada the 51st state. What should Canada do now? Ready for a career change? One way you can truly be yourself, gain valuable training, and shine with your customer service skills? Then listen up. Tanya Mosley didn't even know she had a sister until she went missing.
Her sister, Anita, left home in 1987 and never returned. Now Tanya, along with the help of her sister's son, Antonio, is determined to find out what happened. I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and this week on Crime Story, one woman's search for her long-lost sister. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Catherine Cullen.
You're listening to The House, making politics make sense. A new episode drops every Saturday, and you can find news and interviews on our website, cbc.ca slash the house. Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security. Don't forget, we basically protect Canada. This 51st state business.
Doesn't sound like much of a joke anymore. This week, the incoming U.S. president suggested he's willing to take over Canada by economic force. Maybe use military force to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal. So, what should Canada do? And what is Donald Trump really up to here?
David Sanger was one of the journalists asking Trump questions at that Mar-a-Lago news conference this week. He's covered five American presidents over four decades for The New York Times. He's also the author of New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. David Sanger, welcome to the House. Great to be with you.
It is so easy, I think, for Canadians to feel alarmed or just outraged by this. But are we playing into Donald Trump's hands when we do that? Well, you may be. I mean, I think what he's trying to do is negotiate, right? And that his way of negotiating is often coercive and is frequently to throw out an extreme idea. I thought it was interesting that...
When he was pressed by another reporter I'd asked the initial question, he did leave the possibility of military coercion for Panama and for Greenland, but not for Canada. Interestingly, he also said in that same news conference, Canada has, quote, virtually no military. So I wonder, from a national security standpoint, is there a real threat to Canada here? I doubt it.
You know, I don't think that he is thinking about using the military to take over close allies, NATO allies, Five Eyes allies. But this is the kind of thing that Donald Trump throws around. And his former national security advisor, John Bolton, one of the four national security advisors he had in the first term, who has since become a great Trump critic, makes the point that this is...
typical of the way the president-elect talks out loud, makes big threats, but then tries to convert that to some kind of negotiating advantage. And he probably senses right now that Canada is certainly in a period of transition, and perhaps he thinks one of some weakness, and that he can make some gains by making these kinds of statements. How do you think most Americans feel about this idea?
I think most of them probably say, oh, it's Donald Trump. What did you expect to hear? Right? Because this is the way he operates. And the shock to Canadians and to some Americans is that presidents don't usually talk like this and don't wave around American power and sound like we have returned not just to the 1930s with tariffs.
but to the 1890s with gunboat diplomacy. But at the same time, you know, it didn't stop a majority of Americans from voting for him. So you have to sort of reconcile in your mind the fact that a large portion of the American population, much larger than we would have anticipated, say, a year ago, like his overall approach, particularly on the economy,
and are willing to go tune out this stuff. And it gets to that old line, do you take him literally or do you take him seriously? My own view is he's the incoming president of the United States. He never needs to face another election again, so he can use his power in a more unbridled way.
He knows how to use power now in a way he didn't when he came in in 2017. And so you have to take him both literally and seriously. And so you mentioned a moment ago this idea that from his point of view, Canada is weakened right now because of the political situation. If we are taking him both literally and seriously, what is the best course forward? You know, I think your best course forward is you're going to pick new leadership.
That leadership is going to have to stabilize quickly and figure out how they're going to engage with Donald Trump. I'm not sure that that always means flying down here. I'm in Palm Beach right now to Mar-a-Lago. Do you think it was the wrong move when the prime minister went down? Is that sort of inherent in what you're saying there?
You know, I'm not sure that his move or any other specific move was, but sometimes when you see business executives, you see foreign leaders, we've since seen Prime Minister Maloney and others come in, it has the image that individually they want to come in and establish their separate relationship with him when, of course, their greatest power is to...
deal with him jointly as the European Union or as NATO leaders or as Five Eyes leaders. So there's some risk because, you know, he's going to try to divide and conquer and, you know, use favourites. All American presidents have. He does it more overtly. This conversation, when you broaden it beyond Canada in particular, Panama Canal, Greenland, I think there is something unsettling about this idea.
Of the extent to which he is prepared to upend the status quo, you know, how far is he really willing to go? How much has he changed the role of the U.S. in the world as a reliable partner? I mean, how extreme is this moment that we are living in right now? It's a pretty extreme one because what it tells you is that since the end of World War II, we have had a succession of American presidents.
Republicans and Democrats who have talked some version of establishing international norms driven by legal constraints on countries. And when you think about the justification that the U.S. and Canada have had independently and together for opposing Putin's invasion of Ukraine or other territorial...
Land grabs, it's been, we don't do that as a matter of international law. That may have been the way the world worked a century and a quarter ago when it was more about power, but we have evolved to one of international legal standards and the recognition of sovereignty of borders and so forth. Donald Trump wants to throw that aside because he lives in a world in which
you exercise your power for maximum advantage. And that's the world he came out of in the real estate business. And I think one that he came to sort of admire as in his first term. Think about the leaders he says he admires the most for their strength, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, others for those purposes. So I don't think he feels as constrained. And the very reason that I asked him,
that opening question at the press conference, which was, are you willing to go use military or economic coercion to further your goals here? And I really have Greenland and Panama in mind, not really Canada at that moment, was because I had heard that he has begun discussing how he could make use of those tools, not because he wants to go mountain invasion, but because he sees the...
swinging of the big stick out, as Teddy Roosevelt used to say, the carrying of the big stick as a potential point of leverage. And you do look very closely at both Russia and China in your new book, New Cold Wars. What lessons do you think the two leaders there might be taking from the way Donald Trump is talking right now? Well, it's a really interesting question because Donald Trump is talking about
land acquisitions, whether it's Greenland, Panama, or a 51st state, adjacent to the United States or in areas that are in an American sphere of influence. And he basically said at the press conference, you know, we've got Russian and Chinese ships cruising around Greenland. He was thinking about the Arctic, obviously, an area where Canada's got a huge role.
and was seeming to suggest, without using the term sphere of influence, that they were messing in hours. Now, that may play right into Xi Jinping's hands, who frequently cites the Monroe Doctrine, which was the first doctrine about the U.S. having a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, as his justification.
for pushing the United States back to the third island chain and his claims over Taiwan or the South China Sea. So in an odd way, I think they may welcome this talk because it doesn't threaten them, and yet it shows that Donald Trump is viewing a set of world rules that are more accustomed to the way they would like to operate.
Before I let you go, there is something that I just have to ask you. You are, if I understand correctly, the one who introduced Donald Trump to the phrase America first. You mentioned it to him in an interview in, I believe, 2016. And he said, yeah, I like that. And then his campaign kind of seized on it. Given how omnipresent that phrase became for him, how do you feel about introducing it to him? Well, it's very funny because I...
said this, he immediately lit up and said, well, what leader wouldn't want their country to be first? You know, and I didn't think a whole lot of it. And then that weekend he was down doing a campaign event. I wasn't aware of this in 2016 and apparently began yelling America first. And I saw clips of it on.
the Monday morning after our interview and saw it. And my wife came down to get her a cup of coffee and took a sip and listened to him saying this and looked at me and said, I hope you're really proud of yourself. Listen, David Sanger, it's been a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for making the time. Thank you. David Sanger is the New York Times White House and national security correspondent.
Let us know what you think about Trump's threats. We know you've got opinions. Share them with us in an email. We're thehouseatcbc.ca. It has become obvious to me with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the liberal standard into the next election.
When Justin Trudeau announced his resignation, alone, on a cold day outside his home, trying to grab at pages of his speech as they were carried off by the wind, I kept thinking about what a striking contrast it was to the way his time as Prime Minister began. Sunny ways, my friends. Sunny ways.
Election night, 2015. Trudeau has just won a majority government and he's delivering his victory speech in a room packed with elated supporters. Canadians from all across this great country sent a clear message tonight. It's time for a change in this country, my friends. A real change. There's no question that Justin Trudeau did change the country over the last nine years.
But how? It's a question historians will study, but let's look at what we know now. What are the most consequential, and in some cases, hotly debated ways that Trudeau changed Canada? Some big shifts in social policy came pretty quickly. One of the most profound was allowing medical assistance in dying. Thousands of Canadians have ended their lives differently because of it.
The move was forced by a unanimous Supreme Court ruling. What this decision means is that Canadians who are suffering unbearably at the end of life will have a choice now. The choice to seek the assistance of a physician if their suffering becomes unbearable.
But the Liberals have also expanded their initial law. Medical assistance in dying is no longer restricted to people already at the end of their lives, like terminal cancer patients, leading to debate about whether the policy goes too far or, as some have argued, still doesn't go far enough. Then there's legalizing cannabis. I think that's what he's known for.
You know, would I rank it in terms of importance? You know, I'm not sure I would rank it in terms of importance. But what he's known for, I think that's almost inescapable. It was a liberal election promise in 2015. These days, pot shops have popped up all over the place in many major cities. But legalization hasn't been a total success, according to Paul McCarthy. He's the president of the Cannabis Council of Canada, representing licensed producers. He's also previously worked in liberal politics.
The arguments for legalization, which I totally support, it's you look at the public policy objectives and they're, I would say, in short, threefold. Displace the illicit market. Personally, I would go stronger and say you should eradicate the illicit market. Keep it out of the hands of youth and ensure a quality assured product for responsible consumers. And I would say at this moment, if you evaluated where we are on all those fronts, it's a fail on all of those fronts. Wow. And it's largely.
does come back to the illicit market. And it's because Deloitte did a report, I think it was the end of 2023, and it said they estimated that the illicit market was somewhere to the tune of 40%. It represents the single biggest piece of the pie. None of the licensed producers I represent come even close to that level of market share. And I would say, if you have a legal market and criminal forces control the single biggest piece of that market, do you have a properly regulated market?
Since 2015, I've fought for this country. There's another change that Trudeau argued in his resignation speech was one of his major accomplishments. To advance reconciliation. Perry Belgarde is the former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. He says the Trudeau government's willingness to spend money on education, housing and water infrastructure for Indigenous people was hugely significant. We had unprecedented investments.
$45 billion over six fiscal years, you know, going back to the Bill Morneau time, you know, when he was a finance minister. And so those investments were very key to helping facilitate the closing of the socioeconomic gap. And not just funding, also new legislation on child welfare, protecting Indigenous languages, and implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP. We were able to influence the mandate letters that he gave to his ministers.
We were able to influence the throne speech, which sets out priorities for the government. And because we had that good working relationship and there was co-development on different pieces of legislation and policy, we were able to make a big difference. So if I was to say, did Prime Minister Trudeau and his government really embrace reconciliation, move the file forward, I'm going to say yes. You know, the file has moved forward.
The socioeconomic gap has closed. But is the job done? Of course not. We still have boil water advisories. We still have poor housing. You know, we still have things that have to get addressed. We need policing as essential services. We need to fix a child welfare system that's discriminatory and racist. We need to deal with water as legislation, as a fundamental right that everybody should be able to turn on the taps and drink water. So there's still work to do, but I've seen it move in the right direction.
I guess all of this brings us to the question, how much of what happened on the road to reconciliation under Justin Trudeau is a permanent change? And how much of it is subject to the priorities of generations of future governments? Well, if you just assume the polls are correct, there will be Prime Minister Pierre Polyev in Canada. And so the question is, what are the priorities for this Conservative Prime Minister and Conservative government? What if they want to...
roll back all of these things, roll back the Indigenous Language Revitalization Act, roll back the Child Welfare Act, roll back the UN Declaration Act. Well, it is possible, but these are pieces of legislation. They're not programs. So these cannot be repealed at the whim of a minister or cabinet. It's a very challenging process to repeal legislation. So yes, it can be done, and things can be changed and revoked
put back. But to what end? And why do that? And it's not going to build a better Canada. When we think about how Trudeau changed Canada, it's clear he tried to push forward certain values. He called himself a feminist and famously required his cabinet to have an equal number of men and women. Because it's 2015.
University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young says it's tough to disentangle where Trudeau led the change and where he was reflecting the cultural moment. It's really difficult to sort through big social changes that were possibly coming anyways and what Trudeau himself has done or what his government has done. Certainly, I think that...
At a time when there was already some inclination in Canada to take reconciliation with Indigenous people more seriously than we had in the past, Trudeau's government moved in that direction as well, imperfectly in many ways. But I do think that relations between...
Canada and Indigenous people are better than they were before Trudeau took office. I think that for a lot of equality-seeking groups, whether we're talking about the LGBTQ community, whether we're talking about women, there have been positive moves in the direction of equality because of the interest of the government in those sorts of issues. So I think the Trudeau government has been part of a set of changes.
in a direction that we might have been going in anyways. If there was one phrase that helped define the early days of Justin Trudeau, it was this. ...of Canada's middle class. For the middle class. To strengthen the middle class and support those working hard to join it.
There was an early tax cut for the middle class, and Trudeau says he lifted 435,000 children out of poverty with the Canada Child Benefit. But the government racked up a lot of debt during Trudeau's time in office, never coming close to balancing a budget.
To understand how Trudeau changed Canada's economy and finances, I spoke with Sahir Khan. He's previously worked in the civil service and for Parliament's budgetary watchdog. He's now vice president of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa. The Trudeau government changed the nature of government to the extent that it's bigger. It's been focused on a lot of wealth redistribution. It focused on poverty.
We saw real reductions in poverty. So for children, for seniors, for Indigenous Canadians, there was significant poverty alleviation. And I think he did that probably to the detriment of economic policy that pushed for competitiveness and prepared Canada for, I think, some of the uncertainty that we're facing. Was there an adequate emphasis on kind of growing the economic engine?
And that's a tough balancing act for any government. And I think the Trudeau government, probably pushed along by the NDP, just chose an emphasis that, you know, focused on wealth redistribution and social policy. And that's probably going to be his legacy. And I think there's a lot of good things that came out of it. But if you're at the other end of this and you're worried about competitiveness and how we're prepared for a Trump administration and an increasingly...
difficult geopolitical environment and softening global economy, then, you know, he probably didn't put the same level of emphasis on that. He set up several new social programs. Will they exist beyond Justin Trudeau's government or do you expect that they will be rolled back?
I think a lot of these entitlement programs get a little bit hard-coded. Having been on the government side involved in a number of fiscal consolidation cuts exercises, you become really aware that as much as people might object to, say, the average level of spending of this government or, you know, it's three percentage points higher than maybe that previous consensus, you still get attached to the programs if you're a recipient. A lot harder for governments to kind of roll that back later.
Trudeau also went big on climate, from marching with climate activist Greta Thunberg to signing the Paris Accord to implementing the carbon tax. Okay, the question is why are we putting a price on pollution? Let's start with the fact that climate change is real and it is a challenge. So how did Trudeau's efforts change this country?
There's really no questioning the fact that Justin Trudeau is the prime minister that has put the most focus on supporting climate action of any Canadian prime minister. Catherine Abreu is director of the International Climate Politics Hub. She's also on Canada's net zero advisory body, independent experts who advise the environment minister. There has been a complete revolution in...
climate governance and climate policy in this country in the last decade under his tenure. And I think it's important to acknowledge the significant shift that we've seen in the landscape of climate action in Canada, not just from a policy perspective, but from a conversational perspective, the level of profile that the climate issue has been given by this government and by Trudeau himself is significant. That being said, there's still this
big elephant in the room when it comes to climate efforts in Canada, which is our oil and gas emissions. And while Trudeau and his government have put in place policies and regulations to address emissions in pretty much every other sector of the Canadian economy, we are still missing the buck when it comes to addressing this huge source of emissions in Canada.
Well, I was going to say, I mean, you talk about this as a revolution. You look at some of the numbers, though, it seems as if we are on track to miss some of our targets still, even though some ground has been made up when it comes to emissions reductions. Canada's Environment Commissioner said that we really haven't achieved any significant emissions reductions since 1990 at one point when you set aside the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. So in terms of like results.
What can we say about what Justin Trudeau achieved? Yeah, that's the important question. And I think there are a few things to consider here. So first is the lag time that we've seen in implementing the policies and regulations that have been recommended and put forward by this government. So, you know, we've had dozens and dozens of policies put forward. But for the most part, it's taken years for those to get implemented. And it, of course.
takes time to see the results of those kinds of policy and regulatory interventions in terms of actual pollution cuts. So in our early estimates that we're now seeing from the 2023 emissions inventory, it does look like...
Canadian emissions are finally falling. So we're finally starting to see the results of some of these policies. But unfortunately, that evidence is coming rather late in the tenure of this government that has overseen this revolution in Canadian climate policy. And it would have been probably really helpful had they been able to get those policies up and running sooner and have that evidence of their success a lot quicker.
But these days, a whole host of politicians are renouncing the consumer carbon tax. And that may also be a lasting impact, says University of Calgary's Lisa Young. The Trudeau government has demonstrated how extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, it is going to be for Canada to take.
meaningful action around greenhouse gas emissions. You know, at the end of the day, the carbon tax is a significant part of how things fell apart for Trudeau. His efforts to put caps on greenhouse gas emissions have created such conflict within the Federation that it's very difficult to imagine that they'll go ahead. Trudeau's climate commitments were part of how he tried to reshape Canada on the world stage.
Canada is back, my good friends. We're here to help. But his time as Prime Minister also saw new tensions with global powers, including China and India. Thomas Junot is a former analyst at the Department of National Defence. He's now a professor at the University of Ottawa. I asked him how Trudeau changed Canada's image in the world.
The image has changed a bit. There was a lot of hype around the arrival in some circles of Justin Trudeau 10 years ago. But overall, Canada remains a country that is not especially present in most parts of the world, a country that is not very influential, a country that is well known for neglecting defence, a country that is well known for talking a lot but not doing a lot in its foreign policy. I think that preceded Trudeau and fundamentally it has not changed.
You talked about neglecting defence. How would you characterise how Justin Trudeau has changed Canada's military?
Canada's military was simply not a priority for this government. And some of the defenders of this government will say, yes, but he did increase in some of the recent policy documents the defence budget. But a lot of those increases are backloaded and they're going to come in the late 2020s and in the 2030s. So overall, the Canadian military was broadly neglected in the past 10 years as it was under previous governments. And that has, again, not fundamentally changed.
He has pointed to Canada's support for Ukraine as one of his accomplishments. How significant was that? I would agree that in the list of accomplishments, it's not a long list, but there's not nothing on that list. Support for Ukraine is an accomplishment. I think Canada could have done more to support Ukraine because the needs are massive. But at the same time...
To be fair and to be accurate, we have been an important player among allies in supporting Ukraine, and that has made a difference. You're describing a mixed record, but he is departing at this time of incredible uncertainty. How is Justin Trudeau leaving Canada on the world stage?
Justin Trudeau is leaving Canada unprepared to deal with an increasingly dangerous, unstable and unpredictable world. Our foreign policy lacks strategy, lacks vision and lacks resources. Our military is significantly underfunded.
our national security apparatus is also underfunded. So at a time of growing danger, which is not fundamentally Canada's fault, if the U.S. is drifting towards growing instability, that's not our fault. If China is increasingly authoritarian and aggressive on the world stage, if Russia is increasingly revanchist, that's not our fault. But we are not properly equipped to deal with that. And after 10 years of this government, that has to be their responsibility.
It was an overseas conflict that drove one of Trudeau's early signature policies, bringing in 25,000 Syrian refugees. He personally greeted some of the first arrivals at the airport. But after immigration rose sharply in the last couple of years, Trudeau put out a video admitting the Liberals had made some mistakes. As a federal team, we could have acted quicker and turned off the taps faster.
Trudeau's explanation came as polls showed Canadians' attitudes towards immigration were shifting too. Mireille Paquet is the director of the Institute for Research on Migration and Society at Concordia University. She says the immigration surge may have changed Canada in a way Trudeau wasn't intending.
The first couple of years of his tenure, Justin Trudeau tried to reinvent the linkage that was traditionally there in Canada between being a country that's open to humanitarian migration and Canadian identity. And so I think that it's important because...
A lot of countries didn't have that for a long time. And Canadians had kind of lost also that flame that was so central in the 70s and in the 60s. But there's also the issue in the last couple of years of maybe the government going too fast, maybe Trudeau moving too fast on trying to address demographic change in the country. And that has really called into question a lot of what we took for granted as the Canadian consensus around immigration.
A lot more people feel anxious now at the end of Trudeau's tenure when it comes to the number of immigrants admitted and when it comes to what they perceive to be the impact of immigration on the country. And that is a big change because Canadian views on immigration had been trending in the positive for the last 15 to 20 years. Conservative leader Pierre Polyev often argues Trudeau has changed this country for the worse.
After nine years of the NDP liberals, taxes up, costs up, crimes up, times up. The Conservatives accused Trudeau of driving up crime. And the homicide rate, for example, has risen significantly since 2015. But is the Prime Minister responsible? Nicole Myers is a criminologist at Queen's University.
Certainly, we do need to acknowledge that we have seen some increases in the crime rate overall, as well as the violent crime rate in particular. But these increases need to be put into in a longer historical context and acknowledging that we are still sitting at historical lows on both of those measures. And what we need to perhaps be most mindful is, is that crime goes up and down for a variety of reasons. And it's not sort of a simplistic cause and effect between a change in the law or a change in political leadership that is going to dictate the direction of our crime in this country.
When we look at how Trudeau changed Canada during his more than nine years in power, there's no question the country feels more divided now. Across Canada, we've seen protesters with F. Trudeau flags. The Freedom Convoy taking over downtown Ottawa laid bare the tensions playing out in the pandemic. But has Trudeau simply led Canada in an era of division, or did he make the country more polarized? Professor Lisa Young again.
I think this is a confluence of a couple of things. Even if we weren't in the polarized moment that we're in when we look at politics in North America and elsewhere in the world, Trudeau himself would have been a polarizing figure. His last name. triggered people in parts of the country. Then when he pursued an environmental agenda that was perceived as an attack on the oil and gas industry, it just made that sense of polarization or anger at Trudeau that much greater.
And then we ended up in this really extraordinary moment that we're in post-pandemic where there is such deep polarization around so many issues to really leave us with a substantial group of the population who disliked both Trudeau's government and his policies, but disliked him personally. When he leaves politics, do you think that that will decrease?
some of that polarization? I think he has certainly been a flashpoint. And so I think his departure takes the temperature down a bit. I don't think that it simply goes away with his departure. But over time, assuming that the government changes, time passes, I think that we may see...
some decrease in the really heightened polarization of this moment, but it doesn't go away entirely. There are sort of fundamentals that underlie it that I think are enduring. Justin Trudeau is on his way out, but his impact on Canada will endure in many ways for years to come. That's all we've got time for this week. Our crew on the house is Kristen Everson, Emma Godmere, Benjamin Lopez-Steven, and our senior producer is Jennifer Chevalier. I'm Catherine Cullen. Thank you so much for listening.