In the penultimate chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli warns that fortuna 

demonstrates her power where virtue has not been put in order to resist her and therefore turns her impetus where she knows that dams and dikes have not been made to contain her.

Put differently, the failure to prepare for misfortune is not inevitable. The best rulers or princes make plans that insulate their regimes from unexpected bad luck. They understand, as Machiavelli argues throughout The Prince, that good luck is not something one can count on, nor is it an achievement about which one should brag. Luck, good or bad, is something that simply happens, a reality that requires a realistic response, free of illusions about the resiliency of one’s political order.

On Jan. 6 this year, Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister of Canada. After serving nine years in this office and 11 years as leader of the Liberal Party, his good luck had finally run out. The official explanation for this departure shifted the blame to Donald Trump’s unexpected reelection that November and his threat of imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canadian exports bound for the U.S. market. 

Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s finance minister, had resigned in mid-December just before she was supposed to deliver a statement about the sorry state of Canada’s economy, amid rumors that she had zero confidence in her boss’s ability to address the tariff threat posed by the Trump White House. Instead of building up cash reserves that could mitigate the effects of these tariffs, Trudeau, in Freeland’s scorching words, had indulged in “costly political gimmicks” that would imperil the country’s shaky finances at the worst possible time. Those included a freeze on the national sales tax and sending out $250 checks to working Canadians. Trump’s recent musings about Canada becoming the 51^st state have only heated up the temperature among Canada’s already anxious chattering classes.

With a nod to Machiavelli, this political crisis reflected Trudeau’s unwillingness to prepare for a threat to his political fortunes. His failure mirrors the general inability of leftist ideologues who are unprepared to deal with reality when it knocks on the door.

Elected for the first time in 2015, Trudeau had the good luck of governing a nation with a political inheritance grounded in “peace, order, and good government,” a phrase that first appeared in the British North America Act of 1867. As Canada’s preeminent Tory philosopher George Grant explained in Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965), those beliefs reflected “an inchoate desire to build, in these cold and forbidding regions, a society with a greater sense of order and restraint than freedom-loving republicanism would allow.”

That parting shot at America’s liberal traditions did not dissuade Grant from exposing the hypocritical attitude of Canada’s political elites towards its southern neighbor. In the 1970 preface to Lament, Grant eloquently summarized the contemporary double-mindedness of his countrymen:

We [Canadians] have all the advantages of that [American] empire, the wealth which pours in from all over the world, the technology which comes to us through the multinational corporations…. We are like the child of some stockbroker who can enjoy the fruits of his father’s endeavours by living the swinging life, but likes to exclude from his mind where the money comes from. Like most other human beings, Canadians want it both ways.

Trudeau is the classic case of the Canadian wanting it both ways. His government depended on the historic goodwill and prosperity of the United States without preparing for shifts in the political winds south of the border. In a brazenly thoughtless manner that even Grant could not have anticipated, Trudeau ignorantly counted on the benign relationship that Canada has enjoyed with the United States while he pursued policies that weakened his own country’s identity and tradition. As a prisoner of leftist ideology, he wanted to have his cake and eat it, too.

Trudeau’s adherence to this ideology usually took the form of disrespecting his own country’s identity by denying that it even has one. In 2015, he told Guy Lawson of The New York Times that there “is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” He went on to add that “openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice” are the core values of Canada. Indeed, those values make Canada the world’s first “postnational state.” 

That idea sounded very similar to the Canadian “mosaic” his father, Pierre Trudeau, had championed as prime minister in the early 1970s. A mosaic policy of multiculturalism, unlike the bad old American melting pot, did not expect new immigrants to assimilate the identity of their newly adopted nation. Instead, they could retain their own identities while the Canadian state made every effort to make them feel included. The elder Trudeau later confessed that he had not intended the predictable outcome of his policy: that immigrants would celebrate their country of origin, rather than Canada. His less cerebral son has shown no such regret.

Justin Trudeau’s favorite slogan, “diversity is our strength,” sums up the mosaic metaphor that he inherited (along with his last name) from his famous father. Unfortunately, this vacuous approach to identity has led to outcomes his father did not live to see. According to the Canadian Sikh politician Ujjal Dosanjh, Trudeau has stoked the fires of extremism among some Sikh immigrants who desire the creation of their own homeland—Khalistan—in India, by violent means if necessary.

The message that Trudeau has sent to these extremists, in the words of Dosanjh, is this: “You come here, you can be who you are.” Dosanjh, who has described Trudeau as “an imbecile in terms of understanding how you build nations,” raises a fundamental concern about Canada that is relevant to other nations: “If we don’t have a mainstream, then we’re not really a people.”

Trudeau inherited another unfortunate tendency from his father: using the power of the state to create and impose a “mainstream” that reflects the left’s “search for equality and justice.” Pierre Trudeau had insisted on Canada becoming a “Just Society” in the late 1960s, even though Canadian voters had given him no mandate for implementing this faint imitation of LBJ’s “Great Society.” In a similar way, his son’s government relentlessly hectored Canadians on the fundamental injustice of their nation’s heritage and the need to remedy this history with drastic government action. 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Indian residential schools system declared in 2015 that Canada had committed “cultural genocide” by disallowing aboriginal children from learning about their history, traditions, and languages. Following the commission’s report, Trudeau’s government proceeded to denigrate the memory of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, who had supported the creation of this system. 

After Trudeau resigned in January, Macdonald’s biographer, Patrice Dutil, said that Trudeau should have tried to learn from his predecessor, who was considered a progressive of his time, rather than trying to erase his memory.

Trudeau worked to undermine and erase Macdonald’s legacy, including issuing a Cabinet order to review historical designations and plaques relating to Canada’s first prime minister in an effort to “decolonize” Canada’s history. When nine of the eleven monuments erected in honour of Macdonald were destroyed or removed, Trudeau did nothing. In fact, Trudeau showed precious little regard for his predecessors as he constantly apologized for what he considered their misdeeds. There is no better clue to his arrogance.

The effects of this policy are on display at Bellevue House in Kingston, Ontario, where Macdonald and his family lived from 1848 to 1849. A sign on the path towards this heritage monument calls Macdonald a “monster,” while various exhibits inside the home portray him as a genocidal oppressor of indigenous peoples, despite the fact that he secured the vote for aboriginal men and saved many indigenous lives with the provision of the smallpox vaccination. In American terms, this colossal disrespect would be equivalent to having the federal government place official exhibits at George Washington’s historic mansion in Mount Vernon that mock his memory!

Canadians who dare to question Trudeau’s policies with public actions have learned to tread softly. His draconian response to the “Freedom Convoy,” consisting mainly of truck drivers who were protesting the draconian COVID-19 vaccine mandates and lockdowns that the federal government had imposed, is a case in point.

After the protesters shut down the national capital, Ottawa, in the early months of 2022, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, giving extraordinary powers to the police to crack down on the protestors. These powers included freezing the bank accounts of the protest’s leaders.

Although the actions of many protesters, including public intoxication as well as the incessant honking of horns, were disrespectful to Ottawa’s residents, the Federal Court in 2024 ruled against the Trudeau government for not meeting the threshold that would justify this activation of martial law, threatening basic rights and freedoms in the bargain.

In 2021 and 2024, Trudeau tried to pass the “Online Harms Act,” which would have punished with up to life imprisonment anyone who advocates or promotes “genocide,” a term whose meaning Canada’s Orwellian human rights tribunals would decide. This legislation would give anyone who fears that she may become a victim of a “hate crime” the ability to call on legal authorities to summon a preemptively accused person to appear in court. The judge could then impose a “recognizance” or series of restrictions that would prevent the accused from committing a crime in the future. 

Even the leftist Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, was appalled by this proposed legislation, comparing it to the Lettres de Cachet that allowed the king of France to authorize imprisonment without trial. What the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick described as a “precrime” in his novella The Minority Report could have become Canadian law if the Online Harms Act had not died on the order paper after Trudeau’s resignation in January.  

Peter Brimelow masterfully skewered Pierre Trudeau’s notorious disinterest in economics in The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities (1986). “The truth was that Trudeau was basically ignorant about economics,” Brimelow wrote. “He seemed to like it that way.” The son has arguably outperformed the father in this vein as well, implementing ineffective and disastrous economic policies while imposing a noxious identity politics that more readily captured his attention.

Aside from legalizing marijuana (which has not put an end to the black market for dope), it is hard to find a Trudeau-era policy that has attracted any investment in the Canadian economy. While poverty, homelessness, and inflation steadily worsened during his nine-year reign, the prime minister went out of his way to harm the most productive citizens in the country while cultivating his image as a crusader against climate change and social injustice. 

Canada now enjoys the dubious distinction of being the only oil and gas-producing nation with a self-imposed cap on carbon emissions, hobbling an industry that accounts for 7.7 percent of the economy’s GDP and 25 percent of its exports. Even though the carbon tax, another unpopular Trudeau-era policy, has not reduced emissions and has exacerbated inflation, his government has periodically increased it. 

In the name of taxing the “rich,” the Trudeau Liberals have also increased the capital gains tax to a whopping 66.7 percent for gains above $250,000, a measure that will devastate middle-class Canadians whose properties and other investments have increased in value due to inflation. 

Trudeau’s decision, on behalf of increasing “diversity,” to allow almost 3 million immigrants into Canada over his term in office has, in his own belated words, failed to “get the balance quite right” between the need for labor and population growth. In other words, increases in immigration failed to consider the pressure this mass influx of people would impose upon working-class jobs and affordable housing. Due to reckless spending, Trudeau doubled the country’s national debt gradually accumulated since 1867. If Canada’s economy did not enjoy the good fortune of being entwined with the far more productive American one, it is safe to assume that the nation’s finances and prosperity would be in even more dire straits because of these destructive gimmicks masquerading as serious policies.

In retrospect, one may wonder how Trudeau managed to stay in power so long, given the litany of failures that happened on his watch. In the last two elections that put him in power, he lost the popular vote to the Conservative Party, leading him to rely on the support of the leftist New Democratic Party to prop up his minority government. 

Although the current high poll numbers for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party give this author reason to hope that the post-Trudeau Liberals will be swept from power soon, caution is advisable here. Poilievre’s message of freedom sounds like a Canadian version of Frank Meyer’s philosophy of fusionism, which celebrates the liberty to be a traditionalist (or not) within a relatively free market economy. To many indoctrinated Canadian voters who have faithfully supported Trudeau’s illiberal, top-down statism, this is dangerous “far right” thinking! Refreshing as Poilievre’s libertarian message sounds in the post-Trudeau era, Canadians on the right should not assume that the Liberal Party’s good luck has completely run out.