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How did Trudeau’s performance stack up to his promises?

Time and again, this government grabbed for low-hanging fruit, then spun proposed programs as bold, progressive policy choices

Canadian PoliticsEconomic CrisisEnvironmentHousingIndigenous Politics

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends the state funeral of Ed Broadbent in Ottawa, January 28, 2024. Photo courtesy Canadian Heritage/Flickr.

The following is an adapted excerpt from The Trudeau Record: Promise v. Performance, published in October by Lorimer. Edited by Katherine Scott, Stuart Trew and Laura Macdonald, the book is an authoritative review of Justin Trudeau’s tenure, with 25 independent experts weighing in on his promises and performance. For more information, visit www.lorimer.ca.


The end of the NDP’s confidence and supply agreement with the governing Liberals has federal election forecasters guessing when Canadians will next head to the polls. Recent byelection losses for the governing Liberals, and Conservative and Bloc Québécois cage-rattling about the carbon tax and supply management, add to a sense of political instability, clouding predictions about the future of this government and its policy agenda.

Clearly, we are in pre-election territory. Parties have been trying for much of 2024 to understand and shape how voters view the nine-year record of the Trudeau government. Ideally this debate should be based on facts and convictions rather than the misinformation and memes that fill our communication channels. This is a key reason why we have published our new book, The Trudeau Record: Promise versus Performance.

The realpolitik of governing in Canada

The Trudeau government’s notable policy achievements are easy to point out: more affordable child care, pandemic-era income supports, renewed investment in housing, updated human rights and labour legislation, and efforts to reframe the Crown’s relations with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. But so too are there half-measures and promises not fulfilled, including those to end the first-past-the-post voting system, create a more progressive tax system, or contain still-rising greenhouse gas emissions and their damaging consequences.

Constraints on government action—both international and domestic—have shaped the Trudeau record in fundamental ways, as you would expect of any government. At the same time, self-imposed ideological restraints have also needlessly limited the reach or effectiveness of some of the government’s more progressive proposals. Where situations called for pragmatism and creative use of state powers, the government fell back on free-market economic dogma.

The most notable external constraint on government policy was the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic shortly after the fall 2019 election. By the end of 2023, the novel coronavirus had killed more than 52,000 people and infected millions more in Canada alone. The response to the pandemic consumed the efforts of the government through much of 2020 and 2021. By August 2021, the federal government had spent $366 billion on various COVID-19 programs, procurements, and transfers to provincial and municipal governments.

This surge in expenditures and pandemic-related collapse in economic activity derailed the government’s commitments in other policy areas and narrowed its perceived fiscal space. Almost immediately, the government came under intense pressure from large business and financial elites to scale back its ambitions and impose austerity. Likewise, the Conservative Party continues to blame pandemic spending for the post-pandemic surge in inflation and inequality, despite evidence from the Parliamentary Budget Office and other economists to the contrary.

The Trudeau government also found itself facing an assertive, bipartisan ‘America First’ agenda under the Trump and Biden presidencies. Trump-era tariffs on China and other measures to restrict US financial and corporate engagement with Chinese firms were retained and expanded by the Biden administration. Biden’s efforts to split the world into friendly and unfriendly suppliers of critical resources and renewable technologies may lock Canada into a US-focused trade and foreign policy agenda for years to come, as Carleton University’s Richard Nimijean discusses in our book.

Long-standing domestic tensions also constrain the policy options and tools available to any federal government, notably Canada’s decentralized federation and relatively strong provincial governments, these days headed up by Conservative governments in a majority of provinces. Through the first mandate, the provinces and territories consistently challenged federal overtures in health care, dental care, child care, and other policy areas—pushing back against even the mention of national standards or conditions. At the height of the pandemic, some provincial and territorial governments chose to leave money on the table rather than to pursue federal policy priorities on child care and wage top-ups for essential workers.

Similarly, negotiations around the Canada Dental Care Plan and the fate of a fledgling national pharmacare program may continue to face hurdles from reluctant provincial governments without substantial new federal investment. The government’s landmark National Housing Strategy (NHS), a welcome return to housing policy for the federal government, is only modestly funded compared to the scale of the task, with many programs dependent on the provinces matching payments. The structure of the process has considerably impacted the delivery of much needed housing.

Last year, federal-provincial tensions ratcheted up significantly over environmental and energy policy as well. Saskatchewan and Alberta passed legislation that creates new tools that they believe (pending future constitutional challenge) will protect their economic interests from federal environmental policy. Alberta is also talking about opting out of the Canada Pension Plan and taking half of the fund’s assets with it.

These initiatives are the most recent attempts by the provinces and territories to carve out greater autonomy—of the type that Québec enjoys—fuelled in this instance by deep-seated regional anger and tension over perceived lack of support for the oil and gas industry and recognition of Western political interests. The regular, almost casual use of the notwithstanding clause by recalcitrant premiers—including to shield violations of constitutional and human rights such as Québec’s ban on public employees from wearing religious symbols in the course of their work or Saskatchewan’s Parents’ Bill of Rights requiring schools to seek parental consent before a child under 16 can use a different gender-related name or pronoun—has been criticized across the political spectrum.

The limits of progressive neoliberalism

While these institutional factors and external pressures limited the government’s policy options, its ideological leanings and the ongoing influence of corporate interests in Ottawa have played an equally significant role in hindering progress. Time and again, the Trudeau government grabbed for low-hanging fruit, then spun proposed programs as bold, progressive policy choices. The damaging excesses of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy were acknowledged, but the solutions on offer did little to disrupt the status quo.

Faced with overlapping crises of global proportions, the Trudeau government showed itself willing to use the spending powers of the state yet consistently favoured policies and programs designed to privatize wealth and socialize risk. Transportation policy offers a compelling example. The Trudeau government has been an active and generous funder of public transit. But rather than curtailing the privatization of Canada’s infrastructure, the government’s investment program led to the significant growth of public-private partnerships and contributed to the rising costs of transit construction projects.

On climate, the Trudeau record would be called “groundbreaking,” Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood writes in his chapter for the book, were it not for his government’s continued support for oil and gas extraction at home and environmentally and socially devastating mineral extraction projects abroad. Its lack of ambition and support of private market solutions have similarly hindered Canada’s efforts to meet the climate challenge. Banking on carbon pricing, investment tax credits and the largesse of private business was always a gamble, practically and politically. There’s no guarantee that markets will buy social goods regardless of the incentives on offer—as the failure of the Canada Infrastructure Bank so clearly demonstrated. Political opposition to the “carbon tax” has only intensified over time and now threatens the pursuit of the larger climate agenda.

Likewise, on the housing file, the government’s initiatives have helped ameliorate conditions modestly. But they do not fundamentally challenge the financialization of housing—the main source of skyrocketing rents and house prices. There were some worthy new initiatives in the 2024 federal budget to confront Canada’s housing crisis and the harrowing situation that renters currently face, but the government did not put up the needed funding to substantially expand non-market housing. By contrast, the Construction Loans Program for private developers just got 10 times more money from the feds. As James Hardwick wrote recently in Canadian Dimension, the NHS has “empower[ed] rentiers to seize a greater share of the market and expand the housing bubble.”

These policy choices can often look like caving in to powerful corporate interests. Corporate influence in departments like Natural Resources Canada has hindered nature protection actions that would constrain resource development and extraction and clearly contradicts Trudeau’s commitments to reconciliation with impacted Indigenous communities. The government’s repeated accommodation of brand-name pharmaceutical firm interests demonstrably watered-down policies to lower the cost of drugs for Canadians and undermined efforts to improve access to medicines internationally—including COVID-19 vaccines. Even the government’s celebrated new top tax bracket, and modest reforms to corporate taxation, allowed corporate profits to grow while the effective rate of corporate taxation has fallen through the Liberal’s years in office.

We would go as far as to say that the Liberal government has, over time, frittered away its 2015 mandate to undertake truly bold and progressive reforms. Often, the prime minister’s personal branding as an ally of women or racialized groups was shown to be empty or exaggerated, based on the policy record. In particular, as Nisha Nath writes, significant gaps and weaknesses in the government’s anti-racism strategy and policy reform efforts across the government speak to the failure to meaningfully confront Canada’s long history of racism and its devastating legacy.

Contradictions and policy flip-flops in the government’s immigration and refugee policy are now undermining public support for immigration. In 2015, the Trudeau Liberals explicitly rejected the Harper government’s law-and-order stand on immigration, promising a more welcoming and inclusive approach. In one of its first moves, for example, it promised to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees fleeing civil war; the prime minister personally met the first large group arriving on government transport. But the same treatment was not extended to Afghans in 2021 or to Palestinians currently trying to escape Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. The disconnect between promise and performance is also evident in its expansion of the temporary foreign worker program—responding to corporate demands for cheap labour—while resisting migrant workers’ calls for normalization and fair working conditions.

Questions about what the Trudeau government has substantively achieved is nowhere more important than with respect to the Liberals’ promises in 2015 to forge a new relationship with Indigenous peoples. By the end of Trudeau’s first majority, the Liberal government had passed or proposed 16 pieces of legislation directly impacting Indigenous peoples. But in many instances, follow-through was inadequate or non-existent. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, for instance, requires that Canada “take all measures necessary to ensure that the laws of Canada are consistent with the [46 articles of the] Declaration.”

Yet, there are still no real strategies for undertaking the scale and scope of this task in any meaningful way, as Hayden King and Niigaan Sinclair discuss in their separate chapters in The Trudeau Record. As much as Trudeau changed the tone of federal-Indigenous relations, the white settler state remains incapable of, or unwilling to, address grievances and inequities associated with historical and present-day forms of colonialism.

The next chapter

No government fulfils every promise it makes to voters at election time. Still, looking back on the Trudeau government’s performance over the past nine, sometimes chaotic years—with the exception of major policy achievements like child care, pandemic income supports and dental care—this government has consistently overcommitted and underdelivered. The gap between promises and performance is, in part, a consequence of implacable institutional, geopolitical or economic constraints, but it is also the result of policy choices freely made that could not have hoped to deliver on their stated goals.

We make no claims as to whether or to what extent this gap has affected public opinion about the Trudeau government, which has dropped significantly this past year. Clearly, those perceptions are fuelled by cartloads of misinformation as well as actual disappointment with federal policy—all taking place against a backdrop of heightened economic anxiety and fatigue with a long-serving government. We modestly hope that our book can help to inform the ongoing policy debate ahead of an election with potentially radical consequences for the shape of governments to come.

Katherine Scott is a Senior Researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, where she directs the centre’s gender equality and public policy work. She has worked in the community sector as a researcher, writer, and advocate over the past 25 years. Her current research explores policy alternatives for advancing women’s economic security in the post-pandemic economy.

Stuart Trew is a Senior Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and is the Director of the CCPA’s Trade and Investment Research Project. He has published widely on issues of trade and investment policy, investor–state dispute settlement, and trade-based regulatory cooperation.

Laura Macdonald is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. She has published numerous articles and edited collections on subjects including global civil society, Canadian development assistance and the political impact of North American integration.

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