Conservative Party Expected to Win Canadian Election Despite Justin Trudeau Resigning

Embattled Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday morning that he plans to step down from both the premiership and the leadership of his governing Liberal Party – positions he has held since 2015 and 2013, respectively.

“I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister,” Trudeau said in an address outside his residence. His resignation will come “after the party selects its next leader through a robust nationwide, competitive process,” added. “Last night I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process.”

“This country deserves a real choice in the next election,” Trudeau continued. “And it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles I cannot be the best option in that election.”

He implied that it is his intention for the Liberals to select a new leader by the time of the 2025 Canadian federal election, which will be held on a still unspecified date in the coming months.

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If the party is able to choose a new leader before the election, he or she will, by extension, also succeed Trudeau as the country’s prime minister, but will most likely only hold the position for at most a few months.

Polling indicates that the Liberals are widely expected to lose the upcoming election to the opposition Conservative Party by a landslide of historic proportions in a manner many analysts have called an electoral “wipeout.”

“Over the holidays, I’ve also had a chance to reflect, and I’ve had long talks with my family about our future,” the prime minister said in his address. “My friends, as you all know, I’m a fighter. Every bone in my body has always told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians, I care deeply about this country.”

“I will always be motivated by what is in the best interest of Canadians,” Trudeau added. “The fact is, despite best efforts to work through it, Parliament has been paralyzed for months.”

Shortly following Trudeau’s announcement, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre – who will most likely be elected prime minister later this year – blasted the unpopular Liberals in a video message posted to X (formerly Twitter).

“Canadians desperate to turn the page on this dark chapter in our history might be relieved today that Justin Trudeau is finally leaving,” said Poilievre, who has led the Conservatives since 2022.

“But what has really changed?” the Conservative leader asked:

Every Liberal MP [Member of Parliament] in power today and every potential Liberal leadership contender fighting for the top job helped Justin Trudeau break the country over the last nine years. All Liberal politicians actively worked to pass into law the job-killing, inflationary carbon tax.

…

All Liberal politicians helped pass catch-and-release bail and house arrest for the most rampant re-offenders – policies that increased violent crime 50%, gun crime 116%, and hate crime by 250%.

“So, given that Liberal MPs and leadership contenders unanimously supported everything that Trudeau has done,” Polievre argued, “why dump him now, right before an election?”

According to BBC, top potential candidates to succeed Trudeau as Liberal leader – and therefore prime minister – include former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and longtime Central Bank Governor Mark Carney.

Other contenders include former British Columbia Premier Christy Clark and four current members of Trudeau’s cabinet: Anita Anand, François-Philippe Champagne, Mélanie Joly, and Dominic LeBlanc.

Freeland and Carney appear to be the names most discussed as Trudeau’s successors among multiple sources. Late Monday afternoon, leading prediction website Polymarket showed Carney with a 46% chance of becoming the next Liberal leader, and Freeland with a 36% chance.

As CatholicVote previously reported, before Freeland’s abrupt mid-December resignation from Trudeau’s cabinet she was “widely touted” as his probable heiress-apparent.

Freeland’s departure from the cabinet “blindsided” many individuals close to Trudeau, Canadian news source CTV News noted at the time. She had served as Trudeau’s deputy prime minister for five years and concurrently as his finance minister for four.

Carney, on the other hand, has never served in electoral office, and instead served seven years as governor of the Bank of England, and the previous five as governor of the Bank of Canada.

Despite Carney appearing to be an outsider to the current Canadian political environment, several of his critics have highlighted his support of Trudeau’s policies, such as the widely unpopular carbon tax.

Others have pointed to Carney’s combined 12 years as a central bank chief as evidence of his being a “globalist.”

Carney is a self-professed Catholic, despite being a member of the Liberal Party, which strongly opposes the Church’s teachings on sexuality, marriage, and abortion.

According to Canadian polling organization the Angus Reid Institute, Trudeau currently has a dismal approval rating, hovering around 22%.

A December 30 Angus Reid poll found that Trudeau’s Liberals would come in at a distant third place in the popular vote if the election were to be held that day.

The poll showed Poilievre’s Conservatives with 45% of the vote – a dominant showing in Canada’s multi-party system.

The left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) was in second place with 21%, followed by the governing Liberals with only 16% – just five points ahead of the Bloc Québécois (BQ), a regional party exclusively active in French-speaking Quebec.

An election modeler on X held that if the percentages recorded in the poll were modeled into Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system, the Liberals would lose 96% of their current seats in Parliament – a result that would spell utter annihilation for the party.

The modeler explained that if current polling were to hold, the Liberals would only win six seats in Parliament, down from their current 160.

The Liberal Party has been in continuous existence since Canada’s founding in 1867. Since then, the party’s lowest electoral result came in 2011 when it was reduced to 34 seats.

In 2015, just four years after the Liberals’ previous landslide loss and two years after Trudeau was elected as leader, he led the party to a historic comeback, resulting in a majority government.

Trudeau’s Liberals have since been re-elected twice, in 2019 and 2021. On both occasions, the party fell short of a majority, but remained in power with a plurality of seats – what is known as a “minority government” in Canada.

Also, in both 2019 and 2021, the Liberals narrowly lost the popular vote to the Conservatives, but still remained in charge of Canada due to winning more parliamentary seats.

Over the past few years in particular, Trudeau has maintained his grasp on the Canadian government due to the support of the NDP – which currently has the fourth-most seats in Parliament.

However, last month, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announced that he was withdrawing his support for the incumbent prime minister, whom Singh said had “failed” to “work for people, not the powerful.”

“The Liberals don’t deserve another chance,” Singh added at the time. “That’s why the NDP will vote to bring this government down, and give Canadians a chance to vote for a government who will work for them. No matter who is leading the Liberal Party, this government’s time is up.”

On the political spectrum, the NDP is to the left of the Liberals, particularly on economic issues.

While Trudeau has declared himself to be a Catholic, he has come under fire due to his pro-abortion and pro-LGBTQ policies – as well as his support for the narrative of “mass graves” at Catholic school properties, which have been found to be most likely a hoax.

LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.

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