Is Justin Trudeau Ready to Take a Walk in the Snow?

As a blizzard swept Ottawa in February 1984, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau decided to take a walk. The next morning, he woke up and organized a hasty meeting of his senior staff to let them know that he was retiring.

Trudeau’s walk in the snow has, in the 40 years since it happened, become shorthand in Canadian politics for taking some time to reflect, sleeping on it, and quitting.

Today, many in Ottawa are checking the weather forecast for storms, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—Pierre Trudeau’s son—faces mounting calls to take his own walk in the snow. Down a finance minister and facing the dueling prospects of an internal revolt and a snap election triggered by the opposition parties, the prime minister has, nevertheless, refused.

Over the past year, Justin Trudeau’s personal popularity has sailed off a cliff, accompanied by support for his Liberal Party. Facing the back end of an inflationary spiral, a cross-country housing crisis, declining social services, rising taxes, economic sluggishness, and a general fatigue with a leader who’s been in power since 2015, things were already looking dour for Trudeau.

But, as I wrote during his first real period of turmoil in 2019, Trudeau’s support inside his own party borders on cultish. So, even if his unpopularity prompted some teeth gnashing, his party remained—at least, up to this week—loyal.

Even after his party suffered a humiliating special election defeat in Toronto in June—the equivalent of the U.S. Democratic Party losing a special election in midtown Manhattan—calls for Trudeau to step aside, at least from his own partisans, remained rare.

Publicly, at least. This summer, I happened to sit next to Steven Guilbeault, Trudeau’s environment minister, in a train station lounge as he loudly mused about how best to quell an internal “campaign to show [Trudeau] the door.” That campaign remained in the shadows for months. Another election loss, this time in Montreal, ramped up the outside speculation, but Trudeau’s patriots again remained  mum. The few politicians who piped up with the suggestion that Trudeau ought to retire were not running for reelection, so their criticisms were brushed off.

Among the 100-odd members of Parliament who plan on carrying the Liberal Party’s banner into the next election, virtually every one of them have bent the knee to Trudeau.

Canadian politicians have always inclined toward a lemming-like loyalty to their party leader. But this is quite a different level.

In the early 2000s, the Liberal Party was rankled by infighting amid a power struggle between Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his finance minister, Paul Martin. That fight ultimately resolved in favor of Martin, who went on to win one election before being turfed two years later.

More recently, the opposition Conservative Party metaphorically defenestrated its mild-mannered leader in an Australian-style caucus spill in 2022. The party instead opted for populist Pierre Poilievre—who has successfully wielded all manner of anti-woke shibboleths and conspiracy theories, from becoming an enthusiastic booster of the anti-vaccine Freedom Convoy movement to declaring that he would not let the globalists force him to “eat bugs.” (Poilievre, polling high, has since endeared himself to Elon Musk and counts U.S. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s college best friend as one of his closest allies.)

But Trudeau has never been one for public spats. That’s why the past week has been particularly surreal.

Rumors have percolated for months that Trudeau has plotted a reset of his government. In part to placate internal dissenters—who had been passing around a gentle letter calling for him to reevaluate his political future—and in part because he had a number of retiring and underperforming ministers, Trudeau planned a cabinet shuffle.

As part of that shuffle, Trudeau planned on bringing in Mark Carney, who has served as a governor of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, as Canada’s finance minister. When he informed his current finance minister Chrystia Freeland, about the move, she balked.

Freeland, who also serves as Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, had been at odds with her boss for weeks. Trudeau, desperate to reverse their party’s popularity slide, had wanted to send checks worth 250 Canadian dollars (about $175 in the United States) to the majority of the country. Ostensibly a measure to ease the hurt of inflation, it was a naked attempt to curry favor. Freeland pushed hard against the move, insisting that it was an imprudent use of money, particularly as the Canadian debt is mounting. The move looked only more absurd as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump turned up the temperature on a possible ruinous trade war with Canada.

Facing the prospect of being demoted for her intransigence, Freeland opted to quit instead. In her resignation letter, published last Monday, Freeland reminded the prime minister that Canada could soon be facing 25 percent tariffs from the United States. “That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment,” she wrote.

The move briefly turned off the gravity in Ottawa. A planned fiscal update that Freeland was supposed to deliver, scheduled for Monday morning, was canceled in a panic. Members of the Canadian Parliament raced to the capital—including some who were supposed to be campaigning in a special election on the West coast. (Which they lost miserably.) The Liberals called a hasty caucus meeting, where Trudeau pleaded with his party to keep his job.

The meeting ended, and the parliamentarians filed out one by one or snuck out through the back door, with most refusing to comment on the prime minister’s future.

By the end of the week, things had returned back to a strange calm. Trudeau has made no signal that he intends to leave—and nobody has the power to remove him until, at least, January.

Unlike the Conservatives, who installed an ejector seat in the leader’s chair a decade ago, Trudeau’s caucus has no power to remove a leader. (Unless they just lost an election.) Parliament will have a chance to express a vote of no confidence in Trudeau’s government early next year, though it is far from clear that such a vote will succeed—the center-left New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Québécois have continued to prop up his unpopular government.

Instead, the country—including many of Trudeau’s allies—will spend the holidays watching the weather and wondering if, or when, Trudeau will finally venture out for his walk in the snow.