Geoff Russ: Canada can only get better now that Trudeau is leaving

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Canadians should cheer up. The country is barreling towards rock bottom, which means before long, things can only start to get better.

Justin Trudeau’s underwhelming notice of resignation has rendered him a lame duck and the head of the government largely in name only. Now, the most unimpressive Liberal cabinet in history will claw, hiss, and scratch at each other for the honour of being prime minister for a couple of weeks or months, depending on how unlucky we get.

Trudeau’s departure coincides with president-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House on Jan. 20. He has a plan to upend the North American market and coerce Canada with “economic force” to “get rid” of its border with the United States. Maybe the upcoming hyena scrap that is the Liberal leadership race is actually one last ruse cooked up by Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, and her merry gang of advisers in the Prime Minister’s Office.

If Trump thinks Canada’s Liberal so-called government has boiled itself down to a squabbling kakistocracy run by our national clown show, he may come unprepared for a tough round of negotiations and be made to back down in the face of unexpected competency. But fate is cruel, and we will be led into negotiations by the aforementioned lame duck and the goons to replace him.

Their post-Trudeau leadership race will be a drawn-out contest to become the second-most disliked prime minister of 2025, instead of calling a general election. Rather than clearly laying out a plan for a rapid change of leadership to prepare for the storm coming from Washington, the Liberals have once again opted to move slowly.

The responsible thing would have been to dissolve this minority parliament so that voters could decide between more of this so-called government or a fresh majority that can govern and negotiate decisively.

When will the Liberals learn that their party is not Canada, and that their family tiffs do not take precedence over national, existential affairs? You must not hold your breath for it happening anytime soon, as the Liberals cannot tell their party apart from the public service.

The silver lining is that Trudeau’s exit has partly unshackled Liberal MPs from the iron grip of PMO enforcers, enabling them to be a little more honest with Canadians than was previously permitted.

It feels like a hex or witch’s curse has been lifted from Liberal MPs like Judy Sgro, who, after voting in favour of nearly every half-brained piece of legislation that accelerated Canada’s decline, has suddenly decided that the Liberals went too far left under Trudeau.

Perhaps Sgro will also tell us that the Pope is Catholic and it rains a good deal in Vancouver, where either incidentally or by design, bright rays of sunshine broke through the clouds after Trudeau announced his departure on Monday morning.

Sgro was not the only Liberal MP to speak their mind, with colleague Anthony Housefather of Montreal’s Mount Royal riding declaring on a local radio show that he was not a post-nationalist and wanted to see a more fiscally responsible Liberal Party.

Chrystia Freeland, one of the presumed frontrunners in the leadership race, cited Trudeau’s inability to remain fiscally prudent when she resigned as deputy prime minister and finance minister last month. If Housefather believes in thinking about fiscal matters for more than two minutes, Freeland would settle for 150 seconds.

In her own words, Freeland believes a $40-billion budget deficit is “keeping the powder dry,” and it is actually the $61.9-billion shortfall that took things too far. God help us.

Nonetheless, Canadians should be of good cheer. The end of our long political nightmare is in sight.

This is Canada after nearly a decade of Liberal government, whose wheels went off the tracks in 2020 and never stopped shovelling coal into the engine. But no matter how much these Trudeau Liberals loved running the train with one another, it could not break the foundation set down by generations of better governments.

We are heading for a new era of responsibility, order and correction after crashing out as a country and nation. Trump’s threats to force Canada into annexation through economic means, even if of little real merit, have galvanized a dormant sense of patriotism and nationalism among Canadians.

It turns out that after a decade of undermining our identity, pride, economy, and cultural bonds, the flame we know is still alight.

National Post