Justin Trudeau
The eldest son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, he brought an optimistic style and a progressive agenda to office, won three elections, and stepped aside as living costs, poor polling and party unrest eroded his support.
Personality
Trudeau came to politics from teaching and youth work, and he has favoured an optimistic, values-first style. Declaring victory in 2015, he invoked Wilfrid Laurier's 'sunny ways' approach to bringing people together, and his government built its identity around progressive and feminist social policy. He was willing to make large, visible commitments early, from legalising recreational cannabis and introducing federal carbon pricing to the Canada Child Benefit and a national child-care plan. Not every early promise survived: electoral reform, a prominent 2015 pledge, was not fulfilled.
Under pressure
Trudeau's decade in office brought repeated scrutiny. Canada's ethics commissioner twice found that he had broken conflict-of-interest law, over a holiday on the Aga Khan's island and over the SNC-Lavalin affair, and in 2019 photographs and video of him in brownface and blackface were published; he apologised, saying he should have known better. In 2022 he became the first prime minister to invoke the Emergencies Act, against the Freedom Convoy protests, and a Federal Court later ruled against the move. He held on through two minority governments, but after his deputy prime minister resigned in December 2024 and polls kept falling, he announced his resignation in January 2025.
The arc
Born in Ottawa on Christmas Day 1971 while his father was prime minister, Trudeau worked as a French and mathematics teacher in Vancouver and later chaired the youth program Katimavik. He won the Montreal riding of Papineau in 2008, became Liberal leader in 2013, and led the party to a majority government in 2015. Minority governments followed in 2019 and 2021, alongside the pandemic, the renegotiation of NAFTA into CUSMA and, at the end, a trade war with the United States. He left office on 14 March 2025, handing over to Mark Carney. In 2026 he launched a production company with his former chief of staff Katie Telford.
Legacy
Trudeau became one of Canada's longest-serving prime ministers, and his record is still argued over. News retrospectives point to cannabis legalisation, federal carbon pricing, the Canada Child Benefit, Indigenous reconciliation efforts, the pandemic response and the new North American trade agreement as the main marks of his tenure, along with gender-parity policies that won praise from progressives. The same coverage links his decline to rising grocery and housing costs, caucus unrest and ethics controversies. As Pierre Trudeau's son, he was also the first Canadian prime minister to be the child of a previous prime minister.
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