The Weekly Wrap: Is this finally the end for Justin Trudeau?

In The Weekly Wrap Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was.

Is the Liberals’ leftward lurch here to stay?

It seemed like this week almost more than any before it, one could envision a world in which Justin Trudeau was no longer the Liberal Party leader or Canada’s prime minister. New polling from Ipsos that showed nearly 70 percent of Canadians think it’s time that he step down signaled that we may soon be entering a post-Trudeau era.

Speculating about what politics will look like when he’s gone is a bit fraught—especially since he continues to say that he’s not leaving—but it’s hard not to consider in light of his decade-long dominance over Liberal politics and the country’s politics more generally.

As we discussed on this week’s Hub Roundtable, it’s pretty clear that Trudeau has shifted the Liberal Party to the Left of its previous spot on Canada’s contemporary political spectrum. It was an effective political strategy in the short term. It helped the Liberals to marginalize the NDP and climb from third to first in the 2015 election.

But in hindsight, it set up the incoming Trudeau government with a poor governing framework.