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Corporate Canada has greeted Justin Trudeau’s resignation with a mixture of relief and trepidation. The outgoing prime minister “read the room and made the right call,” said Candace Laing, CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, calling for an end to “wasteful spending and over-taxation.” But the power vacuum in Ottawa comes at a perilous moment for a G7 economy already battling slow growth and weak productivity, given Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian imports.
Trudeau’s name is now mostly uttered “after a swear word” in Canada’s business community, according to Andrew Willis in the Globe and Mail, who argued that “higher taxes, heavy regulation, and a general sense this government just doesn’t care have destroyed the Liberal brand in corporate circles.”
For Roger Martin, the renowned management professor who spent 15 years as Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, there was “no place more negative to go” for Canadian companies after the leadership of a former school drama teacher who, he said, displayed little understanding of business.
“He gave me no sense he understood what the job [of prime minister] was,” Martin told Semafor: “I don’t think there’s anything worse than a guy who’s good at snowboarding and reasonably good at teaching. There is no downside to this.”
It wasn’t just business leaders. Trudeau also managed to alienate union workers, including the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the country’s largest. “There is no question that Canada needs new leadership and, after a decade in power, the Liberals have not earned another chance, no matter who is leading them,” CUPE said in a statement endorsing the New Democratic Party. “The time has come for a shift that truly prioritizes the well-being of Canadians.”
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Italy is now the only member of the G7 that has not had a government turnover in the last 12 months.
Trudeau’s premiership began to unravel last month, after he told then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland that she would soon be replaced in favor of Mark Carney, according to a Bloomberg report. Freeland opted to resign, launching a blistering, public fusillade.
“You and I have found ourselves at odds about the best path forward for Canada,” she wrote of Trudeau. His response to Trump’s tariff threats — a widely criticized flight down to Mar-a-Lago among them — amounted to “costly political gimmicks.”
Instead, Freeland wrote, the government ought to have pursued “a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring.”
Even those business leaders who expressed gratitude for Trudeau’s three terms of service concurred with that sentiment. “It is unfortunate ... that the relationship between the federal government and the private sector was often at odds, especially around the need for fiscal responsibility and policies that enable long-term economic growth, including embracing our energy abundance,” said Goldy Hyder, CEO of the Business Council of Canada.