The Canadian prime minister, who just announced his resignation, was asked about the arguments some have made over the Democratic Party being “out of touch” following the 2024 elections, in which the party lost control of both the White House and the Senate and failed to flip the House. Trudeau argued that “progressives” need to remain focused on the economy and the cost of living, claiming that Canada’s economy is set to grow faster than the U.S. partially due to removing roadblocks for women and minorities entering the workforce.
“That’s an economic narrative, that’s understanding that you do better when everyone has a chance to contribute fully,” Trudeau said on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki. “But you easily turn that into a ‘woke’ argument that says, ‘Oh, you’re just working for minorities and women and you’re not taking care of the economy.’ Well, the capacity of the political Right, and quite frankly, social media, to gin up that kind of dynamic and fall into culture wars and divisions that actually don’t stand up to the hard economic truth of the growth we’ve been able to create in Canada is part of the challenge we have.”
Trudeau added that this challenge stems from one that the world in general faces, in that the public does not want to hear about long-term policies and instead wants their lives to “get better right away.” He also noted how some world leaders are promising to make immediate improvements, something he acknowledged is “very attractive sometimes” even when the ability to deliver on these promises is unclear.
The outgoing prime minister’s assessment of the challenge that social media poses to some in the world comes after Meta announced that it would be ditching its fact-checkers and instead utilize community notes, a feature popularized on Elon Musk’s X. Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, explained that the new feature would help eliminate fact-checkers “political bias” by relying “on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read” instead of “some so-called expert.”
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Trudeau also addressed President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated aspirations to annex Canada, which he considers a distraction from the financial impacts that Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canada will have.
Following Trudeau’s resignation, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson celebrated the prime minister’s decision and hoped it would end the “disaster” of his leadership. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has emerged as Trudeau’s likely successor following the announcement of his resignation, with Poilievre receiving Peterson’s support.
