This week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided to make the inevitable official: He said he was stepping down as both the leader of the Liberal Party and of his country.
“Over the holidays, I’ve also had a chance to reflect and have had long talks with my family about our future. Throughout the course of my career, any success I have personally achieved has been because of their support and with their encouragement,” Trudeau said in his Monday remarks.
“So last night, over dinner, I told my kids about the decision that I’m sharing with you today: I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process.”
JUST IN: Donald Trump takes a victory lap, once again calls on Canada to become the 51st state of the United States after Justin Trudeau announced his resignation.
“Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State.” pic.twitter.com/XyYW7wktHx
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 6, 2025
Of course, this just means that the Liberal Party will find a new sacrificial lamb; under Canada’s parliamentary system, elections must take place before Oct. 20, and unless Trudeau’s party can find someone infinitely more likable than him, the Conservative Party is likely to take over.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s poll tracker gives the Conservatives a 98 percent chance of winning an outright majority if the numbers stay the way they are. The Liberals are over 24 points down, 44.2 percent to 20.1 percent, and are projected to win between 200 and 240 seats in Parliament; only 172 is needed for an outright majority.
Thus, it’s probably good to get a read on the man who’s likely to become the next prime minister of our neighbor to the north, if all things go as they seem to be going: Pierre Poilievre, who some people are calling Canada’s Donald Trump.
Just make sure you know who is calling him this before you try to trap him with a dirty question, that’s all I’m saying.
If you’ve never made Poilievre’s acquaintance — it’s pronounced paul-LEE-ev, just to preempt that question — the best video to get a sense of the man is a viral video from October 2023 when he made a visit to a British Columbia orchard.
Don Urquhart, editor of a local media outlet known as the Times Chronicle, tried to pin him down while he was chewing on some of the produce from the apple orchard, saying that the Conservative Party leader was “obviously taking the populist pathway.”
“What does that mean?” Poilievre interjected in between chews on the apple.
“Well, appealing — appealing to people’s more emotional levels, I would guess,” Urquhart answered, stumbling a bit. “Certainly you — certainly you, certainly you tap very strong ideological language quite frequently.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“‘Left-wing,’ you know, this and that, ‘right wing,’ you know, I mean, it’s that type of –” Urquhart said.
“I never really talk about left or right,” Poilievre said. “I don’t really believe in that.”
Whoops. Urquhart didn’t look pleased at how this was going, so he tried a different tack: “A lot of people would say that you’re simply taking a page out of the Donald Trump –“
“A lot of people? Like which people would say that?” Poilievre asked.
“Well, I’m sure a great many Canadians,” the reporter said, without being able to name one.
Urquhart then tried to get to the “point of the question,” which is why Canadians would trust Poilievre with their vote when he was “taking the page out of Donald Trump’s book.”
“What are you talking about?” Poilievre asked. “What page? Can you give me a page? Give me the page. You keep saying.”
He could not and rephrased the question to a basic one about why anyone would vote for him — which Poilievre answered ably by pointing to his aim of making “common sense common in this country.”
If you notice in the video of the incident, beginning at the 2:00 minute mark, it took just 11 seconds for the reporter to turn into a stammering mess:
It’s hard to know what’s the best here: the apple, the smirk, or the devastating questions that left the reporter flailing.
Again, this is but a short bit of why Poilievre is so likable, although it’s probably the best-known clip — so much so that even Elon Musk was reposting it after Trudeau’s decision to exit:
Another masterpiece
pic.twitter.com/K65PryiS3U— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2025
Now, of course, a lot can happen between now and Canada calling elections — but not that much, and this is the guy who’s going to have to dig our neighbor to the north out of a big hole Trudeau’s Liberals have gotten them into.
However, you’ve got to love the fact that this guy’s likely going to be the one leading the way. How about them apples, Justin?
