Farewell Justin Trudeau, the last of the lockdown tyrants

So farewell then, Justin Trudeau, last of the lockdown tyrants. Or should that be the last of the democratically elected lockdown tyrants? After all, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are still in office. But setting aside those authoritarians, it’s difficult to think of a single democratic leader apart from Emmanuel Macron who was in power during the pandemic who has survived – and Macron will be gone soon. Their decision to lock down their countries, with all the collateral damage that entailed, is surely a factor in their demise.

In Trudeau’s case, inflation is the proximate cause, which rose to 8.1 per cent in 2022. Canada’s furlough programme played a part, as did the disruption to supply chains – not helped by Trudeau’s insistence in January 2022 that all truckers entering the country had to be fully vaccinated. Inflation is now back under control but public expenditure hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels and the finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned last month, partly because Canada’s fiscal deficit for 2023-24 was 50 per cent higher than expected. In short, Trudeau’s decision to shut down businesses and order people to remain in their homes in 2020-21 set the country on a path to ruin. Sound familiar?

Britain’s economic woes, themselves due to our government’s pandemic response, weren’t a major factor in Boris’s defenestration – although the lockdown policy was. But they were responsible for the failures of his two successors and ultimately doomed the party that was in charge when the crisis struck. Jacinda Ardern fell on her sword for similar reasons to Trudeau in January 2023, having more or less bankrupted New Zealand with her prolonged lockdown. Nicola Sturgeon went because her high-handed behaviour during the pandemic exhausted any goodwill towards her in the SNP.