Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on Monday, beginning the end of a tumultuous second term marked by a series of embarrassments, scandals, outrages, and buffoonery. Here are Trudeau’s biggest scandals and policy disasters:

The blackface scandal. Trudeau’s 2019 reelection campaign scrambled to perform damage control when embarrassing photos of Trudeau in blackface at a 2001 event were publicized. The blackface scandal returned in 2021 when more photos emerged.

Asked in 2021 if still more outrageous photos might emerge, Trudeau said he was “wary of being definitive about this” because he did not remember all the times that he had worn blackface, or what photos existed.

“The fact of the matter is that I’ve always – and you’ll know this – been more enthusiastic about costumes than is sometimes appropriate,” Trudeau told reporters, alluding to still more photos of himself wearing blackface to sing the Jamaican folk song “Day-O” as a teenager and the mockery he endured in 2018 for dressing in traditional Indian garb during his visit to that country.

Trudeau managed to survive the blackface scandal, although there were serious calls for his resignation in 2021, and his party may now regret missing the opportunity to force him out. His reputation for buffoonery contributed to the growing sense among Canadians over the past few months that he could not be trusted to negotiate against the returning Donald Trump.

WATCH: Harry Belafonte Sings Day-O:

Pandemic tyranny. Trudeau descended into outright tyranny during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, prompting a backlash from exasperated citizens that grew into the Freedom Convoy trucker protests. 

The Freedom Convoy was a union of thousands of middle-class Canadians pushing back against onerous vaccination mandates, but Trudeau contemptuously dismissed them as “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.”

WATCH: Canadian Truck Driver Explains Reasons for the Freedom Convoy:

Trudeau sank even further into tyranny by abusing counter-terrorism laws to crush the trucker protests. The move seemed like a political victory for him at the time, but it fueled the seismic turn of Canadian public opinion against Liberal Party arrogance. 

Trudeau’s actions were repeatedly rebuked as “unreasonable” by Canadian courts and slammed as “divisive” by the Conservative opposition. His likely successor, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, stood behind the Freedom Convoy and led his party to a crushing lead in the latest polls.

Immigration disaster. Out-of-control immigration has been one reason for the declining poll numbers of Trudeau and his party. The Trudeau administration announced sharp cuts in immigration in October 2024, but it was too little — and far too late.

By Trudeau’s final year, almost all population growth in Canada was due to immigration, and unemployment had soared to 14 percent among young people. Trudeau nearly doubled the immigration limits during his two terms and Canada’s social and legal systems were not prepared to handle the resulting stress.

A report in early December showed nearly half of the Syrian refugees admitted to Canada were still on government welfare almost five years after arriving in the country – and the rate of welfare dependency climbed for each successive wave of Syrian migration.

As his poll numbers collapsed, Trudeau offered obsequious apologies for allowing corporations and universities to exploit his generous programs for temporary foreign workers. Canadians dealing with skyrocketing home prices and a declining wage base were not in a forgiving mood. Neither were vindicated critics who recalled Trudeau smearing them as racists and xenophobes for sounding the alarm.

India delivered a final immigration embarrassment to Trudeau in the closing days of 2024 by publishing a law enforcement report that showed human smugglers were abusing Canada’s absurdly negligent student visa program to slip migrants into Canada, and then walk them across the border into the United States. Not all of those migrants survived the walk.

Political war with India. Trudeau publicly accused the Indian government of masterminding the assassination of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Vancouver in June 2023, but later admitted he had no “hard evidence” to back up his accusation.

The result was a bitter diplomatic feud with India that shows little sign of abating over a year later, with not much of an upside for anyone involved. Poilievre, the heavy favorite to become Canada’s next prime minister, has promised to prioritize mending Canada-India relations. On the other hand, Poilievre favors tighter controls on immigration, including from India, which displeases some Indian and Canadian-Indian leaders.

Whether India had anything to do with Nijjar’s death, and whether it has interfered in Canadian politics against other Sikh leaders, remain open questions. Trudeau’s allegations were not wholly implausible, but “plausible” is very different from “provable.” The prime minister’s critics accuse him of picking a fight with India that he had absolutely no strategy for winning.

Trudeau had already annoyed India with several gaffes during a 2018 trip that made him look unserious to his domestic critics and disrespectful to his hosts. One of those blunders was inviting a convicted Sikh separatist terrorist named Jaspal Atwal to a dinner reception in New Delhi – an invitation the Canadian government clumsily withdrew amid a storm of controversy.

Humiliation by China. Trudeau’s government was thoroughly humiliated by Communist China during the Meng Wanzhou debacle, when Beijing took a few Canadians hostage and strong-armed Trudeau’s government into letting the CFO of Huawei skate on charges of fraud and evading sanctions from the United States.

In April 2024, a Canadian intelligence commission concluded that China “clandestinely and deceptively interfered in both the 2019 and 2021 elections” – and the interference benefited candidates from Trudeau’s Liberal Party. 

Beijing wanted Canadian Conservative candidates critical of the Uyghur genocide, China’s cybersecurity threat, and other issues to lose their elections. The Conservatives estimated Chinese interference could have cost them up to nine seats in parliament.

Trudeau insisted it was “improbable” that China tipped any races in his favor, while his critics accused him of a cover-up and demanded a thorough independent probe.

Medical Assistance in Dying. Canada became the medically-assisted suicide capital of the world under Trudeau – and the enormous surge in deaths is giving second thoughts to even some MAID (medical assistance in dying) supporters.

Euthanasia has been authorized for some very dubious cases, doctors are expressing deep reservations about implementing the laws as written, and critics feel all of their worst-case predictions have come true.

The next step in the MAID process was to officially authorize assisted suicide for people who suffer solely from mental illness, but that expansion has been delayed and the Conservatives have pledged to scuttle it completely. Both proponents and opponents of medical assistance in dying have accused Trudeau of political cowardice for punting the next phase of Canada’s great suicide experiment until 2027 instead of making a firm decision.

The Qaddafi bribe scandal. Trudeau became embroiled in a massive scandal known as the SNC-Lavalin affair, named after a Canadian construction company that was accused of paying bribes to the government of Libya under its late dictator Moammar Qaddafi.

The well-connected Canadian company was relentlessly pursued by Jody Wilson-Raybould, former justice minister and attorney general. Wilson-Raybould testified that Trudeau and his top aides interfered with her investigation and pressured her to give SNC-Lavalin a sweetheart deal to settle the case or to drop it entirely.

Wilson-Raybould backed up her allegations with a trove of emails, text messages, and a recorded conversation in which former Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick ominously informed her that Trudeau was “quite determined” to halt the SNC-Lavalin prosecution “one way or another.”

Some Liberals were furious at Wilson-Raybould for betraying the party by recording her conversation with Wernick, although it was not illegal. Trudeau expelled her from the party, along with another female former minister named Jane Philpott. The scandal almost wrecked Trudeau during and after his 2019 reelection, in no small part because it involved Trudeau and a group of powerful men bullying a female minister — who also happened to be a member of a Canadian indigenous tribe.

Wildfire disasters. Forest management and wildfire response has been an utter disaster during Trudeau’s second term and the prime minister could think of no better response than to vaguely blame “climate change” – an excuse rejected by serious scientists and forestry experts.

Forestry experts compared the Trudeau government’s negligent policies to priming an atomic bomb in Canada’s oil-country forests. The bomb went off during the last few wildfire seasons, unleashing killer blazes in drought-stricken areas that burned thousands of hectares and devastated towns.

Critics blamed negligent forest management – preceding Trudeau but growing worse under his administration – for packing the forests with deadwood and uncontrolled brush growth. Trudeau’s primary response was to demand increased carbon taxes, which join other environmentalist policies in making things worse because they reduce the amount of forest inhabited, and responsibly managed, by humans. Spending policies driven by the climate change agenda also tend to underfund programs that would actually make a difference during wildfire season, such as hiring more firefighters and buying them top-shelf equipment.

Saluting a Nazi soldier. Some of the above-mentioned scandals were caused by Trudeau and his officials taking a very relaxed approach to vetting and research, as with the Sikh terrorist Trudeau invited to dinner in India. An equally embarrassing example came from September 2023, when Trudeau joined in a standing ovation for a Ukrainian “hero” who was reportedly a soldier for Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

Trudeau and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were both at Parliament in Ottawa when the Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, honored Yaroslav Hunka as a “veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.”

“He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service,” Rota said, to thunderous applause from many of the attendees, including Zelensky and Trudeau.

Hunka’s service in World War 2 was conducted in the service of the Waffen SS, a detail astonished historians said the Canadian government could have easily researched. The unit was linked to several atrocities, although it was not convicted of war crimes in postwar trials.