Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on Monday, launching both the process of his Liberal Party choosing a new leader and his country electing a new prime minister. 

Caretaker Trudeau. Trudeau said he would remain in office as a “caretaker” prime minister until the Liberal Party chooses a new leader. He asked Governor General Mary Simon to “prorogue” Parliament until March 24, essentially forcing the Canadian legislature into recess until that date. This means Parliament cannot hold a confidence vote to force Trudeau out of office until prorogation ends in March.

“Parliament has been paralyzed for months after what has been the longest session of a minority parliament in Canadian history,” Trudeau complained on Monday, perhaps hoping to deflect attention from the detail that prorogation will guarantee the deeply unpopular prime minister remains in power for another three months.

Trudeau previously abused prorogation in August 2020, when he forced Parliament to recess while an ethics scandal was embarrassing his administration. Critics said prorogation also gave Trudeau a chance to walk away from his responsibilities as prime minister at the height of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

“Shutting down parliament in the middle of a pandemic and an economic crisis, with a planned sitting next week and committees working hard to get answers and solutions for Canadians is wrong,” Jagmeet Singh, leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) said at the time.

Singh changed his tune on Monday and supported Trudeau’s final prorogation. The Conservative Party of Canada, which has needled Singh for cutting deals with Trudeau and backing down from every confidence vote that would have removed the disastrous prime minister, noted that Singh’s new enthusiasm for prorogation coincides with the qualifying date for his government pension:

Conservatives have been accusing Singh for months of maneuvering to keep the Trudeau government in power until his pension came through. Singh said on Monday that his party will vote to dissolve the Trudeau administration as soon as prorogation ends in March.

Liberal Party leadership race. Trudeau said on Monday that his party would choose a new leader through a “robust, nationwide, competitive process,” but no one is quite certain what that process will look like or if it can be completed by March 24. It is very unlikely the Liberals will have a new leader before January 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated for his second term as U.S. president.

Liberal Party President Sachit Mehra said on Monday the contest to replace Trudeau would begin this week. One of the challenges facing Mehra is that Trudeau leaves no clear successor. His strongest and most trusted supporter in the party was Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland – but the political cataclysm that ended with Trudeau’s resignation included her angry resignation after Trudeau attempted to force a humiliating demotion upon her for disagreeing with his fiscal policies.

Freeland is still a contender to lead the Liberal Party, but she has many critics who view her as no improvement over the despised prime minister who forced her resignation. Freeland was too close to Trudeau for too long and was instrumental in executing the policies that have become unpopular with the majority of Canadians. Her last-minute turn against Trudeau’s wildly irresponsible spending is unlikely to make her a match for the heavyweight Conservative contender for prime minister, Pierre Poilievre.

Freeland also faces the problem that one reason Trudeau’s support collapsed among Liberals was the sense he could not go toe-to-toe with U.S. President Donald Trump in border and tariff negotiations – and Trump does not think highly of Chrystia Freeland.

“Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!” Trump said in December when Freeland resigned.

Trump’s disdain for Freeland dates back to at least 2018, when he was renegotiating trade deals with Mexico and Canada during his first administration. Trump sniffed that he did not “like their representative very much” when Freeland was dispatched to negotiate with him.

Other top candidates for Liberal leader include former central banker Mark Carney, who served as an adviser to Trudeau over the past few months after rebuffing Trudeau’s efforts to woo him for Freeland’s old job as finance minister; transportation minister Anita Anand, who was defense minister in 2021 but was reshuffled into other posts, possibly because Trudeau thought she was too determined to take his post; Francois-Philippe Champagne, minister for science and industry, whose ties to Quebec might make him politically attractive as Liberal leader.

Also expected to throw their hats in the ring are Foreign Minister Melanie Joly and Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who might suffer in the eyes of fellow Liberals because they were too close to Trudeau and too closely associated with his policies. LeBlanc took over as finance minister after the resignation of Freeland, who held that post in addition to being deputy prime minister, so he might have trouble winning over Liberals who thought Freeland was treated poorly.

An interesting dark-horse contender could be former British Columbia premier Christy Clark, who openly stated in October that she wanted to be “part of the conversation on the future direction of the Liberal Party and of the country” if Trudeau resigned. Clark has been out of the political limelight since her tenure as premier ended in 2017, but she was a vocal critic of Trudeau who could be an appealing face for the Liberals if they want to signal a sharp turn away from the former prime minister’s policies.

The Liberals find themselves in a situation not dissimilar to the Democrat Party in the United States: years of an unpopular leader have left the party without superstar candidates to take the helm. Canadian Liberals are even worse off because Trudeau was fairly ruthless about knocking down prominent party members like Freeland and Anand who might have threatened his grip on power.

“It’s very much from sunny ways to the haze and dust of the detritus and rubble that is left after ten years of Justin Trudeau’s helming of the Liberal Party,” pollster Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid Institute pithily remarked to the Washington Post on Monday.

Replacing Trudeau before the next election. The Liberal Party might hope to install a new leader and transform them into the sitting prime minister before prorogation ends, but Trudeau ended up as the leader of a minority government who relied on coalition partners like Singh’s NDP and the Bloc Quebecois to keep his seat, and those partners are signaling they want a fresh start with a new election.

“There’s no significant difference between the Liberal Party that we know and the Liberal Party that will be presented to us after there is a new leader,” Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet said on Monday.

In addition to promising that he will vote to bring the Liberal government down as soon as Parliament is back in session, Singh has been rampaging across the airwaves and newspapers of Canada in a spirited effort to convince voters the Liberals are done for and his NDP is now the primary left-wing opposition to Poilievre and his Conservatives.

Singh might just be able to pull it off, since the Liberal Party is polling at 16 percent right now and NDP has surpassed them with 21 percent. The Conservatives are sitting higher than both of them combined with 45 percent.

The next federal election. The next Canadian federal election is scheduled for October 2025 but, as Trudeau’s government came apart at the seams, most observers expect that date to be bumped up.

Singh periodically threatened to withdraw NDP’s support for the government in early 2024 over a variety of issues, which is one reason Conservatives have been taunting him about keeping his powder dry until his pension was secure. 

Some analysts also believe the Liberals wanted to call an election in early 2025 to dump the unpopular Trudeau, but they were afraid to make a move while the Conservatives held such a commanding lead in the polls. The Liberals seemed to be gambling that Poilievre would become unpopular after winning leadership of the Conservative Party in 2022, but they lost that gamble badly, as the Liberals have only slid further and further behind their rivals in the polls.

If Singh makes good on his pledge to join the Conservatives in voting against the Throne Speech when Parliament comes back into session – the formal act by which Parliament rejects the sitting government – a new election would be triggered. Canada can organize an election much faster than America (so can everyone else, frankly) so it seems likely that Canadians will head to the polls in March or April.

Under the Canadian system, the parties compete for seats in Parliament, then the winning party forms a government, and its leader becomes prime minister. If the winning party does not have enough seats to install a prime minister on its own, it must form a coalition with allied parties, establishing a “minority government.”

Trudeau became prime minister in 2015 with a majority government, but he was returned to office in 2019 as the leader of a minority party.