Justin Trudeau’s Exit and Canada’s Rocky Future in the Trump Era
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Nora Loreto on how political disarray in Canada’s political elite in the face of MAGA taunting.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer and Nora Loreto on how political disarray in Canada’s political elite in the face of MAGA taunting.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a news conference at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, Canada on January 6, 2025.
(Dave Chan / AFP / Getty Images)Donald Trump has repeatedly talked in the last two months about wanting to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. While this bluster is unlikely to lead to any real territorial expansion, it is having the effect of destabilizing some long-held allies of the United States. In Canada, Trump’s threat of a tariff war and annexation was a precipitating cause of the already-unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation.
While the Canadian political elite has been rattled by Trump, they don’t have any effective response for defending their own sovereignty. In truth, Canada’s national sovereignty has already been weakened by decades of neoliberalism, a point made by Canadian journalist Nora Loreto. For this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked to Nora about Trump’s threats and Canada’s disarray.

Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Even as he imposes authoritarianism on the United States, Donald Trump has given a new lease on life to the center left in many other countries. Canada is holding an election at the end of April under the shadow of the American presidents threat to turn it into the 51st state. Until Trump’s inauguration, the Conservative Party of Canada had a commanding lead. But voters are changing their minds fast and it now looks like the Liberal Party under new leader Mark Carney will win the election.
To talk about the quick revolution in Canadian politics I spoke to Luke Savage, a widely published journalist and substracker. We take up not just Canada’s likely rejection of Trumpism but also the question of whether Carney’s technocratic centrism really offers an alternative. If there is to be a new Canadian nationalism, will it have more substance than Carney offers?
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