A sort-of goodbye, anyway. Trudeau is retiring as head of the party and then once the party figures out who his replacement might be he will resign as PM as well.
Or something like that:
From [a] Canadian friend: He’s effectively shut down government until March and then will slow rollout a leadership race that will push the election out as long as possible.
That means the election likely won’t happen until October.
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Trudeau told reporters he decided to step down now because it’s become clear that he would not be leader due to internal party conflicts that he cannot be the one to carry the liberal standard into the next election.
And of course it’s all-important to the left that conservatives must be stopped! The consensus is that conservatives under Pierre Poilievre are poised to win the next election.
If it seems to you that Trudeau has been in power forever, that might be because he’s actually been PM for ten years. And if you wonder how long a Canadian PM can serve, the answer is that there are no term limits in Canada. Trudeau has served long enough to have thoroughly worn out his welcome, but he’s not even close to beating the previous Canadian record:
Under this system, William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, holding office for a total of 21 years and 154 days over three non-consecutive terms.
When I read that, I immediately suspected that (the aptly-named) King may have served at roughly the same time as our FDR, during the Depression and WWII. That turns out to have been the case, and he had other similarities to FDR as well:
William Lyon Mackenzie King OM CMG PC (December 17, 1874 – July 22, 1950) was a Canadian statesman and politician who was the tenth prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948. A Liberal, he was the dominant politician in Canada from the early 1920s to the late 1940s.[a] King is best known for his leadership of Canada throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War. In August 1944, he ordered the displacement of Japanese Canadians out of the British Columbia Interior, mandating that they either resettle east of the Rocky Mountains or face deportation to Japan after the war. He played a major role in laying the foundations of the Canadian welfare state …
There are parallels and trends among Western countries. FDR and King, Reagan and Thatcher, and now – hopefully – Trump and Poilievre.