How Justin Trudeau captured the zeitgeist, and how he lost it

TORONTO — In his early days as prime minister, Justin Trudeau was “cool.” In the year that followed his majority sweep into power, he appeared in the pages of Vogue, on the cover of a Marvel comic book and on “The Daily Show,” chatting with an up-and-coming Hasan Minhaj.

But the same strategy experts and observers say put him in the public eye and won him the youth vote in 2015 may have brought damning scrutiny as political tides changed, particularly as his rivals adopted his online style.

“He created a movement in 2015 and he got a lot of young people engaged,” said Alfred Burgesson, who sat on the Prime Minister’s Youth Council from 2019 until 2021.

“The same people that are asking for change today, or looking for a different leader today — a lot of these young people, they started to pay attention because of it.”

Trudeau announced plans to step down as prime minister and Liberal leader on Monday following weeks of pressure from within his party. He said he would resign just as soon as a new leader is chosen.

And though sentiment has changed over the years, Burgesson, who is now 28, said Trudeau helped many young people feel seen and heard, in part by establishing the youth council.

At the time, he said, the way people talked about Trudeau was “incredibly positive.”

Elections Canada data from the 2015 election showed that 57 per cent of voters aged 18 to 24 cast a ballot, an increase of 18.3 percentage points from the almost 39 per cent recorded in the 2011 election. And research conducted by Abacus Data following the 2015 vote suggested Liberals won the support of 45 per cent of young voters.

Mireille Lalancette, a professor of political communications at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, noted that Trudeau was the first major party leader in Canada to use Instagram in 2015.

“People were using Twitter, but Instagram is more of an identity-centric, image-centric medium,” she said.

Trudeau used those images to project a persona that was at once youthful and confident, sensitive and thoughtful: a leader worthy of respect, she said.

“These were his best years because people were rooting for him. He was also really popular. He was also able to reach out to the younger generation,” Lalancette said.

He was a self-proclaimed feminist, an optimist who promised “sunny ways.” He presented himself as a family man, Lalancette noted, and said he valued reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

He also reached out beyond Canada’s borders.

His “steamy” photo shoot for Vogue magazine with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau made waves internationally in December 2015. He graced the cover of Rolling Stone a couple years later. His likeness — though not his voice — appeared on “The Simpsons” in a 2019 episode that saw Lisa Simpson nurse a crush on him.

“There was a moment where he was really a supernova,” said Alex Marland, a professor of political science at Acadia University.

“Back here in Canada, we were getting all sorts of news stories that were talking about how he was being mobbed in the Philippines, or if he was going out to Switzerland, there were people there wanting to meet him.”

Marland said Canadians had a sort of parasocial relationship with Trudeau at that time. He’d grown up in the public eye because of his father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, so people felt like they knew him.

“They did not like anybody criticizing Justin Trudeau, because they saw him as almost a family member,” he said.

But Marland said that started to change in 2018 when Trudeau and his family took a much-ridiculed trip to India. They were photographed, over and over again, wearing clothes more appropriate for a wedding than a state visit.

“People started seeing it as: he’s a bit of a phoney,” he said.

“And all of a sudden, now, for some people, they were able to move away from giving him the benefit of the doubt to realizing that instead of (being) authentic, he was actually manipulating them.”

Politicians seldom go out on a high note, Marland said, but in Trudeau’s case the highs were higher and the lows were lower. His image had become so big, Marland said, that when it didn’t match up with reality, people noticed.

“What was growing over time was the disconnect between promise and delivery, and that’s a fundamental problem when you’re dealing with a brand,” he said.

“As a brand, Justin Trudeau was failing on a lot of promises because he was creating expectations and he was not fulfilling them.”

He was dogged by a litany of scandals, from the SNC-Lavalin affair that saw two female cabinet ministers — justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and health minister Jane Philpott — resign, to the surfacing of old photos and video of Trudeau wearing black- and brownface.

Trudeau didn’t live up to his feminist, culturally sensitive promise.

Although Canadians re-elected Trudeau in 2019, he was knocked down to a minority government. The Liberals were unable to regain majority in 2021.

Marland pointed to a famous photo of Trudeau flanked by his cabinet, which was the first in Canada to achieve gender parity, walking up to the governor general’s residence in 2015 to be sworn in.

Compare that, he said, to the image of the prime minister standing alone at a lectern as he announced his resignation.

“That in itself captures what has happened,” Marland said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 8, 2025.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press