This morning, Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau's right hand, resigned.
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/finance-minister-chrystia-freeland-resigns
Trudeau was facing a revolt in caucus last fall, but instead of making any real changes, he became more resolved than ever, circled the wagons around his inner cabinet, and carried on. Now, the most central player in that inner cabinet has called it quits.
This will be the second high-profile Finance Minister that has resigned after being unable to curb Trudeau's crazy spending habits. In 2020, economic celebrity Bill Morneau resigned after Trudeau blew his carefully-crafted budget out of the water. Now, Chrystia Freeland, who replaced Morneau, has done the same.
Rumours abound that Trudeau was planning to replace Freeland with an even more famous Finance Minister, Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and later governor of the Bank of England. Apparently, replacing famous Finance Ministers with more famous Finance Ministers is Trudeau's best idea for holding on to power. It doesn't seem to be working. He is mired in the polls a full ten points behind the Tories and has been for more than a year.
No matter how big the cranium on the Finance Minister is, they can't get blood from a stone. Trudeau's latest hare-brained scheme to recover his lost popularity was a nine-week GST holiday which started last Saturday. The holiday exempts some businesses from collecting GST from some products, but not all. It didn't even start or finish on some natural break point like a month-end, but started half-way through December (hint: for Christmas shoppers) and ends half-way through February (hint: for Valentine's dates), creating a massive accounting headache for the businesses concerned. Most businesses polled say the cost of accounting, switching tax rates half-way through the month, and then accounting for it all, will create far more in extra accounting and programming costs than what it will generate in extra sales.
At the end of the GST holiday, a special one-time cheque was to be mailed to all Canadians, at a cost of $4.68 billion. This was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back, and Freeland put her foot down. Starting last Thursday, Freeland's office began leaking that the cheque would never happen, at which point Trudeau decided to replace her. To add insult to injury, however, he insisted that she read the budget update to Parliament today as her idea, which seems to have triggered the resignation.
Housing Minister Sean Fraser had already announced his resignation. Oddsmakers are calling it 50/50 whether Trudeau will resign or keep retreating further into his bunker.
