Those words “lock in” suggest someone who is thinking about a legacy. When this was pointed out, Trudeau backpedaled a bit and said “lock in” sounds a “little aggressive.” But is he worried about a Poilievre government coming to office in 2025 and reversing a lot of what his government has done?
Trudeau said he thinks that “a lot” of what he’s done is “aligned with the way the world needs to be going anyway. So it’d be more like losing time, losing ground as opposed to actually having things reversed.” A Conservative government might scrap the carbon tax, he said, but some future government would only have to bring it back. Ideally, Trudeau said, a country has a natural political cycle of turning slightly to the left and then slightly back to the right, but with a sense of forward movement. He predicted the Conservative Party will make one more attempt at running against the government’s climate policy and the Liberal notion of “inclusive economic growth.”
“And then finally they’ll perhaps figure out that maybe there’s a direction Canada’s going in that we can tweak” but is not reversible, he said.
Then he slipped back into talking about legacy.
“I don’t expect that when the dust settles and I’m a paragraph in some history book, 30 years from now, people are going to be able to point [to the equivalent of] multiculturalism or the [Charter of Rights and Freedoms] as the big legacies or the big consequence,” he said.
“But for me … my dad was a professor, I’m a teacher. There’s a difference there, right? Where it’s about empowering and building processes that extend forward in the right direction. I mean, a good teacher sets their students up so that the next year, when they move on from them, they’re able to build and move forward on that success.”
