This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the past several months, bird-flu numbers have been steadily ticking up, especially among farmworkers who interact closely with cows. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who reports on science, about her level of concern right now, and the government’s response to the spread of the virus so far.

Lora Kelley: We last spoke in April, after a dairy worker became infected with bird flu. At the time, you described your level of concern about bird flu as “medium.” How would you describe your level of worry now?

Katherine J. Wu: At this point, I would upgrade it to “medium-plus.” I don’t think I will upgrade to “high” unless we start to see strong evidence of human-to-human transmission. I am not ruling out that possibility, but we aren’t there yet.

The situation has gotten quite a bit worse since last spring. We are seeing consistent infection of dairy workers, meaning an especially vulnerable population is exposed in their work environment. Each time the virus infects a new person, it’s an opportunity for it to evolve into something that could eventually become a pathogen that moves easily from person to person.

Lora: What could public-health officials have done differently in recent months to contain the outbreak?

Katherine: Part of the reason I feel concerned is the government’s lackluster response. The movement of the virus into cows was a huge red flag. Cows have never been a known source of this flu, so that was a complete surprise. That should have been a moment when officials said: We really need to contain this before it gets out of control. If some of the first afflicted herds had been kept from moving around, or even culled, it’s possible that the virus might have been contained before dairy workers got sick.

The USDA has ramped up its testing of milk, and the CDC is still working hard to do outreach to farmworkers, who are the population most at risk here. But there could still be more testing at the individual level—individual animals, individual people. There could be more frequent, aggressive sampling of where the virus is in the environment, as well as on farms.

Representatives at USDA and CDC have denied that their response has been inadequate—though independent experts I have spoken with dispute that. To be clear, officials can’t fully predict the future and stop an outbreak the second it starts to get bad, and critics aren’t demanding that. But right now, it’s still a very reactive approach: We see that the virus has been here; I guess we can keep checking if it’s there. But a more proactive approach with testing and better communication with the public would really help.

Lora: How has the government’s response to bird flu compared with its response to COVID?

Katherine: There’s no doubt that having COVID in the rearview affected the government’s response. I think they didn’t want to overreact and cause widespread panic when there wasn’t a need. That’s fair, but there’s a middle ground that I think they missed.

The response to COVID was by definition going to be haphazard, because we didn’t have a preexisting arsenal of tests, vaccines, and antivirals. We hadn’t dealt with a coronavirus like that in recent memory. Here, though, there is a slate of tools available. We’ve dealt with big flu outbreaks. We know what flu can do. We know that flu, in general, can move from animals into humans. We’ve seen this particular virus actually move into people in different contexts across the world.

Lora: Have we missed the opportunity to mitigate the spread of bird flu?

Katherine: Because there has not yet been evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, there is still time to intervene. Did officials miss some opportunities to intervene more and earlier? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that from here the attitude should be I guess we should just let this roll.

Lora: We may have RFK Jr., a vaccine skeptic, leading the Department of Health and Human Services soon. How might his leadership affect the bird-flu response?

Katherine: I don’t think there is a need to roll out bird-flu vaccines to the general public yet. But I think there are likely to be major changes to public-health policy in this country. RFK Jr. has specifically said that the National Institutes of Health will be taking a break from focusing on infectious disease for the next few years, and that doesn’t bode terribly well. Infectious diseases are not going to take a break from us.

Lora: Are there lessons from the COVID era that the public should better absorb in order to deal with illness more broadly?

Katherine: To be fair, it’s hard to avoid getting sick in general, especially at this time of year. During the worst of the pandemic, when people were still masking more consistently and not going into public places, we did get sick a lot less often because we were avoiding each other.

That said, I think people did forget very, very quickly that the things that worked against COVID work well against a lot of other diseases, especially other respiratory viruses. I am not saying that we all need to go back to masking 24/7 and never going to school or work in person. But maybe don’t go to work when you’re sick—a practice that all employers should enable. Maybe don't send your child to day care sick. Maybe don’t sneeze into your hand and then rub your hand all over the subway railing. Wash your hands a lot.

Unfortunately, there is this tendency for a really binary response of doing everything or nothing. Right now, people seem to be leaning toward doing nothing, because they are fatigued from what they felt like was an era of doing everything. But there’s a middle ground here too.

Related:

Bird flu is a national embarrassment. America’s infectious-disease barometer is off. (From April)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

MAGA’s demon-haunted world How Trump made Biden’s Gaza peace plan happen David Frum: Justin Trudeau’s performative self-regard The one Trump pick Democrats actually like

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a 42-day cease-fire deal that will include an exchange of hostages and prisoners, President Joe Biden announced. Senate confirmation hearings were held for multiple Trump-administration nominees, including Pam Bondi for attorney general and Marco Rubio for secretary of state. During Bondi’s testimony, she refused to say that President-Elect Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was detained and questioned last night over his attempt to impose martial law last month.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Hipster Grifter Peaked Too Soon

By Sophie Gilbert

In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

No more Mr. Tough Guy on China No one will remember Jack Smith's report, Peter Wehner writes. What happens when a plastic city burns What is L.A. without its trails? Aspiring parents have a new DNA test to obsess over.

Culture Break

Jan Buchczik

Test out. Here are 10 practical ways to improve your happiness, according to happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks.

Read. Kindness has become countercultural, James Parker writes. Perhaps Saint Francis can help.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Talking tough about China has been a hallmark of Donald Trump’s political career. But now, with his second administration only days away, he appears to be prioritizing Big Business’s interests in his China policy—even to the possible detriment of U.S. national security.

These are early days, of course, and Trump’s position is subject to change. But the very nature of his political coalition looks likely to prevent him from taking a hard-line approach toward China. The corporate titans in his camp—most of all, Tesla founder Elon Musk—have major financial interests in China. They could try to use their influence to restrain Trump and the China hawks on his team, such as his choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, from actions that might threaten those investments.

Striking the right balance between security and business is admittedly tricky. Left to themselves, many American CEOs would likely sell equipment and technology to China, or make investments in Chinese firms, that could help Beijing upgrade its military capabilities and high-tech industries. In trying to prevent this, Washington could wind up depriving U.S. companies of innocuous opportunities in the world’s second-largest economy. President Joe Biden attempted to resolve this dilemma by putting some restrictions on American companies’ interactions and investments in China, but specifically targeting the technologies that are most vital to U.S. security, such as advanced chips and artificial intelligence.

Key Republicans around Trump seem to believe that these curbs went too far. Last month, amid the late scramble to avert a government shutdown, House Republicans dropped a provision from the spending bill that aimed to toughen restrictions on U.S. investment in China. Jim McGovern, a Democratic representative, asserted that Musk used his influence to scuttle the original budget deal in order to get that China provision excised. Musk “got what he wanted,” McGovern posted on X. “The ability to sell out the U.S. so he could make money in China.” Whether or not that was Musk’s intent—he criticized the House for spending too much—the provision’s removal cleared a potential hurdle for U.S. companies that want to expand their investments in China.

That decision is part of a pattern. A week later, Trump asked the Supreme Court to stop the impending ban on the Chinese-owned social-media platform TikTok. Congress had passed a law mandating the ban in 2024, out of concern that the Chinese government could pressure the app’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to cough up the data it collects about American citizens. The law gave ByteDance a chance to save TikTok by divesting its stake in the app, but that never happened. As president in 2020, Trump similarly sought to ban TikTok or force ByteDance to sell the app’s U.S. business. Now Trump’s legal team suggests that shutting down TikTok would infringe on free speech.

[Read: Has Trump gone soft on China?]

But the flip-flop may be motivated by a less idealistic purpose. Perhaps Trump now sees TikTok as a valuable tool for self-promotion. More ominous, Trump’s TikTok turnaround (at least in public) happened to coincide with a meeting he had with a billionaire donor early last year: Jeff Yass is the co-founder of a financial firm, Susquehanna International Group, that is a shareholder in ByteDance and stands to lose from a TikTok ban. Trump has said that the two men didn’t discuss the company.

Democratic Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, a co-author of the TikTok bill, suggested to me that he does not think such concerns are unrelated to Trump’s change of heart. “My Republican colleagues tell me it’s because of one or two donors on his side who have basically tried to persuade him to undo the law,” Krishnamoorthi said. But he noted that the only way Trump can unwind the legislation is to “come back to Congress,” where the law was approved with bipartisan support.

Trump appears to be watering down his plan for tariffs on China as well. During the presidential campaign, he pledged to impose duties of 50 percent on Chinese imports. Shortly after the election in November, he changed that to 10 percent, presumably on top of existing tariffs. This reduction (if it is indeed Trump’s final plan) would benefit the American economy. The extremely high duty Trump originally proposed would have wreaked havoc on supply chains and raised prices on everyday necessities for American households, given how many of these the United States still imports from China. And if Trump slaps higher tariffs on other countries that produce low-cost imports—say, Mexico—he may actually help China, because U.S. companies will choose to keep their manufacturing there instead.

Chinese leaders have been trying to woo wary American investors back into Beijing’s struggling economy, and they would surely welcome a softer stance from Washington. For his part, Trump seems to believe that he can work with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He even invited Xi to his inauguration (Xi is not expected to attend but may send a high-level envoy to represent him). Earlier this month, Trump said that the two are already communicating through their aides (China’s Foreign Ministry did not confirm this).

Trump’s apparent softening puts U.S. interests at risk. Relations between the United States and China have deteriorated since Trump left the White House in 2021; Xi has become even more hostile toward Washington, and he is unlikely to waver from economic, security, and foreign policies designed to counter American global power. Among these are enormous government subsidies to Chinese industry and efforts to undermine the current world order. In a speech published in a recent issue of the Chinese Communist Party’s top ideological journal, Xi expressed his contempt for the West in especially harsh terms: “Many Western countries find themselves increasingly in difficulty, largely because they cannot curb the greedy nature of capital or address the deep-rooted maladies of materialism and spiritual emptiness,” Xi said.

The timing of the speech’s publication—two years after Xi delivered it and three weeks before Trump’s inauguration—could be a warning to the incoming president. Xi may be more implacable and willing to retaliate against Trump this time around. “History has repeatedly proven that striving for security through struggle brings genuine security, while seeking security through weakness and concession ultimately leads to insecurity,” he said in the speech.

American tycoons, including Musk, could become Xi’s targets. When Trump imposed tariffs on China during his first administration, Beijing generally limited its response to tit-for-tat duties and curbs on U.S. imports. Now the Chinese government is signaling that it could go after American companies more aggressively. In December, Chinese authorities launched an antitrust probe into the U.S. AI chip giant Nvidia. Three months earlier, China’s Commerce Ministry threatened to bar PVH, which owns the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, from doing business in the country. The American apparel firm had offended Beijing by abiding by a U.S. regulation—one that prohibits importing cotton from the Xinjiang region, where China is alleged to be using forced labor.

[Read: The global outrage machine skips the Uyghurs]

Tesla could easily be next. Musk and other business leaders know this and may see it as a reason to press Trump to go easy on China. But what’s good for profits could be bad for national security and undermine America’s technological advantage. An incoming U.S. president who puts his rich backers above the national interest would surely prove Xi correct about American greed causing American decline.

The outgoing Biden administration is introducing even more measures focused on keeping advanced chips out of China.

Read more...

After seven-week hijack, Puntland locals say they are victims of foreign trawlers. But China calls the attack 'vicious'.

The Liberal Party has held power in Canada for 68 of the past 100 years. That record is a testament to the party’s pragmatism and prudence. A satirist once mocked William Lyon Mackenzie King, the most enduring of Liberal prime ministers, for supposedly believing: “Do nothing by halves which can be done by quarters.” Not all the Liberal leaders were as very cautious as King, but almost all of them absorbed his lesson: Don’t overdo things.

Until recently, the Liberals rarely deviated from King’s guidance. The one major exception occurred during the prime ministership of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father. In 1980, the elder Trudeau was returned to office after a brief spell in opposition. The previous year, the Iranian revolution had caused a geopolitical crisis that spiked oil prices worldwide. The elder Trudeau convinced himself and his inner circle that the opportunity had now come to build a state-directed energy economy. His new government fixed prices, expropriated foreign holdings, and taxed producers to subsidize consumers.

This rattletrap project soon collapsed into economic ruin. The Liberals were crushed in the following election, in 1984, losing 95 of their 135 seats in Parliament.

Pierre Trudeau himself had retired just ahead of the implosion. For decades afterward, the 1984 defeat revived Liberal prudence: Don’t overdo things. When the Liberals returned to power in 1993, they delivered middle-of-the-road economic policy. When they lost power again, in 2006, they did so not for want of moderation, but because of a classic Canadian scandal of patronage and kickbacks in government contracting.

I recite this history to make a point: Justin Trudeau inherited not only a famous name and a handsome face, but also a detailed playbook of what and what not to do in Canadian politics.

Canada is a country that does not reward imported ideologies—the nation is too riven by its own native fault lines: French versus English, resource producers versus industry and finance, rural versus urban, central Canada versus the Atlantic east and the prairie and mountain west. The successful Canadian politician must bridge those divides. The work of doing so is never easy. If a would-be leader makes the mistake of adding too many borrowed ideological isms, the already difficult becomes practically impossible.

Successful Canadian governments mix and match. The Conservative government of 1984–93 undid Pierre Trudeau’s heavy-handed government controls. At the same time, it negotiated an agreement with the United States that hugely reduced the acid rain that poisoned lakes in Ontario and Quebec. Next, the Liberal governments of 1993–2006 exercised the fiscal discipline that balanced Canada’s budgets and reduced the huge debt accumulation of the Trudeau years. Then, the Conservative government of 2006–15 both cut taxes and enacted the most ambitious anti-poverty program in recent history, a generous child benefit for poor and middle-class families.

These Conservative and Liberal governments also did much that their base voters wanted, of course. But they always remembered: Don’t overdo things.

Enter Justin Trudeau. Trudeau gained the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2013. His rise coincided with a sharp turn in U.S. politics. During Barack Obama’s second term, American liberals shifted in a much more radically progressive direction on issues of race, gender, immigration, and identity generally. Exactly why the shift happened cannot easily be explained, but it can be accurately dated. Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighborhood patrol in February 2012. After Eric Garner was choked to death by police in July 2014, and Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the first Black Lives Matter protests and riots broke out. Social-media use intensified the new dynamics of online activism: The most striking early Twitter mobbing erupted in December 2013. By the early Donald Trump years, polling found that white liberals expressed more progressive views on race than actual members of the minority groups those liberals supposedly championed. Detractors named this progressive veer “the great awokening.” Trudeau absorbed the turn, and rapidly came to personify it.

[David Frum: Canada lurches to the left]

At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2016, President Obama joked about the enthusiasm for Trudeau among progressives on both sides of the border: “Somebody recently said to me, Mr. President, you are so yesterday. Justin Trudeau has completely replaced you—he’s so handsome; he’s so charming; he’s the future. And I said, ‘Justin, just give it a rest.’”

Trudeau won a majority in the election of 2015: 184 of the 338 seats in Parliament. He won nearly 40 percent of the popular vote, a creditable plurality in a five-party system. Somewhere along the way, however, the playbook that warned Don’t overdo things got lost.

On issue after issue, the new Trudeau government implemented progressive ideas adapted from American activists, typically with harrowing consequences. In Canada, the federal government has a large role in criminal justice. The Trudeau government enthusiastically mimicked U.S. ideas about restorative justice. Canada’s incarceration rate dropped from about 86 per 100,000 adults in 2013–14 to about 72 in 2022–23. Over that period of nearly a decade, Canada’s rate of violent crime surged by 30 percent. From 2014 to 2022, the rate of homicides spiked by 53 percent. Residents of the greater Toronto area now share horror stories of violent home invasions. Invaders are typically seeking to grab keys to expensive cars. Toronto contractors now do a lively business in automatic driveway bollards designed to deter thieves from driving right up to the house and being able to make an easy getaway.

In 2018, the Trudeau government legalized the sale and distribution of cannabis. Enforcement of laws against the possession of harder drugs relaxed too. British Columbia currently permits personal possession of less than 2.5 grams of almost any drug, including heroin. In 2021, Ontario courts dismissed 85 percent of all drug-possession charges before they came to trial—this compared with only 45 percent of charges dropped pretrial in 2019, prior to a new policy directive in 2020.

Opioid-overdose deaths in British Columbia reached a new peak of 2,500 in 2023. Canadian cities—once famously safe and orderly—are now crowded with homeless addicts. In the three years from 2020 to ’23, Vancouver reported a more than 30 percent increase in homelessness. Vancouver’s permissive policies and mild weather have lured thousands of people who are vulnerable to addiction to a city notorious for Canada’s most expensive housing. The grim spectacle of people lying unconscious on streets, of syringes and needles discarded in parks and public places, has earned Vancouver the unenviable title of “fentanyl capital of the world.”

A view shows housing structures behind fences on March 25, 2024, as the City of Vancouver plans a cleanup of the waterfront Crab Park where homeless people have been camping for three years. (Paige Taylor White / Reuters)

Canadian-government efforts at reconciliation with Indigenous populations predated the Trudeau administration: The Conservative government of the early 2000s had paid $2 billion to settle claims of abuse from Indigenous Canadians who had attended residential schools. But the Trudeau government redoubled such initiatives, paying tens of billions of dollars more to settle additional claims. Over nine years, the Trudeau government tripled spending on what it labeled “Indigenous priorities” to nearly $32 billion annually, more than Canada spends on national defense. It negotiated settlements to Indigenous lawsuits that have added an estimated $76 billion to Canada’s future liabilities.

[David Frum: Against guilty history]

Indigenous groups have also been granted significant approval rights over major resource projects. During the Trudeau years, land acknowledgments have become a near-universal feature of public life in Canada. Public, academic, and corporate events habitually open with an expression of obligation to Indigenous groups that once dwelt on or near the meeting place.

Yet over this period of fervent commitment to restitution, Canada’s Indigenous people have suffered a catastrophic decline in life expectancy. As I noted recently:

From 2017 to 2021, average life expectancy for Indigenous people in British Columbia dropped by six years, to 67.2 years (the average for non-Indigenous Canadians in 2021 was 82.5 years). From 2015 to 2021, Indigenous people in Alberta suffered a collapse in life expectancy of seven years, to 60 for men and 66 for women. The principal culprit: opioid addiction and overdose. In Alberta, Indigenous people die from opioids at a rate seven times higher than non-Indigenous Albertans.

The Trudeau government faces its gravest problem because of Canada’s poor economic performance under his leadership. Fifteen years ago, Canada made a strong and rapid recovery from the global financial crisis. Of the Group of Seven countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), Canada was the first to return to pre-crisis levels of both employment and output. But Trudeau has not succeeded so well with the crisis that erupted on his watch. Measured by growth in GDP per capita, Trudeau’s Canada has posted some of the worst scores of the 38 most developed countries both before the coronavirus pandemic and after.

The Trudeau government has tried to accelerate weak productivity growth by a lavish surge in federal spending and a massive increase in immigration.

Canadian public expenditure of course spiked during the pandemic. Yet even now, three years after the pandemic emergency, Trudeau’s government is still spending 2.5 percentage points more of its GDP on programs other than interest payments than it spent when Trudeau entered office. Because tax revenues have not kept pace, deficits have swelled, and the country’s overall debt burden has grown crushingly.

The immigration trend is equally arresting. Before Trudeau, Canada accepted about 250,000 new permanent residents a year. Relative to population, that figure was already substantially higher than the corresponding U.S. number. The Trudeau government raised the level past 300,000 after 2015, and now to nearly 500,000.

Canada under Trudeau has pivoted from what economists call “intensive” growth (which involves each worker producing more) to “extensive” growth (which means producing more by increasing the number of workers). There are three big problems with the extensive-growth strategy.

The first problem is that it does not raise Canadians’ living standards. The country produces more in aggregate, but the individual does not, so there is no basis for paying workers more.

A second problem is that the new immigrant workers are also new immigrant consumers, who compete with the existing population for, among other things, housing. Relative to people’s incomes, housing in Toronto is now more expensive than in New York City or Miami. The nearby new metropolis of Hamilton-Burlington, Ontario, now ranks among the 10 least affordable cities in North America, as people priced out of Toronto relocate westward around Lake Ontario.

A third problem is that new immigrants may welcome Canadian opportunities, but they do not always share Canadian values. When privately reproached for the Trudeau government’s weak response to anti-Semitic outrages, his foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, reportedly replied, “Have you seen the demographics of my riding?” (Canadian electoral districts are known as “ridings.” Joly’s riding is 40 percent foreign-born, with Algeria the top source of migrants, followed by Morocco, Haiti, Syria, and Lebanon.) Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, Canadian cities have been disgraced by anti-Semitic incidents of accelerating violence. Shots have been fired at synagogues and schools, though mercifully nobody has been hurt. One Montreal synagogue has been firebombed twice. Police have given broad leeway to anti-Israel protests that would likely have been suppressed as prohibited hate speech had they been targeted at any other minority group but Jewish Canadians.

These specifics do not, however, quite capture all that has gone wrong for Trudeau. His party now stands at about 22 percent in the polls, six points worse than the Liberals’ share in the wipeout election of 1984. Look back through Trudeau’s personal-approval ratings, and you see a much earlier break point: the spring of 2018. Until then, Trudeau was remarkably popular, scoring a peak of 65 percent in September 2016. (The contrast with Trump probably helped him a great deal that fall: Trump was, and is, a widely despised figure in Canada.) Trudeau was still polling at and above 50 percent in the fall of 2017. Six months later, his rating had collapsed, to just 40 percent.

[David Frum: Justin Trudeau falls from grace]

What changed in the spring of 2018? During the school break of that year, Trudeau took his wife and three children on an eight-day tour of India. On that trip, Trudeau and his family were repeatedly photographed wearing the local costume. Trudeau had already gotten into some trouble when an image surfaced of him—then in his late 20s, working as a teacher at a private school—clad in Aladdin costume, his face darkened by makeup. But here he was, as prime minister of the country, playing dress-up in ways that looked simultaneously foolish and patronizing, all at taxpayers’ expense.

Canadians who paid closer attention to Indian politics noticed something even more disturbing on the 2018 visit. The Canadian embassy invited a notorious Sikh extremist to its dinner honoring Trudeau in New Delhi. The invitation was rescinded and blamed on an unfortunate misunderstanding. Then it turned out that Trudeau had met with the extremist before, apparently as part of an ill-considered political strategy to woo Sikh ultranationalist votes in Canada.

For Canadians, the photos of the India dress-up drove home the sting in Obama’s joke about Trudeau’s preening: “Give it a rest.” Meanwhile, the implausible explanation of the invitation to a murderous terrorist cast a shadow upon the high ideals Trudeau so often professed.

Trudeau lost his parliamentary majority in the election of October 2019. Thereafter, he governed with the support of the more left-wing New Democratic Party. Although his poll numbers would sometimes rally, especially in the first shock of the coronavirus pandemic, the gloss never lasted. Trudeau tried to regain his majority in a post-pandemic election in September 2021 and failed again.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during an election-campaign stop in Toronto. (Carlos Osorio / Reuters)

At the beginning of his prime ministership, Trudeau described Canada as a post-national state: “There is no core identity, no mainstream, in Canada.” In his mind, no membrane seemed to exist between “foreign” and “domestic.” Hence his apparent belief that Sikh extremism in India might be used as a political resource in Canada.

In 2023, however, Trudeau learned that the Chinese state had been interfering in Canadian elections for some time. China was accused of funding pro-Beijing Chinese-language media in Canada, and of pressuring individual members of the Chinese Canadian diaspora. The then-leader of the Conservative Party would later estimate that the clandestine Chinese effort cost his party at least five, and as many as nine, seats in the election of 2021—not enough to change the outcome of the election, but a significant impact nonetheless. The Chinese government also allegedly intervened in the Liberal Party’s internal politics to replace a Beijing-skeptical Liberal member of Parliament with a Beijing-friendly one in 2019.

Reportedly, the Chinese government made veiled threats to Chinese-citizen students in Canada that their visas might be revoked if they did not join the Liberal Party and back the Beijing-friendly candidate in the nominating contest. Some of those students were allegedly provided with false documents to make them eligible to vote. At a public inquiry last year, the Beijing-friendly member of Parliament testified that he’d known international students were bused in to support him but said that he did not—at the time of his nomination—realize any impropriety was taking place.

The Canadian public knew nothing of this until more than a year after Trudeau had received an intelligence briefing about it all—even then, the government seemed more outraged by the report’s leaking than by the Chinese interference. Trudeau in fact praised the Liberal lawmaker who’d been elected with Chinese help, and scolded journalists that their questions about Chinese interference verged on racism.

Yet Trudeau sometimes could discover the limits of post-nationalism. When right-wing U.S. backers provided financial support for a truck blockade of Ottawa in early 2022 to protest COVID-19 restrictions, Trudeau invoked emergency powers and froze hundreds of bank accounts associated with the protests. The two cases of foreign interference were different in many ways, but it was not easy to quell suspicions that one difference was that the 2019 interference had helped Trudeau’s party, whereas the 2022 interference did not.

As he sought Canada’s prime ministership a decade ago, Trudeau proudly described himself as a feminist. Half of his cabinet appointees would be female, because—a formula he often used—“it’s 2015.” In office, however, Trudeau tended to assign his female appointees the dirty work that men avoided. In the worst scandal of Trudeau’s leadership, Canada’s ethics commissioner found that the prime minister had pressured the justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to save an important corporate backer from criminal prosecution; Trudeau has denied that he ever ordered her to do so, but the scandal led to her resignation. Then, in his government’s terminal crisis, he forced from office via Zoom call his loyal female finance minister, Chrystia Freeland—after asking her to deliver one more round of bad news for him even as he offered her a demotion. For the self-advertised feminist, the gap between image and reality appeared wider and wider.

Trudeau has resigned as leader of the Liberal Party, but not yet as prime minister. The party will now choose a new leader to face the election that is expected sometime soon this year. For whoever wins the job, impending Liberal defeat seems impossible to avert. More likely, he or she will have signed up for the long work of reinvention and rebuilding. Trudeau’s successors will have to decide: Should the Liberal Party return to its historic pragmatism and prudence, or should it continue on his path of valuing declared intentions over measured outcomes?

The post-Trudeau Liberals may do well to rediscover the foundational rule of Canadian party politics: Seriously, we weren’t kidding. Don’t overdo things.

New Delhi launches three domestically built vessels as it seeks to compete with China for influence across Asia Pacific.

Chinese users of Xiaohongshu welcome influx of Americans, but caution that sensitive topics are off-limits.