TRUDEAU LEAVES BEHIND AN ANTI-CATHOLIC LEGACY

 

Trudeau Leaves Behind an Anti-Catholic Legacy

His government’s actions with respect to abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia, and the residential-school controversy drew strong criticism from some Canadian Church leaders.

 

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a news conference at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, Canada, on Jan. 6, 2025. Trudeau announced his resignation, saying he will leave office as soon as the ruling Liberal Party chooses a new leader. (photo: DAVE CHAN / AFP via Getty Images)

 

Peter Laffin WorldJanuary 6, 2025

Over his nine-year reign as Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau has championed causes that directly contradict fundamental Catholic teachings with respect to human life and undertaken other actions that have harmed the local Church.

His long run of damaging policies appears to be coming to an end, however. With polls showing his Liberal Party facing almost-unsurmountable headwinds in the upcoming election, the Catholic leader announced his resignation as party leader on Monday, leaving a legacy marked by this unmistakable opposition to Catholic teaching and priorities. Most notably, his policies and advocacy for the advancement of abortion and euthanasia rights have made Canada a global leader in the culture of death. Additionally, his role in perpetuating Canada’s “mass graves” narrative, involving unfounded claims that hundreds of Indigenous children had been buried covertly at Catholic residential schools, resulted in a rise in Catholic hate crimes and a spate of church burnings.

Trudeau, 53, will remain as prime minister until the Liberal Party selects a new leader, which must occur before the March 24 recall of Parliament.

Church leaders pushed back strongly against some of these actions, particularly with respect to his government’s introduction of its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program.

“Suffering and death are indeed terrifying and the instinct to flinch from pain is universal. But euthanasia and assisted suicide are not the answer,” wrote Archbishop Richard Gagnon of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in a 2020 letter to Trudeau regarding the government’s push to expand medically assisted suicide even further. “At this point in Canada’s history, we should ask, with integrity and honesty, what kind of culture we are leaving to future generations.”

Culture of Death

Following a 2015 decision by Canada’s Supreme Court that ruled that the existing laws prohibiting assisted dying were unconstitutional, MAID was passed in 2016 by the Canadian Parliament with Trudeau’s full support.

“There are people who think we should have gone further with this bill; there are people who think we already went too far,” Trudeau said of the bill’s passage in 2016. “Making this first step a responsible, prudent one that gets the balance right between protecting vulnerable Canadians and defending rights and freedoms is what we have focused on, and I’m confident that we got that balance right.”

How far did the bill go in furthering the practice of medically assisted suicide? From 2016 to 2022, the number of instances skyrocketed, increasing each year by an average of 31%. In 2021, MAID was expanded to include people with incurable conditions, though not terminal.

By 2023, medical assisted suicide accounted for 1 out of every 20 Canadian deaths. Plans to expand the MAID program to include individuals suffering from mental illness have been postponed because, according to Health Minister Mark Holland, the Canadian health system was not ready to make the leap.

“The system needs to be ready, and we need to get it right,” Holland told reporters. “It’s clear from the conversations we’ve had that the system is not ready, and we need more time.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party is far ahead of the ruling Liberals in current public-opinion polls, has led the charge opposing this latest bid to expand MAID.

“After eight years of Justin Trudeau, everything feels broken and people feel broken. That’s why many are suffering from depression and they’re losing hope,” Poilievre recently told reporters. “Our job is to turn their hurt back into hope — to treat mental-illness problems rather than ending people’s lives.”

Abortion

Trudeau has also been a staunch abortion-rights proponent. And though abortion is commonly referred to as a “settled issue” in Canada due to broad public support and scant political opposition — Poilievre has repeatedly said that he would not restrict abortion rights if elected — Trudeau’s advocacy has been pronounced.

“We unequivocally reaffirm every woman’s right to make decisions about their body, their life, and their future,” Trudeau said in September. “We reflect on the freedoms won by women. We recommit to the progress we can’t risk losing. And we fight — tooth and nail — to protect a woman’s right to choose.”

Throughout his rein, the Canadian PM has targeted pregnancy centers for offering what he has called “dishonest counseling.” And in November, he introduced legislation that would amend Canadian tax law to force pregnancy centers to disclose whether they offer abortion services or birth control, or risk losing their charitable tax-free status.

Trudeau, who regularly refers to himself as a feminist, has also often waded into the abortion debate in the U.S. At the 2023 Global Citizens Summit in New York, Trudeau lamented pro-life efforts following the fall of Roe v. Wade.

“When do we get to stop having to re-litigate this?” he asked. “Women are still having to stand up for basic rights that should have been and have been recognized long ago.”

Earlier in Trudeau’s reign as prime minister, the then-president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Douglas Crosby, wrote a letter to Trudeau criticizing his government’s efforts to promote abortion in other countries.

“Such a policy is a reprehensible example of Western cultural imperialism and an attempt to impose misplaced but so-called Canadian ‘values’ on other nations and people,” Bishop Crosby told Trudeau in the March 2017 letter. “It exploits women when they are most in need of care and support,” he said, “and tragically subverts true prenatal health care.”

Unfounded Mass-Graves Claims

Following the 2021 announcement by an Indigenous First Nation in southern British Columbia that more than 200 unmarked graves of Indigenous children had been discovered at a former Catholic residential school, a flood of media outlets in Canada and elsewhere published stories claiming that it was one of a number of “mass graves” of children who had been covertly buried beside such schools, which operated for more than a century in Canada. More than three years later, no evidence has been found confirming the existence of such “mass graves.”

Despite the lack of any supporting evidence, Trudeau went into high gear criticizing the Church following the initial claim of unmarked graves in southern British Columbia.

Along with ordering that flags be flown nationally at half-mast, the prime minister called “as a Catholic” for Pope Francis to come to Canada to apologize to “Indigenous Canadians on Indigenous soil” for what had occurred at the country’s residential schools. Trudeau also made a highly publicized visit to an Indigenous graveyard, during which he was photographed kneeling down and looking forlorn over a grave site with a teddy bear in hand.

The ensuing public outcry directed at Catholics resulted in a 260% rise of anti-Catholic hate crimes in Canada in 2021. More than 120 Catholic churches have been vandalized, set ablaze or burned to the ground since the controversy erupted.

In response to the sharp rise in anti-Catholic activity, Trudeau called the behavior “unacceptable” but also “fully understandable.”

“Churches were being burned and vandalized,” Terry O’Neill, a prominent Catholic Canadian journalist, told the Register, “and he calls it ‘understandable.’ That’s an amazing lack of leadership right there. It was a sad moment in Canadian history.”

Despite the fact that no mass graves have been found despite numerous excavations, Trudeau and his government have never apologized or amended their initial comments.

The late Bishop Fred Henry, who served as bishop of Calgary from 1998 to 2017, strongly denounced the unfounded “mass grave” claims against the Church in a 2023 email he sent to The Catholic Register, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Toronto.

“Why is the Catholic Church not asking the federal government for proof that even one residential child is actually missing in the sense that his (or) her parents didn’t know what happened to their child at the time of the child’s death?” he asked.

According to the late bishop, such misrepresentations only serve to undermine Canada’s efforts to promote reconciliation with Canada’s Native peoples.

“Would it help Indigenous people across Canada to better lives if the Catholic Church did go so far as to take responsibility for the murder and clandestine burial of thousands of residential school children in the name of reconciliation?” Bishop Henry wrote. “No, it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t improve the lives of Indigenous people one iota if that monstrous libel against the Oblates, the Sisters of St. Ann, the Grey Nuns et al. were to become the accepted ‘truth’ in Canada.”

https://www.ncregister.com/news/trudeau-leaves-behind-an-anti-catholic-legacy