Justin Trudeau puts Canada on ice

Mr. Trudeau’s decision to call it quits—but not to leave office immediately—puts the Canadian government under the command of a lame duck for the next few months. It’s not a good look for Canada while Donald Trump is threatening to abrogate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and put 25% tariffs on Canadian goods.

Canadians who complain that Mr. Trudeau’s choices are always about his own interests seem vindicated. He’s been losing altitude in polls for months. Had he asked the governor general to dissolve Parliament last year, he would have triggered the start of the federal election process and Canada probably would have a newly elected prime minister by now. But Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party would almost certainly have lost. By choosing to wait and now to suspend Parliament instead, he’s bought time for the party to find a new leader. But he’s delayed the transition to a new government that the country urgently needs. With the legislature on ice until March 24, the federal election can’t happen before May.

This is bad news for Canadians who want to avoid a trade war with the U.S. through negotiations. Mr. Trump wants Canada to spend more on its national defense and to do more to stop the flow of fentanyl and illegal migrants into the U.S. But Parliament can’t act now, which means new spending can’t be passed. Canada is paralyzed.

Looking on the bright side, Canadians are finally almost rid of Mr. Trudeau. Mr. Poilievre is waiting in the wings. He’s a politically incorrect opponent of big government and wokeism and an advocate for growth. The Conservatives are the odds-on favorite to win a majority of seats in the next parliament, making the 45-year-old Alberta native, who represents an Ontario riding, the likely next prime minister.

Voters registered with the Liberal Party—who amazingly don’t need to be citizens, only residents of Canada—will choose a new party leader on March 9. Among the front-runners is Chrystia Freeland, who until December was Mr. Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and finance minister. Her legacy is out-of-control spending, a weak Canadian dollar and sluggish growth. Die-hard Liberals blame her December resignation for the pickle they’re now in.

A mid-January poll suggests that former central banker Mark Carney is more popular among the party’s voters. But it’s hard to see how he could lead Liberals to victory in the general election. He calls himself an outsider because he has never been an elected member of Mr. Trudeau’s government. But the green activist was a United Nations special climate envoy and is the founder of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. More recently he served as an adviser to Mr. Trudeau. His fingerprints are all over the moribund Canadian economy.

Many Canadians are tired of Mr. Trudeau’s habit of handing down elite diktats and hammering cultural dissidents. Many more are fed up with getting poorer every year. In April Statistics Canada reported real gross domestic product per capita “has now declined in five of the past six quarters and is currently near levels observed in 2017." Tegan Hill and Joel Emes of Vancouver’s Fraser Institute note that “business investment per worker in Canada (adjusted for inflation) declined by 20.0 percent" between 2014 and 2021. Over the same period “business investment per worker in the US (adjusted for inflation, in Canadian dollars) increased by 14.6 percent."

Mr. Poilievre thinks tax, regulation and energy policies are behind decisions by investors to steer clear of Canada. He wants entrepreneurs to push back—for once. In a May 2024 National Post op-ed he blasted big business for going along with the government’s antidevelopment agenda. Mr. Trudeau, he wrote, “killed TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline by changing the rules, adding delays and complicating the process." The prime minister also “killed the proposed $20-billion Teck Frontier Mine by signalling to the company that its application would likely be rejected at cabinet, despite it having the support of the affected First Nations and the independent environmental review body." He added: “In both cases, the companies’ gutless executives agreed to take the fall."

Plenty can go wrong between now and election day. Mr. Poileivre’s pit-bull style has risks. But as long as he campaigns on affordability, energy, rebuilding the military and reviving the economy, he’s got the best chance of capturing the flag in Ottawa.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.