International
Justin Trudeau’s star goes out among the Canadian population and his own party
After 10 years in power, Justin Trudeau’s star is dying at high speed: the electorate has turned their backs on him and, within his Liberal Party, more and more voices want him to resign to avoid a catastrophe in the elections scheduled for October 2025.
For months, the polls have all told the same story. Justin Trudeau is an unpopular prime minister and the Liberal Party is heading for a painful loss in the upcoming general election that may relegate him to third place in the lower house of Parliament.
What do the polls say?
The average of polls currently places the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, with 42.5% of voting intention, while Trudeau’s Liberal Party is 19 points below, with 23.2%.
And what is worse for the critical voices within the Liberal Party, the lack of ideas and the immobility of the Justin Trudeau Government in the face of the problems that afflict the country anticipate that the next few months more Canadian will turn their backs on them.
Some even fear that the situation experienced in the 2008 elections will be reproduced when the Liberal Party, then in opposition and led by the intellectual Michael Ignatieff, was reduced to 34 deputies of the 308 seats that the Lower House of Parliament then had.
“It has been behind in the polls for some time now. That is not a huge problem when the elections are far away so the party gave Trudeau room to try to improve the situation because there was time left,” Andrew McDougall, professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, explained to EFE.
“But now there is only one year left before the next election. So the pressure has increased and the party is getting more and more impatient,” he added.
Justin Trudeau swept the 2015 general election
Paradoxically, Justin Trudeau took the leadership of the Liberal Party after the 2008 election disaster. Son of former minister and former liberal leader Pierre Trudeau, one of the most transcendental politicians in the modern history of Canada, he met expectations and in 2015 swept the general elections, becoming the twenty-third first minister of the country.
And also, paradoxically, one of the main proposals that brought him to power in 2015 was to open the country’s borders to receive more refugees and immigrants, both for economic reasons and to recover the founding spirit of Canada as a host country.
True to his promises, one of his first acts as prime minister after winning in 2015 was to go to Toronto airport to personally receive Syrian refugees.
Canada has changed
Ten years later, the North American country has changed. In 2015, Canada received 300,000 immigrants. Since then, the figure has not stopped growing. In 2022 there were 431,645, 16% more than in 2021. In 2023 there were 465,000. This year they will reach 485,000. From 2025, 500,000 per year.
Thanks to these migration levels, Canada is the G7 country with the highest population growth, with 2.7% per year. It is the highest level since 1957, when the explosion of post-war births and immigration placed the rate at 3.3%.
The problem for Justin Trudeau is that the country has not been able to absorb these levels of immigration. There are literally not enough housing for a population that in nine months between July 2023 and April 2024 grew by one million people.
Nor have basic services such as health care been able to keep up with the growth rate.
Trudeau acknowledged on Thursday that he was wrong and has announced that he will reduce the number of immigrants that Canada will receive by up to 27% in the next three years.
“We didn’t get the balance right,” he agreed.
“We are going to stabilize the growth of our population so that all levels of government have time to recover, to make the necessary investments in health, housing and social services. To accommodate more people in the future,” he added.
The question now is whether he will have time to recover the aura that has kept him in power since 2015, especially within the Liberal Party.
“Trudeau insists that he is the best person to lead the party, that no one would do it better. Most politicians believe they are the best to lead their formations. So I’m not surprised that Trudeau resists leaving power,” McDougall explained.
International
Venezuela Refuses to Repatriate Citizens Amid Tensions Over Chevron’s Departure
The government of Venezuela privately warned the government of Donald Trump that it will not accept its own citizens being deported, following the United States’ decision to end Chevron’s license to operate in the Caribbean country, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
The newspaper, citing sources familiar with the matter, notes that the Venezuelan repatriation agreement is becoming strained after a January meeting between Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell and the Chavista leader Nicolás Maduro, who is not recognized as president by the U.S. The Chevron issue has exacerbated tensions.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration ended Chevron’s license in Venezuela and gave the company a month, until April 3, to leave the country after President Trump criticized Maduro for not accelerating the deportation of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as quickly as expected.
The WSJ indicates that Venezuela’s private warning could further hinder Trump’s promised mass deportation campaignof undocumented immigrants, which his administration has already had to pause due to the high costs of using military planes for repatriation flights.
International
Hearing suspended in Guatemala on revocation of José Rubén Zamora’s house arrest
Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora Marroquín will know until next week if he should return to preventive detention, after this Friday the hearing was suspended for a possible revocation of his house arrest.
The resumption of the hearing was rescheduled for next Monday, at 10:00 local time (16:00 GMT), by order of criminal judge Erick García, since, as he indicated, he lacks the case file for the moment.
The possible return of Zamora Marroquín to prison is due to a case of alleged money laundering in 2022, the year in which the Public Ministry (Prosecution), whose leadership is sanctioned internationally under allegations of corruption, began a judicial prosecution against him.
The journalist’s potential return to prison takes place after this week an Appeals Chamber revoked the house arrest measures that had been granted since October 2024 to the former owner and founder of the media El Periódico, a morning in which he uncovered more than a thousand cases of state corruption.
According to the opinion of the magistrates of the Third Appeals Chamber, there was “an error” in the resolution of the judge who decided to release the journalist last year. The review of the measures was requested by the Prosecutor’s Office.
Zamora Marroquín was detained for the case for more than 800 days, between July 29, 2022 and October 2024, without his guilt being proven to date.
Before this Friday’s hearing, the journalist recalled in statements to the media that he has complied with all the court orders regarding his house arrest, and reiterated that he has not seen his family for more than two years, since they are abroad in the face of the risks they could encounter in the Central American country.
Likewise, he added that the persecution against him has been “physical and psychological but I am not going to give up” and described the Third Appeals Chamber as a court linked to the “corrupt” and Deputy Felipe Alejos, sanctioned by the United States for corruption.
Zamora Marroquín, with 30 years of journalistic career, was arrested on July 29, 2022, just five days after issuing strong criticism for corruption against then-President Alejandro Giammattei, between 2020 and 2024, and his close circle.
The journalist remained in prison for a judicial process for alleged money laundering, which according to international organizations such as the Inter-American Press Society (IAPA) has been plagued with irregularities.
International
Trump withdraws 400 million federal funds from Columbia University for anti-Semitism
Donald Trump’s government canceled this Friday subsidies and contracts with Columbia University in New York worth 400 million dollars “due to its passivity in the face of the persistent harassment of Jewish students,” after receiving on Monday a report commissioned by the administration on anti-Semitism on the campuses of several universities in the country.
This cancellation “is the first set of actions, and new cancellations are expected,” warns a statement signed by the general administrative services, which specify that Columbia currently has 5 billion federally committed.
The decision to cut subsidies and contracts has been made together with the federal departments of Justice, Health, Education and Administrative Services, after the operational group commissioned by the government with the specific task of detecting and denouncing anti-Semitic behavior has not received a satisfactory response from Columbia, according to the statement.
Complaints of anti-Semitism began to appear in Columbia and other campuses shortly after October 7, 2023, the date on which Hamas launched a terrorist attack against Israel, which was then followed by a war declared by Israel against Gaza that has been one of the deadliest in several decades.
That war gave rise to demonstrations against Israel as they had not been seen on university campuses for fifty years, with Columbia at the spearhead, with some anti-Jewish incidents that made the Joe Biden Government intervene and summon the rectors of several universities to Congress, several of which (including Columbia’s) had to resign.
Despite the fact that the protests have dropped a lot in terms of intensity, Trump went further than Joe Biden: first, he named that operative group on anti-Semitism on campuses, and second, he threatened to withdraw visas or residence permits from students accused of supporting “terrorist organizations like Hamas.”
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon says that Columbia “for too long has left its homework with Jewish students on its campus, but today we show Columbia and the other universities that we will no longer tolerate that terrible passivity.”
And the director of the group that sent his report last Monday, Leo Torrell, abounded in the threats: “Freezing funds is one of the tools at our disposal to respond to this upsurge in anti-Semitism. This is just the beginning,” he said.
Curiously, in the protests against Israel, one of the most active groups has been the left-wing Jews, who have denounced that under the premise of anti-Semitism, legitimate political criticisms against the State of Israel are being included.
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