Justin Trudeau is out. Even Canada has had enough.

Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, pays the price as the pendulum swings against Covid authoritarians globally

The Wicked Witch of the North has melted away.

Everyone who hated Covid vaccine and lockdown mandates should cheer.

Justin Trudeau, who imposed strict rules on Canada, then declared a national emergency when citizens protested, is losing his job as prime minister. Trudeau said Monday he will step down as soon as his Liberal Party names a replacement.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Trudeau lasted so long. His approval ratings are now even worse than Joe Biden’s; 74 percent of Canadians say they dislike him.

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(Help me keep a perfect 100 percent disapproval rating from Pfizer. For under 20 cents a day.)

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Canadian politics are generally centrist, in keeping with the country’s tendency towards what Canadians call civility and skeptics view more as a passive-aggressive enforced conformity that puts Japan’s to shame.

Either way, Trudeau’s initial Covid lockdowns reflected his country’s mood. (His approval rating actually rose in spring 2020.) Like Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand, Canada embraced restrictive Covid lockdowns and mandates at first.

The country effectively closed its borders except to essential trade in 2020. Its biggest province, Ontario imposed strict lockdowns that closed most stores and limited non-essential gatherings even into 2021.

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(74 percent disapproval. That’s bad, right?)

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Canada and Trudeau also fell hard for Covid vaccines.

The country ordered more than 10 shots for each person, over 400 million jabs in all - more per-person than any other country. And Canadians largely followed orders and rolled up their sleeves. A July 2021 survey showed that 66 percent of Canadians believed vaccinated people should have “greater freedoms” than the unjabbed, compared to 41 percent of Americans.

In August 2021, Trudeau said anyone flying commercially would need a vaccine passport - effectively denying unvaccinated people any realistic way to travel around Canada, which stretches over 3,000 miles from British Columbia to Newfoundland.

But by winter 2022, even many Canadians had lost patience with lockdowns and vaccines.

With discontent rising, Trudeau showed his true authoritarian streak. After thousands of truck drivers and other protestors peacefully occupied the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Trudeau invoked the “Emergencies Act” - a law that had never before been used and gave him extraordinary powers - on February 14, 2022 to dismantle the protests. Right-wing groups from the United States were funding the protests, which were thus a threat to Canada’s security.

Canadian authorities then blocked funding and seized bank accounts associated with the protests and cleared out the encampments. Months later, CBC News reported that the Canadian government had known even before it invoked the Emergencies Act that its rationale was nonsense. And in January 2024, a Canadian court ruled the government should never have invoked the act.

Trudeau said he had no regrets.

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(How’d that work out for you?)

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Trudeau’s approval rating, which lurked around 40 percent for most of 2022, sank further since as media-driven Covid panic receded and anger at the rampage over civil liberties grew.

Now Trudeau has joined Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and of course our own Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. on a long list of tinpot Covid dictators who have faced their own reckonings.

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch.

Goodbye, Justin.