It’s no longer Trudeau: Canada’s PM resigns

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It's been a decade since since a horrific attack at a satirical French newspaper kicked off Paris, worst ever year of Islamist terrorism. Our correspondent speaks with the editor of Charlie Hebdo, which still stands for the freedom to poke fun at everyone. And our series the World Ahead continues. Looking this time at how in 2025 the pharmaceutical industry will be leaning on artificial intelligence. AI can dream up better drug molecules perhaps, but there's no replacement yet for human trials. First up though, By the time it came, it came as no surprise.

So last night over dinner, I told my kids about the decision that I'm sharing with you today. I intend to resign as party leader as Prime Minister.

Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, the longest serving leader of any G7 country, is out.

Canadians deserve a real choice in the next election. And it has become obvious to me with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the liberal standard into the next election.

Even until a couple of years ago, it would have been hard to imagine such battles resulting in an inglorious ousting.

It's true, though Justin Trudeau, like a lot of other Western leaders, didn't have much of a choice. He was told not to amble, not to tarry, but to sprint for the exit after he failed to connect with the voters who elected him 10 years ago.

Rob Russo is the Economist's Canada correspondent.

About 80% of Canadians had turned on Mr. Trudeau and said it was time for him to go. Like a lot of other leaders, he's lost those voters to populist Conservatives over the last decade.

But it's not just voters he's lost. It seems he's lost his own party. Can we wind back and understand why that's happened?

Look, there's nothing that concentrates the the mind like a hanging. And about 150 Liberal MPs now see that there is not a safe Liberal seat in the entire country of Canada. They've lost some what were considered very safe seats in by elections over the past year. So Mr. Trudeau was contested within his own party and within his own cabinet. No more dramatically so than about a month ago when Christopher Freeland, his finance minister and deputy prime minister, the woman who has stood by his side since he won election a decade ago, left in a cantankerous resignation in the lobbed a grenade towards Mr. Trudeau on her way out the door, basically saying that he was superficial and facile in the face of a Trump threat to the Canadian economy.

It does seem like a rather sudden fall for somebody who is taken to be the savior of liberalism worldwide.

Yeah, when you look at the tumble Mr. Trudeau has taken over the last decade, it's dizzying. This was the beacon of progressivism for a lot of Western democracies, and he squandered it. He squandered at how by in some ways, turning his back on his own promises. It was interesting to hear Mr. Trudeau talk about the fact that one of his biggest regrets was that he failed to move ahead on one of his signature promises in 2015, and that was to reform Canada's electoral system to allow for proportional representation. He failed to get a consensus on that from the opposition parties, and he dropped it.

I do wish that we'd been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country so that parties would spend more time trying to be people's second or third choices, and people would have been looking for things they have in common instead of trying to polarize and divide Canadians against each other.

But where he really lost ground was with the voters on economic issues who had grown tired of identity politics and whose priorities had shifted from climate and minority rights to issues like the cost of housing, the soaring costs of inflation like immigration, which had grown exponentially under Mr. Trudeau. So this consensus, this broad swath of voters that he had managed to assemble in 2015, younger voters, middle class and working class voters, indigenous voters, really came undone.

To be fair, Rob, it wasn't all bad.

Mr. Trudeau did win plaudits in his first term, even grudging plaudits from his rivals for his handling of a truculent Donald Trump during the first renegotiation of the North American Free trade agreement in 2018. He won praise for taking about 450,000 younger Canadians children off the poverty rolls in Canada by coming up with what's called the Canada Child Benefit increased pay for parents right up to the age of 18. He was seen as enlightened by bringing in one of the very first carbon taxes in industrialized countries. That was seen as a serious indication of his commitment to fighting climate change.

So after all that, the Trudeau era is over, who's likely to replace him?

It will depend on what kind of race the Liberal Party decides it's going to have. There are some suggestions that facing the imminent threat of Donald Trump's tariffs, that they shouldn't waste time, that they should go directly to selecting a leader from within the current caucus. That would mean somebody like Christopher Freeland, the former finance minister, would be among those talked up as a potential successor, as would Dominic LeBlanc, who is known as the minister with asbestos underwear. It seems he can sit in any hot seat and handle that heat if it's a larger race that allows for people from the outside to come into the race. The most prominent name mentioned over and over again is of course, Mark Carney, the former governor of the bank of England, former governor of the bank of Canada. He was governor of the bank of Canada under Conservative government. So he and Pierre Poilier, the Conservative leader, are not strangers. He is an outsider. He would be the one who would be able to say, I wasn't there during the last several years. I'm a fresh start. Vote for me and I'm serious about the economy and I will take on Trump.

But I suppose the question, having heard your description of Mr. Trudeau's downfall, is whether or not Trudeau was the problem. Do the Liberals have a chance? Whoever ends up in charge, it's going.

To be daunting for anybody who tries to succeed Mr. Trudeau. They are at historic lows in terms of popularity with Canadians. That's going to be very, very difficult for any new leader to overcome.

So if it's likely then that the Conservative leader will be the next pm, then give us a brief introduction.

Sure. Pierre Poilievre is a career politician. He's 45 years old. What he has succeeded in doing is cementing a new bond between Conservatives and the working class voters of Canada. Unionized Canadians and most surprisingly younger Canadians. That's a switch for Conservative leaders in Canada. Mr. Poiliev has also been explicit in and that he is going to end what he calls wokeism and the fixation with identity politics that he's accused Mr. Trudeau of. Over the last decade, Mr. Poiliev spent over an hour with populist rabble rouser Jordan Peterson, in which he espoused his philosophy of government. And it was illuminating. What did we do wrong as a country?

We have a Prime minister who is dedicated to a extremely radical ideology. Basically, authoritarian socialism has guided him throughout his entire prime ministership. He believes in a state that controls every aspect of your life. Your money, your speech, your thought, all of the industries of the country. And every time that has been tried, it is a complete disaster. So the question then is, when all this gets resolved, what happens next?

We've just heard the starting gun of a 10 week sprint that will lead to the selection of a new leader. And that new leader then will have to, in the interim, come up with a new platform for the Liberal Party that will almost certainly face defeat in the House of Commons when Parliament reconvenes on 24 March. That means that we will likely be into an election campaign in Canada near the end of March. And that election campaign will almost certainly turn on the threat posed by President Elect Trump's tariffs, which would be a staggering blow to the Canadian economy. If Mr. Trump goes ahead and puts a 25% tariff on Canadian imports into the United States, economists have suggested that it would lead to at least a 2% drop in Canada's GDP. That means a cost of about $2,000 for every Canadian. That's what the campaign will be about. Who is best positioned to confront the threat posed by Donald Trump?

Rob, thanks very much for your time.

My pleasure, Jason.

Ten years ago today, two masked gunmen burst into the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo. An irreverent nose, thin, very satirical weekly newspaper armed with Kalashnikovs. The pair assassinated a dozen people, eight of them editorial staff. The perpetrators claimed allegiance to Al Qaeda. And they didn't pick Charlie Hebdo by chance. For decades, it had poked fun at religion, all of them, including Islam. And as our Paris bureau chief, Sophie Pedder found when she spoke with the paper's editor, a survivor of the attack a decade ago, it still does. So.

Charlie Hebdo today is unbowed, unrepentant, and every week it turns out a newspaper just as tasteless, silly and provocative as ever. But not everything is the same. The paper now operates from a highly protected and undisclosed location.

Which is where you went to meet them?

Well, not exactly, because the editor, who's known as Rhys, had to meet me in an unmarked and third party office. The address of which I obviously can't disclose either.

Bonjour.

On the morning of the terrorist attack at Charlie Hebdo, Rees was himself shot in the shoulder and witnessed the murder of his colleagues. But he survived and he took over the editorship. And he was clearly, absolutely determined to keep the paper going, publishing in the very week after the terrorist attack. Today, he lives under a fatwa and with police protection, and he doesn't take any risks. He was talking about the comparison with Salman Rushdie. He has learnt that an individual just with a knife could spring an attack if he ever dropped his guard. So he doesn't. He doesn't take any risks. And in a sense, nothing has ever been quite the same for Charlie Hebdo. But it has rebuilt and it's nurtured a new generation of cartoonists. It's published every week since that winter attack. And I wanted to find out how he and all of them really managed to move forwards after this unspeakable event. He tells me, we think about the attack all the time, but we don't talk about it all the time. You can't be petrified by the history of the paper. You can't be crushed by this history.

And now, 10 years on, on this anniversary, how is the newspaper marking it?

Well, Charlie Hebdo, to mark the anniversary, has published a book of drawings by all of those who were murdered. Some are text by those who were not cartoonists. It's called Charlie the Diary of Their Life. It's mostly a collection of cartoons. And it's a way, I think, for Riis and for the colleagues who survived the attack to keep alive their former colleagues. Riis tells me that the value of drawings is their simplicity. The visual language can speak about difficult things, but can be understood by everyone.

And for those who haven't seen this newspaper before, tell me what kind of thing it does besides cartoons?

Well, Charlie Hebdo spares nothing. There are articles, sort of satirical commentary on political life. But Charlie Hebdo is mostly known for its cartoons. And what they try and do, this is how Rhys put it to me, is that they identify the important bits in what he called the stew of events that is the news, and they mock it. The caricatures roam from the irreligious. I can think of one where the Virgin Mary was giving birth in stirrups. They publish the prophet Muhammad displaying his bottom or in sort of provocative attire. There was one recently where they had Marine Le Pen, the far right leader, shaving her pubic hair. And for obvious reasons, the paper gets into trouble, particularly with the religious regimes in Turkey and Iran.

And how does that land in France? Is that a well received satire?

Well, in France, what makes it quite particular is that there is no law against blasphemy. So the mocking of religious ideas is considered absolute, an acceptable part of French culture. Obviously, the law forbids hate speech or incitement to violence, but the difficulty is, of course, that the line between those two can sometimes be drawn in different place by different people. And therefore Charlie Hebdo is at times controversial even in its home country. What it most often gets accused of is Islamophobia. Now, the paper, which is left leaning, has its roots on the left and it's feels that it ridicules all ideas and dogmas. It dismisses this as absurd. But its critics will tell you that there is a very fine line between what the paper calls satire and what in effect becomes mockery that punches down.

So clearly, as you say, controversial even at home. But broadly, public opinion is on the side of Charlie Hebdo.

I think that the French authorities are on the side of Charlie Hebdo. And President Macron gave a very strong speech defending the right to caricature religion and religious ideas. And this was particularly after a schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, in 2020 was decapitated in a terrorist attack and his crime was showing pupils caricatures of Muhammad in a class that was all about free speech. Yet public opinion does seem a little bit more fragile. In 2023, only 58% of the French told a poll that they supported the Charlie Hebdo spirit. That is down from 71% in 2016, a year after those original attacks.

Why do you think that support for the newspaper and for the idea is going down then?

Well, I wonder if it reflects a more general trend in Western society towards greater intolerance for causing offense. I mean, if you look at what American stand up comics said, I'm thinking of Jerry Seinfeld or Dave Chappelle. They've spoken out against what they see as a more censorious attitude towards satire. People don't like to cause offense. And actually even the New York Times back in 2019 ended the publication of political cartoons altogether. I think it's probably more now about self censorship rather than the law, and it's that that's tempering. Sat. Riis suggests that the new moralism of social media and the sort of pressure from public opinion is like a religion itself with its high priests and its spiritual enforcers. He argues to me that Charlie Hebdo is not extraordinarily provocative, but that it seems so now because the margin of tolerance is more limited. Even humor about sex or death, he says, is less accepted these days. Rhys stressed to me that they are doing exactly the same thing that they did before. It's just that around us, he says, people are much more timid. At any rate, the writers and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo continue to defy that sort of pressure and refuse to tame their cartoons. And if satire elsewhere is becoming more bland and more censoring, then its voice is even more precious.

Thanks very much for your time, Sophie.

It's a pleasure always to speak to you, Jason. Thank you.

The pharmaceutical industry has its own version of Moore's Law, the one that for decades described how computing power was getting cheaper by half every couple of years. New drugs, their law says, double in cost every nine years. Back in the 1960s, a billion dollar research fund in $2008 would have yielded about 10 new drugs. These days, it wouldn't even get you one. But artificial intelligence may once again come to the rescue. Faster drug discovery would clearly be better, not only for the companies making them, but also for the patients awaiting them. As part of our World Ahead series, I spoke with Shailesh Chitnis, our global business correspondent, about how AI will begin to fulfill that promise in 2025.

On average, it takes around 10 years and more than $2 billion to develop a new drug. And in the past 10 years, America's food and Drug Administration, which is its drug regulation authority, has approved an average of 53 drugs every year. But in 2025, a wave of new drugs will near regulatory approval and AI could finally begin to speed things along.

Let's talk through the details. How does AI help in all that?

It helps in a couple of different ways. So the first is it is able to process large amounts of data through research papers, different data sources, to improve researchers understanding of diseases and their targets. The other step it is actually helping is pinpointing molecules and fine tuning the structures itself to boost the chances of success in human trials. And lately, generative AI is actually going a step further. It can actually come up with entirely new molecules to test.

And you said that AI could really start to speed things up in 2025. I mean, where are things now? What has it done so far?

To give you a sense of its usage, DeepMind, which is Google's AI laboratory, made a model called AlphaFold. Now, in 2020, AlphaFold 2, which is one version of this model, accurately predicted the structure of almost every protein in the human body. Its next version, which is AlphaFold 3, expanded this capability to other molecules that make up living things. So it's really a Big leap forward in terms of not just predicting, but actually creating the type of structures that researchers really need to create these kind of drugs. Now, ordinarily this would take months of trial and error experiments, but with AI, it can take a few hours to maybe a few days. Insilico, which is a biotech company that uses AI to develop drugs, says that it has reduced the pre clinical phase to about 18 months and at a cost of only $2.7 million, a fraction of the time and expense needed when we are talking about multiple years and hundreds and millions of dollars.

And we've been talking so far only about the preclinical phase, as you say, what about the rest of them? AI sets to help in the later stages as well.

That is the harder part, because once a drug enters clinical trials, it has to be tested on humans. And this is where so far EI has not been able to make a huge dent, because human clinical trials are time consuming. And there are good reasons for this. One is that pharmaceutical companies need to find the right patient population in which to test these drug candidates. The other is they have to be very sure that the drugs are safe to be given to this patient population. And lastly, it takes a certain amount of time to actually be able to measure the effectiveness of a drug on a particular disease, which can be very dependent on the disease or the action of the drug. But today we have around 65 AI inspired molecules that are going through human trials in various phases. That's according to bcg, which is a consulting firm.

So to your mind, is it just a matter of time then before these drugs prove themselves and efficiency gains are made and AI is kind of making all of our drugs?

Not yet. And the reason I would say that is because drug development is notoriously complex and has a very high failure rate, which has to do with with a lot of understanding about how a drug interacts with the human body. And so because of this, roughly around 1 in 10 drugs make it through to approval. And so even with the help of AI, we should not expect this approval rate to go up by a huge amount. It should certainly improve. And so to give you some examples, Benevolent AI and Exentia, which were two promising AI startups, recently reported disappointing results in clinical trials for their drugs which were actually developed using AI. But despite these setbacks, I think there is a lot of reasons to be optimistic. AI is already helping pharmaceutical companies make smarter choices about which molecules to take forward. Now, 2025, we could actually see a few AI inspired drugs get approved.

Shahlesh thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.