Trudeau’s most embarrassing moment: voted Canada’s worst PM in six decades

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been having a very difficult year politically. Sure he and his government have experienced corruption scandals and other popularity problems over his time leading the country, but nothing has hurt him quite as bad as voter apathy.

People in Canada seem to be ready for a change. Each new survey on the PM's numbers put him further behind his opposition yet the possibility of Trudeau's ultimate downfall pales in comparison to a finding from last year that saw him voted Canada's worst prime minister in sixty years.

Three in ten Canadians said Trudeau was the worst Prime Minister their country has ever had according to a July 2022 poll from Research Co. that revealed the country’s best and worst Prime Ministers since 1968 based on a 1000-person national sample of the population. 

Research Co. noted in an analysis of its survey findings that feelings about Trudeau and his tenure worsened over the course of 2022 but nowhere was this hate for the current Prime Minister stronger than in the western province of Alberta.

“Animosity towards Justin Trudeau is decidedly strong in one Canadian province,” said Mario Canseco, President of Research Co. in a statement from the polling company on its survey. “Almost half of Albertans (49%) consider him the worst recent prime minister.” 

The findings shouldn’t be a surprise after years of the government’s pandemic response poisoned the minds of some in the country, leading to a special kind of personal hatred for the man who led the country through the most several very difficult years. 

“The popularity of certain leaders also differed greatly from province to province,” noted the Tronto Star in its analysis of the survey’s results, reporting that leaders like Stephan Harper were more popular in Alberta while Pierre Trudeau was more popular in Ontario. 

While Justin Trudeau may have been the most disliked Prime Minister in the survey, he certainly wasn’t alone. Canadians have a long memory and you might be surprised by some of the PMs who made it onto the survey's best and worst list Prime Ministers list. 

Here are the top nine worst Prime Ministers in Canada after Justin Trudeau, who was voted Canada’s worst by 30 percent of Research Co.’s survey respondents. 

18 percent

7 percent

6 percent

5 percent

3 percent

3 percent

2 percent

1 percent

Interestingly, some of the Prime Ministers who were voted the worst in Canada's history also appeared on the top of the country’s best PM rankings for the same time period, which is something you’d expect if the survey captured a well-balanced group of individuals from all sides of the political spectrum. 

For example, Pierre Trudeau garnered 5 percent of the worst vote but ended up being ranked Canada’s favorite PM pick with 20 percent of the vote. Here are the other eight. 

17 percent

11 percent

11 percent

8 percent

3 percent

2 percent

1 percent

1 percent

One of the most interesting findings of Research Co,’s survey discovered that a stunning 26 percent of respondents didn’t know who they’d pick as their favorite Prime Minister, which is a very sad comment on the current state of Canadian politics.