Justin Trudeau is resigning after an historic political tenure, here's a look back at his career-defining moments

CTV National News: Looking at Trudeau's career With nearly a decade as prime minister and 18 years in politics, Justin Trudeau's leadership era is at an end. Allison Bamford reports.

In a seismic political move, Justin Trudeau has announced his intention to step down as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and prime minister, once his successor is named.

This decision comes after more than nine years in the country's top job and nearly 12 years at the helm of his party.

Trudeau announced his departure at Rideau Cottage on Jan. 6, saying that every moment he's woken up as prime minister he's been inspired by Canadians, who he said deserve a real choice, and it's become clear to him that he "cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election."

This move follows a tumultuous fall sitting of Parliament and sets the ball in motion towards the end of Trudeau's historic political tenure, one marked by both substantial social and policy change, as well as controversy and fluctuating public support.

As the country readies to enter a new political era, here's a look back at Trudeau's career.

2008-2013: From backbench MP to party leader

In his youth, Trudeau remarked to CTV News' Sandie Rinaldo that he'd "never" be a politician, after watching what his father Pierre Elliott went through as prime minister. But murmurs of a political future began when he was cast back into the public spotlight delivering the eulogy at his father’s funeral.

By 2007, Trudeau went from helping the Liberals campaign, to winning the nomination for the Quebec riding of Papineau.

In 2008, he won the seat and headed to the House of Commons, defying pundits' predictions in a way that would foreshadow his ability to do so many more times in the years ahead. Trudeau's ascent from backbench opposition MP to party leader was then relatively swift.

While 2009 to 2011 were years the Liberal party spent in the political wilderness, come 2012, fresh off a charity boxing victory against Sen. Patrick Brazeau, Trudeau launched his leadership bid.

In April 2013, at age 41, he clinched the party's top job with nearly 80 per cent of the vote, promising "to do the hard work that is required."

From there, he endeavoured to rebuild the divided Liberal brand, with polls showing his party on a steady upward trajectory since Trudeau put himself forward as its future face.

2014-2015: Third party to prime minister

Kicking off his pre-campaign push to sell the Liberals as a viable change option to then-prime minister Stephen Harper's aging government, Trudeau made the sudden announcement in February 2014 that he was expelling all Liberal senators from the party's caucus in a bid to make the upper chamber more non-partisan.

The surprise move at the time sparked what a decade later has been cemented as a largely independent Senate.

When Harper called the 2015 campaign months early, framing the race as being about who has "the proven experience today to keep our economy strong and our country safe," the expectations for Trudeau's performance were fairly low, with the three-term incumbents quick to frame him as "just not ready."

But, after the longest federal campaign in recent history — which saw Trudeau both work a crowd with his sleeves rolled and take on his opponents in a series of more buttoned-down debates — the Liberals far exceeded political expectations and won 184 of 338 seats on Oct. 19, 2015.

Promising "real change," "positive politics," and "sunny ways," the Trudeau majority government then hit the ground running.

2015-2019: Majority standing to minority

In a move that has already cemented its place in Canadian history books, Trudeau's first act as prime minister was to appoint a gender-balanced cabinet, remarking infamously at its swearing-in ceremony, "because it's 2015!"

His win and early overtures to advance feminist policies earned Trudeau the attention of international media in a way that wasn't matched until nearly a decade later when he and his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau announced they were separating.

From there, his team set out to enact the suite of sizable policy commitments they'd made during the campaign.

This saw the Liberals reinstate the census, roll out the Canada Child Benefit — lifting hundreds of thousands of kids out of poverty as part of a broader effort to "grow the middle class" — and sign the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Tied to one of the defining moments of the 2015 campaign — when drowned three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi washed ashore amid a refugee crisis — the Liberals also moved quickly to welcome tens of thousands of Syrian refugees.

The Liberal government also quickly embarked on a path towards First Nations reconciliation, addressing systemic drinking water infrastructure inequities, and reckoning with the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Trudeau also issued a series of official apologies during his first term as prime minister for historic abuses of minorities by the government, including of Indigenous people and LGBTQ2S+ people.

This period also saw Canada under the Trudeau Liberals join fewer than a handful of other countries in enacting access to medical assistance in dying (MAiD), a controversial policy which has undergone updates since, but with Canada remaining one of the most permissive jurisdictions in the world.

However, it didn't take long for the rubber to hit the road on some of the Liberals' loftier promises.

Within a few years of governing, the Liberals abandoned a plan to do away with the first-past-the-post electoral system, first began to show signs of chronically failing to balance the budget, and enraged environmental activists for spending billions to buy the cross-provincial Trans Mountain pipeline.

Coupled with burgeoning ethical issues and travel troubles — including an embarrassing trip to India and a breach of the federal gifting rules related to a Christmas trip to the Aga Khan's private island — the shine started to dim.

One of the biggest tests for Trudeau came when Donald Trump became president of the United States in 2016.

As 'The Apprentice' star declared his intent to begin free trade agreement renegotiations with Canada and Mexico, 14 months of brokering a new NAFTA became a front-burner issue and pushed Trudeau's domestic agenda slightly out of focus.

The largely acrimonious renegotiation saga, however, ultimately led to a new deal being inked in 2018 — the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA — which all three countries celebrated as a win, and which is slated to come back up for review in 2026.

Also in 2018, Trudeau navigated the historic legalization of marijuana, as well as diplomatic and agricultural commerce tensions with China over the detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

As the next election neared, controversies continued to stack up against Trudeau, including accusations of political interference in the bombshell SNC-Lavalin Affair.

In that scandal, members of the prime minister's staff were alleged to have pressured then-attorney general and justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to ask federal prosecutors to make a deal in the corruption and fraud case against the Quebec-based company.

The controversy led to Trudeau removing Wilson-Raybould and then-treasury board president Jane Philpott from caucus, saying members' trust in the two had been "broken," for having turned over recorded conversations and expressing a lack of confidence in the government, respectively.

Trudeau's long-time principal secretary and friend Gerald Butts also resigned following the scandal, in what many political watchers perceived as him falling on the proverbial sword to spare the prime minister.

When Trudeau launched his second federal election in 2019, he did so with an entirely new message about change: now's not the time for it.

Carrying four years of governing baggage, the prime minister framed the race as a choice between continuing the progress made, or reverting to the way things were under Harper's Conservatives.

A big shift heading into the campaign was the shakeup in his political opponents. With both the Conservatives and New Democrats having elected new people to the top job, a then-47-year-old Trudeau went from the youngest to the eldest of the main three party leaders.

Trudeau's attempt to sell the slogan "choose forward" also took a hit when Time Magazine published photos of him nearly two decades prior wearing brownface at an Arabian Nights-themed party at the school where he taught.

During his apology for the incident — a major moment that tarnished his progressive image — Trudeau admitted there were other instances of him dressed in either brownface or blackface, while conceding that he couldn't be "definitive" about how many times he'd engaged in this type of "absolutely unacceptable" behaviour.

Ultimately, on Oct. 21, 2019, after a hard-fought and divisive campaign against then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, Canadians decided to give Trudeau a second chance.

But, the Liberals were sent back to Ottawa with fewer seats and a new requirement to collaborate with the opposition parties, as a minority government.

The outcome of this election also exposed new national unity challenges for the prime minister. From his Liberals being shut out of Alberta and Saskatchewan, to facing a revived Quebec sovereignty movement, Trudeau still vowed to "fight for all Canadians" in his second mandate.

2020-2022: Governing during a global pandemic

There would be no easing in to Trudeau's time as a minority leader.

Early 2020 saw the prime minister and the country grieve the downing of flight PS752 by Iran, which killed 176 people, among them 55 Canadian citizens and 30 Canadian permanent residents.

Grappling with a more divided country, unbeknownst to anyone, a global pandemic was also about to expose even deeper fractures in the federation.

Amid Trudeau's promises to unite Canadians, March 2020 saw them dramatically isolated to prevent spreading COVID-19. And, after the virus came home for the Trudeaus, the prime minister had to adapt to holding daily press conferences from outside his Rideau Cottage residence.

From there, over the months ahead, he announced the closing of borders, the rollout of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and a wage subsidy for businesses, and the signing of new deals to procure COVID-19 vaccines.

By mid-2020, another Trudeau-era scandal emerged.

The WE Charity controversy involved the Liberal government's decision to contract the organization to administer the nearly $1-billion pandemic-era Canada Student Service Grant (CSSG), and conflict of interest allegations given members of Trudeau's family and inner circle's close ties and work with the Kielburgers.

What ensued was a flurry of major political drama, from his top aide chief of staff Katie Telford testifying to his then-finance minister Bill Morneau paying back thousands in travel expenses for excursions his family took with WE Charity.

Ultimately, "Teflon Trudeau" — as CTV News' Don Martin described him at the time — apologized and was cleared of any direct wrongdoing, though the perception of elitism connected to the entire affair lingered.

This chapter also saw the nation grapple with racial reckonings, from the discovery of unmarked graves at former residential school sites, to the rallies against anti-Black racism and police brutality. In the face of both, Trudeau led with empathy but still faced critics who considered his responses hollow.

In August 2021, looking to put the previous two largely miserable years behind him, Trudeau called an early election, just halfway through his second mandate.

In launching the campaign, the newly-freshly-shaved prime minister hoped to make the case that Canadians needed to have their voices heard about who they wanted to lead the country at that pivotal moment in the pandemic.

It was a summer campaign unlike any other, given the surging fourth wave of the virus and associated health and safety restrictions on large gatherings. Vaccine mandates and then-Conservative leader Erin O'Toole's noncommittal stance on them became a central issue, and anti-vaccine protesters became increasingly vocal.

It was also during this election that the crisis in Afghanistan — when the Taliban seized power once again — dominated headlines. The Canadian government committed to welcoming at least 40,000 Afghan refugees, but faced significant criticism for its delayed response time.

In the end, on Sept. 20, 2021, voters sent federal politicians a clear message: get back to work. The Liberals failed to secure the pandemic majority they'd hoped, and instead returned to the House of Commons that had largely the same party breakdown of seats as it did before Canadians went to the polls.

That winter, after Trudeau got to work making good on his election commitments, the "Freedom Convoy" rolled into the picture, gridlocking the nation's capital for weeks in opposition to COVID-19 policies. The anti-government sentiment among what the prime minister infamously rebuked as a "small fringe minority," coupled with the protesters' intransigence, tested police forces, politicians, and the public.

As the truckers refused to leave Ottawa, blockades at Canada's borders with the United States in Windsor, Ont. and Coutts, Alta. ratcheted up the federal government's sense of urgency to deescalate.

After some high-stakes high-level meetings, Trudeau made the historic — and later ruled justified — decision to invoke the Emergencies Act.

This granted the government unprecedented powers to dismantle the protests, enacted over a stunning and frigid February weekend, and later examined in a public inquiry that saw Trudeau take the stand.

Less than a week after the final convoy semis adorned with 'F*ck Trudeau' flags rolled off of Parliament Hill, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Trudeau was quick to stand with allies in backing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's response, seeing billions of aid dollars flow to the war-torn country in the years that followed.

Then, injecting some at-the-time arguably much-needed stability, Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh announced their two parties had inked a confidence-and-supply agreement under which the fourth-party New Democrats would prop-up with minority government Liberals on key votes, in exchange for progress on a suite of progressive policies.

Framed as "Delivering for Canadians Now," the two-party pact gave Trudeau time to start cementing some legacy policies, enraging the Conservatives who were quick to condemn the move as an undemocratic "coalition."

2023-2024: An embattled leader fights on

Largely, the story of the final years of the prime minister's tenure centred on Canadians' concerns over the post-pandemic cost-of-living spike.

While the Liberals tried time and again to point to compounding global factors affecting interest rates and food prices, and rolled out a series of small-scale consumer-sympathetic measures including a grocery rebate to lessen the sting, Canadians were still struggling and laying blame at the feet of the federal government.

Enter stage right, a populist new Conservative leader in Pierre Poilievre, who seized early on voters' economic woes, slamming the Liberals over the carbon tax and housing affordability. This pressure, amplified by several premiers, saw Trudeau eventually offer up pollution-pricing carve-outs and a renewed national housing strategy.

The Liberals' carbon pricing backstop — years the making and challenged by Saskatchewan, Ontario and Alberta in court — came into effect in 2019. It has gradually increased in cost over time, in conjunction with a regular rebate payment that Trudeau struggled to make stand out in Canadians' bank accounts.

Then, with inflation forcing their mega-spending days into the rear-view, Trudeau's deputy and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pivoted to framing a series of social supports tied to the Liberal-NDP pact —such as child care, dental care, and pharmacare — as affordability aids.

The other dominating issue of this era was foreign interference. After a series of bombshell reports and leaks dropped alleging Chinese foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections, parliamentarians struck committees and called on Trudeau to strike a public inquiry.

Resisting this, the prime minister pointed to the series of election-shoring measures the Liberal had enacted – including creating the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians – he compromised and tapped former governor general David Johnston to probe the matter as a "special rapporteur."

That ended in spectacular acrimony and the Liberals relented. Quebec justice Marie-Josée Hogue was named to lead a public inquiry into foreign interference in federal electoral processes and democratic institutions.

While the nation awaits her ultimate conclusions, the Liberals heeded strong opposition pushes and created a foreign agent registry and enhanced other security apparatuses.

And, amid accusations of not taking meddling threats from other states such as India seriously enough, the prime minister shocked many when he rose on the opening day of the fall 2023 sitting to accuse that country of having a role in the extrajudicial killing of a Canadian Sikh leader — a move that had cascading impact.

The murmurs about Trudeau's leadership began to surface just a few months later. Arguably first was a long-time Liberal senator suggesting it may be time he steps down to make room for a fresh face at the helm of the Liberal party.

As MPs began speaking more openly about needing to at least check in on the issue — around the time the Israel-Hamas war exposed internal tensions — Trudeau asserted his intention to stay and fight Poilievre at the ballot box.

Then, as part of a refreshed media strategy around the 2024 budget — in which the government targeted Millennial and Generation Z voters with a fairness-framed capital gains tax hike — Trudeau pivoted to talking "politics in full sentences" on a series of podcasts.

It was during one of these conversations that the prime minister revealed he'd contemplated stepping down in 2023, when his marriage was on the rocks, but ultimately deciding he couldn't walk away with the stakes so high for protecting his progressive legacy.

The real turn came this June, when the Liberals lost a long-time stronghold downtown Toronto riding to the Conservatives in a stunning and unexpected byelection defeat. From there, the murmurs turned into on-the-record calls for the prime minister to put his ego aside and step down for the sake of the party.

2024-2025: Trudeau's final months as leader

Trudeau's grip on leadership slipped further as summer faded into fall. Just before the House of Commons resumed for the fall sitting, Singh announced he'd "ripped up" the Liberal-NDP deal that had been propping up the government for more than two and a half years.

Without the pact, MPs returned to a House under traditional minority dynamics, which led to heightened tensions and two unsuccessful nearly back-to-back attempts by the Conservatives to bring down the Liberals with non-confidence motions.

Emboldened by new voting power — and after picking up the Liberal riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, Que., in a September byelection upset — Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-François Blanchet issued an ultimatum to the Liberals.

His demand was for the government to help pass two Bloc bills — one geared toward boosting Old Age Security and the other at protecting supply management — by Oct. 29, or he'd start talking to the other parties about bringing down the government.

After failing to heed this call, the Liberals lost the Bloc's backing, leaving the NDP to be the only party propping up the Liberals in Parliament by November, as the Conservatives continued to use opposition day confidence motions in an effort to force an early election.

As the unstable fall sitting forged on, Trudeau also faced an internal caucus revolt, seeing dozens of his caucus members organize behind the scenes to formally ask him to consider stepping aside. That effort culminated in a high-drama closed-door cabinet meeting, but ultimately the effort to oust Trudeau fizzled with the prime minister promising to refocus.

That all came just ahead of Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidential election.

That major development south of the border saw an attempt to revive the "Team Canada" united front, but Trudeau was met with skepticism from some political opponents and Canada-U.S. observers over his ability to take on a second Trump term, and he soon faced a series of social media jabs from Trump and members of his inner circle.

In a bid to turn political tides domestically, in late November Trudeau announced he was giving Canadians a temporary tax break on essential items, along with a one-time $250 rebate, but the holiday affordability package faced headwinds on the Hill.

Eventually, the government opted to advance the GST/HST pause and put the promised cheques on the backburner, after failing to secure any other party's support for legislation to enact it.

It was around this time that reporting resurfaced of simmering tensions between Trudeau and his finance minister over spending.

That high-stakes political friction culminated in mid-December, when Freeland quit cabinet and published a stunning, and in some ways scathing, letter she sent to the prime minister, decrying "costly political gimmicks" at a time of considerable economic insecurity.

Her abrupt departure blindsided Trudeau's top aides and sparked turmoil within the government, from taking hours to make clear that the fiscal picture would be tabled at all, to the late-afternoon swearing-in of longtime Liberal Dominic LeBlanc as Canada's next minister of finance.

From there — despite trying to quip at a Liberal holiday party that all families fight over the holidays but eventually make up — a growing number of his MPs came to the conclusion that Trudeau's time as leader was up.

In an effort to inject some governing stability and fill what had grown to several vacancies on his front bench, on Dec. 20 Trudeau shuffled his cabinet, promoting eight rookie Liberal MPs and reassigning four ministers.

Though, before the ceremony even got underway, Trudeau was dealt a major blow to the last remaining pillar of parliamentary support his embattled minority was relying on to stay in power.

Singh declared, after months of waffling, that his party was ready to vote non-confidence in the Liberal government — regardless of who was at the helm.

Siezing on this, Poilievre wrote to Gov. Gen. Mary Simon, pushing for her to talk to Trudeau about recalling the House from its holiday hiatus for a confidence vote, but the move was quickly panned by the procedurally inclined as a stunt.

Trudeau then — after cancelling a series of end-of-year interviews and making little more than a passing comment about continuing to work on Canada-U.S. relations — quietly took his reflecting into the holidays.

This left many speculating about his next steps. Filling some of the void were more Liberal MPs, who in the days leading up to and through Christmas, generated headlines about how many of them were ready for a leadership race.

As uncertainty simmered over whether that, a prorogation, or a snap election, was what the country was headed into in 2025, the prime minister hit the slopes in British Columbia.

Back from his family holiday less than a day, with the majority of the Ontario, Atlantic, Quebec and B.C. caucuses calling for his resignation, the news broke Jan. 3 that national caucus chair Brenda Shanahan had called an emergency national caucus meeting to discuss Trudeau's leadership. That meeting is scheduled for this coming Wednesday.

Now, more than a decade after he promised to unite the country, Trudeau is preparing to leave office, saying he's hopeful his departure will help bring the temperature down on the level of polarization in federal political discourse.

Though, stepping down now — and admitting he is no longer the best person to take his party into the next federal election — has left his successor with likely just a few months to try to recover any ground the Liberals have lost, and then introduce themselves to Canadians before they go to the polls.