The Prime Minister and his advisers were reportedly blindsided by the NDP Leader’s decision.THE CANADIAN PRESS
So. Farewell then, supply and confidence agreement, maker of governments, binder of parties, precedent-setting pseudo-coalition. Or, if you prefer, anti-democratic backroom deal sprung on the voters without warning.
That’s the view, certainly, of my colleagues on The Globe and Mail editorial board. With the Liberal-NDP agreement dead, they wrote this week, “Canadians have finally got what they voted for in the last election: an honest-to-God minority Liberal government,” meaning one that must seek support from other parties for each bill on its own, rather than securing a blanket endorsement of its entire legislative agenda in advance.
Well, no: Canadians did not vote for a minority government, Liberal or otherwise. They didn’t vote for any sort of government, and never have: the choice is not on the ballot. We elect Parliaments in this country, not governments. Every one of the roughly 17 million votes cast in the last election were marked beside the name of the candidate and party the voter preferred should represent his or her riding in Parliament.
Doubtless many of those voters also wanted that party to govern the country. But the actual outcome was the product of all those millions of individual decisions: There was no collective mind that decided we should have a Liberal minority government. Neither did the voters express, individually or collectively, a view on what agreements MPs should or should not strike among themselves once elected.
We elect MPs, rather, to use their judgment. They can tell us in advance what they plan to do if elected, and we may wish to punish them if they do not do as they said they would. But many if not most of the issues MPs will be called upon to decide in the life of a Parliament will be of the sort that were unforeseen or indeed unforeseeable on the day of their election.
What, at any rate, did the agreement amount to, for good or ill? On the one hand, the NDP promised not to do something it had no intention of doing, that is defeat the government. The Liberals, for their part, agreed to do the sorts of things they would almost certainly have done anyway, such as punt pharmacare into the next decade (unless by “pharmacare” you mean a bill covering exactly two categories of drugs that has yet to become law or obtain the consent of the provinces).
Still, at least the two parties were agreed on something, an arrangement they committed to maintain “until Parliament rises in June 2025.” Unless, of course, they didn’t. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s theatrical declaration last week that he had “ripped up” the agreement essentially meant there never was an agreement: An “agreement” to do what you like until you don’t is not an agreement in any meaningful sense of the word.
For that matter, can anyone doubt the Liberals would have ripped up the agreement themselves and called a snap election, if the polls were right? True, they would have some difficulty pretending they were forced to do so by an obstructionist Parliament, given the guarantee of NDP support. But if a law forbidding snap elections is not an impediment – you may remember it, it’s been on the books since 2007 – it’s hard to see how a signed agreement would be.
But now the agreement is dead, which clearly changes everything. In the absence of an agreement, the NDP will continue not doing what it had pledged not to do under the agreement. Only, instead of declining to defeat the government on every bill, it will now decline to defeat it on each bill. No longer obliged to prop up the Liberals, the NDP will henceforth do so of its own free will.
This is of greater significance than it sounds. The point of the agreement was not, as so often claimed, to guarantee the Liberal government would not be defeated in the House: that was never in the cards. The point was to guarantee the NDP would not be asked about it. It was to help the NDP out, not the Liberals.
It wasn’t just that the NDP, becalmed in the polls and behind the other parties in fundraising, could not stomach another election, so soon after the last. It is that the other parties knew they couldn’t – and knowing they could not, could act in a way that would surely bring on an election were the NDP not there to prevent it.
The government, that is, is in what might be called a “strong minority” – the numbers in the House line up in such a way that it can pass legislation with the support of any one of the other three main parties. Or to put it another way, to bring the government down requires all three parties to decide to do so at the same time.
What does that mean? It means that as soon as a vote was called on any given bill, the Conservatives and Bloc leaders would rush to the microphones to announce their parties would vote to defeat it, leaving the NDP Leader to squirm and stare at his shoes before finally admitting that, no, his party would not be joining them.
It was to spare the party this repeated humiliation that the NDP agreed to the deal: Instead of having to come up with excuses each time for why they were once again propping up a government they had denounced as corrupt, incompetent and worse, they could simply point to the agreement.
Why give up this prophylactic now, and expose the party to fresh, new humiliations? Because time has passed, and the calculus of advantage has changed. The protection the agreement afforded always had to be weighed against the dangers of being too closely identified with the Liberals.
On the one hand, as history shows, whatever political benefits the agreement yielded were likely to accrue to the larger party. On the other hand, there don’t seem to have been any political benefits: Support for the Liberals has plummeted since the deal, and the NDP along with them. With an election not far off, it was time to pull the rip cord.
If the NDP are in a precarious situation, however, so are the Liberals. The deal with the NDP might not have been worth the paper it was crayoned on, but still: a piece of paper is a piece of paper. The Prime Minister and his advisers were reportedly blindsided by the NDP Leader’s decision. But they appear to have had no more advance word of the sudden resignation of the Liberal national campaign director, who discovered a desire to spend more time with his family just a year into the job, and with an election looming.
The impression of a Prime Minister walled off from unpleasant news was reinforced by a summer spent, in effect, hiding from his own caucus, after the calamity of the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election in June. The loss of such a safe Liberal seat, carrying the message that few Liberal seats were safe any more, had sparked the odd MP to call privately – one even did so publicly – for the leader to step down.
Rather than give them the chance to combine forces against him, via the emergency caucus meeting some were demanding, Justin Trudeau spent the summer calling MPs individually – and precious little else. No changes in senior staff were announced, nor were any major policy departures, beyond repairing some of the more obvious political damage on the immigration file.
Neither, as of writing, has there been a cabinet shuffle. But then, if cabinet shuffles were this government’s salvation, they would have worked long ago: last summer, for example, when seven ministers were dropped and more than 30 given new portfolios. It had no visible effect on the government’s support, possibly because no one thinks cabinet matters any more.
Power has been so centralized in the Prime Minister’s Office – more even than under previous prime ministers – that there is really only one post that people pay much attention to. As it happens the occupant of that post is in particularly bad odour with the public, with a net approval rating, according to last month’s Abacus poll, of negative 35.
A leader with those kinds of numbers would be a drag anchor on any party, especially in Canada’s leadership-obsessed political culture – but in a party that has so wholly given itself over to the leader as the current incarnation of the Liberal Party, it is fatal. Recall the cult-like atmosphere that surrounded Mr. Trudeau’s ascension to the role in 2013, accentuated by the bizarre rules adopted for that year’s leadership race (to vote you didn’t even have to be a member: just a “supporter”), and cemented by his miraculous delivery of the party into government in 2015.
And yet, for that very reason, they are stuck with him. Mired though they are about 20 points behind the Opposition Conservatives, and facing massive losses in the election to come, there is no mechanism for removing the leader against his will. It would be one thing if the party had opted in to the provisions of the 2015 Reform Act, allowing the leader to be defenestrated by a simple vote of the caucus: as the Conservatives did to Erin O’Toole in 2022. But Liberal MPs declined to avail themselves of that power, and now there is nothing they can do.
The worst part of it is: Mr. Trudeau may be their least bad option. As horrific as the election is likely to be for them under Mr. Trudeau’s leadership, it might well be worse under any alternative. But this, too, is a function of the leadership cult. In a functioning system of cabinet government, in which ministers had real responsibilities, there would now be several powerful contenders for the job, with substantial followings in the party, if not the country. As it is, there is maybe one and a half.
Suppose it were possible to push him out. And suppose there were some plausible alternative. You’d still need months to organize a leadership campaign, under the elephantine process Canada’s parties use to pick a leader: months consumed by the raising and spending of funds on behalf the candidates that might otherwise have gone to the party; months filled with public feuding between the candidates; months of inevitable scandals over the signing up of new members.
There isn’t time. The party may well lose another safe seat in next week’s by-election in the Montreal riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun. It won’t matter. The last real chance to push Mr. Trudeau out was in June. But party members lacked the nerve or the means to do it then, and now there’s nothing they can do.