Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet at a news conference, March 28, 2013, in Quebec City.The Canadian Press
Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet has issued an ultimatum: the Prime Minister’s Office must see to the never-going-to-happen, or else Mr. Blanchet will trigger the extremely-unlikely. How’s that for a threat? Surely Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is somewhere quaking.
Mr. Blanchet has insisted that Mr. Trudeau, Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Katie Telford, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, all resign for their handling of the WE Charity scandal. If they refuse, Mr. Blanchet says he will attempt to trigger an election in the fall.
“We say they must go,” Mr. Blanchet told reporters Wednesday. “We say that even more intently than we did before.”
Mr. Blanchet is referring to the fact that he demanded Mr. Trudeau’s resignation all of six weeks ago, when both he and Conservative leader Andrew Scheer insisted the Prime Minister and Finance Minister “step aside for the good of the country.” Since then, Mr. Morneau, Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Telford all testified before House finance committee, where they revealed details about the WE arrangement that made an already shady agreement appear even more grubby and incestuous.
La Presse also reported that the WE Charity paid another firm to assist in delivering the program in French-speaking regions – the implication being that the Liberals didn’t bother to check if WE could properly serve the country’s francophone students before handing it a massive contract.
The only problem that left for Mr. Blanchet, who surely wants to stretch out this fresh Quebec angle, was that he and Mr. Scheer had deployed their “resign” calls prematurely. (In fact, Mr. Scheer demanded Mr. Trudeau step down twice before, during the SNC-Lavalin scandal, perhaps unaware that the only effect was to make his party seem weak when Mr. Trudeau, of course, stuck around.) So, Mr. Blanchet had to refresh his resignation call, this time with something of a serious-sounding addendum: Resign, he said, or I’ll force an election.
The threat of tabling a motion of non-confidence in a minority Parliament is a weighty one most of the time. But consider the conditions now: The Bloc will need the support of the entire Conservative caucus, plus the NDP or the Greens and independents, to successfully bring down the Liberal government.
By the fall, the Conservatives will have just chosen their new leader, who will have had next to no time to carve out the party’s direction, establish a rapport with his caucus and familiarize himself to the wider electorate. If Peter MacKay wins, he will not have a seat in the House of Commons. And recent polling suggests the Conservatives still have plenty of work to do if they want to unseat the Liberals in a snap election. Indeed, a Leger poll earlier this month found that 39 per cent and 38 per cent of decided respondents said they would vote Liberal if, respectively, Erin O’Toole or Mr. MacKay became leader – a full 10 percentage points or more than those who said they would vote Conservative.
Then there’s the NDP, which was in rough financial shape after the 2019 election, only to be delivered another blow by the COVID-19 pandemic. The party saw donations slow down in the first quarter of 2020 to slightly more than $972,000, compared to $1.4-million over the same period in 2018, the last non-election year. Fundraising has picked up since then – $1.3-million in the most recent quarter – but the party is still in no position to run another expensive campaign. Even before COVID-19, the NDP made the decision to postpone its national convention in the interest of paying off its campaign debt.
On top of that is the whole people-struggling-to-survive thing, with Canadians across the country just trying to keep it together mentally, physically and financially. Despite polling that shows theoretical support for an election should Mr. Trudeau be found in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act, the practical realities about a return to school, the end of safe(er) outdoor summer activities and possible rising infection numbers could make an election call in the fall seem like an ill-timed expense and distraction. (Partisans will insist that accountability for WE can’t wait, but it’s that sort of myopic thinking that keeps a party 10 points behind.) Voters who are in no mood for an election may take out their angst on the parties that pushed for it.
In fact, the party that might benefit the most from a snap election – other than the Bloc, with approval of Mr. Trudeau on the decline in Quebec – is the Liberal Party, even with its persistent and recent ethical lapses. All of these factors taken together make the prospect of a fall election appear rather unlikely, and renders Mr. Blanchet’s threat little more than impotent political theatre. Perhaps he’ll have better luck with his third or fourth resignation calls. With nothing much else to lose, he might as well throw in a “please.”
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