Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, left, and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh take part in the federal election English-language Leaders debate in Gatineau, Que., Sept. 9, 2021.Pool/Reuters
Now the teetering begins.
The exhausted, embattled Liberal government just eked through another listless summer. The Prime Minister’s Office has been telling Liberals for two years there’s lots of time before an election.
But now NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has realized that Justin Trudeau is a millstone around his neck that he needs to cut loose before it’s too late. The minority Liberal government is in the minority again.
Mr. Trudeau’s government is no longer stable. Jeopardy is attached.
Mr. Singh’s decision to pull out of the supply-and-confidence agreement doesn’t mean the Liberal government will fall right away. The NDP can still support the Liberals on a vote-by-vote basis. So can the Bloc Québécois, for that matter.
But don’t believe the people who say Mr. Singh’s move changes nothing.
The NDP-Liberal deal is done. What happens now?
A low-in-the-polls, long-in-the-tooth minority government is an inherently unstable thing. And even reluctant opposition parties sometimes get cornered into pulling the plug.
Every major political decision can now be fatal to the Liberal government – starting with the decision about Mr. Trudeau’s fate. Could the Prime Minister resign, even if he wanted to, when the government’s sudden defeat, and a snap election, are possible?
That election isn’t imminent just yet. Mr. Singh’s NDP is still weak and won’t be in a rush to force an election. But without a deal, late-stage minority Parliaments tend to degenerate into games of chicken.
After all, the New Democrats’ move to kill the alliance with the Liberals became necessary because serving as the Liberals’ reliable bolster was dragging them down. The NDP was taking the blame for an unpopular Prime Minister rather than gaining from policy concessions it wrested.
Mr. Singh’s statement announcing the end of the deal with the Liberals didn’t even bother to give a specific reason. It was a pure-politics campaign video asserting that the Liberals are too weak to stop the bigger threat of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives and arguing, without supporting evidence, that the NDP is better placed to do so. Mr. Singh had been looking weak, so it was time to act tough.
But that pressure doesn’t stop now.
Mr. Singh will have to make regular decisions about supporting Mr. Trudeau’s government every time there is a confidence vote. Mr. Singh’s show of strength will vanish if he waffles every time. And Mr. Poilievre made it clear Wednesday he will seek to manufacture ways to put Mr. Singh on the spot. The survival of the Liberal government hangs on a game of Russian roulette.
Twenty years ago, Paul Martin’s government teetered every other week in 2005 as his Liberals cut piecemeal policy deals with the New Democrats. Then-NDP leader Jack Layton was regularly taunted for caving in and supporting the Liberals. Until he didn’t.
Even Stephen Harper’s newly elected minority government felt so vulnerable in 2006 that his PMO celebrated each time they surpassed the tenure of previous governments. When Mr. Harper exceeded Joe Clark’s nine months, they had a cake.
All of this means Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals can’t work on the expectation that they have another year before the election. They’d need to find support on any money bills and the non-confidence motions Mr. Poilievre is promising. An election is now more likely in the spring than the fall. And the idea that Mr. Trudeau can bounce back from a double-digit deficit in opinion polls in six months is, to put it mildly, far-fetched.
What’s more, the Hail Mary option for the Liberals – replacing Mr. Trudeau with a new Liberal leader – is now rapidly being closed off.
The implied threat of an election campaign at any moment will probably help Mr. Trudeau’s defenders to turn down calls for his resignation on the grounds the Liberal Party shouldn’t be left leaderless. If Mr. Trudeau himself wanted to resign, he’d have to do it soon – there is little time left for the Liberal Party to hold a leadership race before the threat of an election grows close.
So while the NDP’s withdrawal from the parliamentary alliance with the Liberals doesn’t trigger a Liberal defeat, it changes a lot. Now Mr. Trudeau leads an unstable government that can no longer count on another year.