At Issue - Is Freeland’s resignation a fatal blow for Trudeau's government?

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

At Issue special edition: Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigns from cabinet hours before she was to deliver the fall economic statement. Can Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s political career survive the blow, and what comes next from the opposition? Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey there, I'm Rosemary Barton. This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for a special edition on Monday, December 16th.

Chrystia Freeland resigns. The deputy PM announced her departure from cabinet just hours before she was set to present the government's fiscal update. As shocking as it was, opposition leaders quickly found their voices. Mr. Trudeau's government is over. He must acknowledge that. Justin Trudeau has lost control and yet he clings to power. Today I'm calling on Justin Trudeau to resign. He has to go. This week we're asking what's next for the Liberals? Can Trudeau survive this dramatic

resignation? Chantelle Hebert, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj join me to talk about the politics behind Freeland's stunning resignation. So, Chantal, I'm going to start with you. How stunned were you when you saw this news this morning? The timing of it? I thought I'd seen quite a bit in politics. The Paul Martin resignation, remember, over the course of a gallery dinner. Lucien Bouchard's letter to Brian Mulroney.

This falls clearly in that category, i.e. an event that you can feel is shaking the pillars of the political temple that is the government. Why? Because Christian Freeland and Justin Trudeau, they may not have been close friends, but they were the defining political relationship of the government and have been almost from day one. So that this would happen on the day of the fiscal update in circumstances like that amounts in the book of just about any observer to a deadly blow to a weakened government. And Andrew, it's not just the resignation. It is also some of the scathing language that Chrystia Freeland used against the prime minister in her letter of resignation. Yeah, it's not so much a resignation as, you know, she pulled the pin on a grenade and threw it in the room.

Calculated to do maximum damage. I think some of the policy differences that are outlined in the letter are perhaps more apparent than real. I think it, you know, pleased her to position herself as being the voice of fiscal sanity. But if you look at her budgets that she's run, at least ostensibly she's been in charge of, you would say they haven't been particularly fiscally prudent. But I think that gets at the issue here is this is, on one level, this is about how she's been treated, which is abominably, over the last few months, where they basically hung her out to dry, made it known that she was on a short-term time remainder at best,

and then insisted she go out and read this document, which I guess was the last straw. But more broadly, it's about the relationship between this prime minister and his cabinet or between prime ministers and ministers. We have centralized power so much in the office of the prime minister, and you can start to see the repercussions. It's an interesting question why some of the most capable ministers in this government are outside the cabinet looking in. People like Bill Morneau or Mark Garneau or Jane Philpott or Jody Wilson-Raybould.

And the common thread is, if you read all of their memoirs, is they were basically treated like pawns, like foot soldiers, not like cabinet ministers with actual responsibilities, constantly being overruled, constantly being second-guessed and run roughshod over. And in this particular minister's case, she decided to fight back. A couple of curious things. One, that they apparently had a moment inside caucus today and hugged. So I don't know how bitter things are, given that that happened, or maybe that was for show for both of them. But the other thing, Althea, is the timing. Why Justin Trudeau would

go to Chrystia Freeland on the Friday before a fall economic statement and say, I want you to do something else is baffling to me. Stupid could be another word to describe it. I don't think anyone actually thought that Chrystia Freeland was going to self-sabotage a big day as finance minister for this. So I think that would have been hard to predict. And I think to Andrew or Shantaz's earlier point, you know, you can quit because you have a disagreement with the prime minister on policy.

I don't like these $250 checks. I'm not prepared to do this HST rebate. I don't think this is fiscally sound at this point. But to quit in this way is sending a message. First of all, she left the government scrambling. They had no clue whether they were even going to table the fall economic statement, who was going to read it, where they were going to move forward, how they were going to move forward on this. And then it was the way in which she quit. She basically, to Andrew's point, but she didn't need to destroy him. And she chose to destroy him. And she drew lines in the sand. Basically,

if you still side with the prime minister, then you believe in bad economic policy. You are irresponsible. You support a plan that is not sound as we go into negotiations with Donald Trump. So there's like the leadership politics at play in this that I think the battle lines have been drawn on. And she's encouraging people to join the dissenters rank. It is like the most interesting political move I, too, have ever witnessed. It is fascinating. And she clearly knew what she was doing. I mean, she kept her powder dry for a very big moment. And Chantal, the fact that Freeland was offered a minister job of dealing with Canada-U.S. relations, seemingly without a department,

it hasn't really been made clear to us. But that was not something she was willing to accept. What do you make of that attempt by the prime minister? So you are the finance minister. You have spent, and that is documented, that most of the fall fighting those affordability measures, the GST break and those checks that were supposed to go out or might still go out, who knows. And on the Friday before, you have to bring in a fiscal update that will show a very high deficit,

much higher than anything you predicted six months ago. The prime minister calls you up via Zoom, I understand, and says, I'm thinking of moving you to a position, a Canada-U.S. relations, that actually doesn't have an existence in the roadmap of what the government is. So no department, no deputy minister. And I'm going to move someone in your place probably next Wednesday. In clear, you are going to go to the House of Commons on Monday and fess up to this huge deficit. And then it's going to look on Wednesday like I'm demoting you and I'm telling the country I'm going to fix the bad ways of this minister. Who would have stayed and

delivered that fiscal statement in those circumstances except a masochist? But Althea is right. The end result is a vote of non-confidence in the government from its own finance minister. And the rationale she puts forward may be at odds with that of Justin Trudeau, but it happens to be within the consensus of the larger economic, fiscal, business community in this country. So where that leaves the government, both on policy and on politics, I really don't know. Okay, we have one more block, and we'll go around through everyone on this. So, Andrew, given what Chantal has just laid out there,

how can the Prime Minister stay in his job? Oh, well, it's not inconceivable at all. It's going to depend on some things. I don't think he, even today, I'm not sure he has that much to worry about from caucus. We'll see. But they are mostly frightened little rabbits. The prime minister has so many levers over them. It's only recently they've even been prepared to put their names to it.

I think the more telling issue is what happens in cabinet. And just as with the MPs, generally their issue is mostly who can save my seats, with the cabinet ministers, it's who can advance my career. And a lot of them now are going to be looking at this and calculating, am I better off sticking with the captain as the ship goes down, or should I jump off before the whole thing blows up? And if I do jump off, who am I jumping to? Am I a candidate for the leadership? I think part of this was, you know, it's one thing to basically rewrite budgets for finance ministers if they're going to stay in their job. If they're being told you're going to lose your job, oh, we're going to bring in Mark Carney to replace you.

I think one of the effects of this has been to materially damage at least the short-term prospects of Mark Carney, the Mark Carney accession, if not the candidacy. And I will say, just to add to that, I think the candidacy of Dominic LeBlanc just took a major leap forward. I was struck by the almost universal commendation of his appointment, even though he's already running half the government, to step in as finance minister. 30 seconds to Althea. Well, Dominic LeBlanc is now the minister of everything, basically has replaced Chrystia Freeland. To your original comment, I do think this has reignited all the chaos

that happened in early October. I think the dissenters feel emboldened that there are now more people, people who are unwilling to speak publicly, who are now willing to speak publicly. I'm told 45 people are willing to sign a letter. We heard rumors all throughout the day of senior cabinet ministers likely resigning, that Mark Carney was not touching this government at all. And the most important thing is NDP leader Jagmeet Singh called for the prime minister's resignation.

Basically, Singh is saying, we want you to have a leadership race. We'll probably support you if you have a leadership race, but I cannot back this guy anymore. At issue tonight, Chrystia Freeland's resignation on her way out, she criticized the prime minister for costly political gimmicks, while her replacement on his way in sang her praises. Chrystia Freeland is somebody that is, I have worked with for well over a decade. She's somebody that I admire as a colleague, that I appreciate as a friend. She has accomplished a great deal for our government. Welcome back.

Let's bring everybody back and get right into it. Chantal Andrew and Althea. Chantal, how big a blow is this for the Prime Minister? Can he survive? And the reason I ask is because we are facing down Donald Trump, and things are going to get serious pretty quickly. How can he stay on in his role? Okay, so basically, this is a government that was already weak to face the challenges of the Trump presidency. It is now even weaker. And it's not going to get any stronger because we've made the point before,

but that's even more true today, without a fresh mandate. This is someone that is basically on a death watch. As for the survival of the government, if the prime minister does not decide to step down as liberal leader and ask his party to choose a successor. I believe that this significantly shortens the life of his government. Why? Because at some point the House will come back at the end of January. Come the end of February at the latest, there will be a confidence vote. And after today, Jagmeet Singh has left himself no room to support the government on a confidence motion

if Justin Trudeau leads the party. It's hard to know what's worse, Andrew, a liberal government in throes of a leadership race facing Donald Trump or a country in throes of an election facing Donald Trump. I mean, both are not great outcomes for us. Well, but you've got to take your medicine. We have to get a stronger base of government, whichever party leads it, whichever prime minister leads it. As I say, I think that we may be surprised at how long Justin Trudeau is able to cling on. But let's supposing that option is ruled out. Well, you either have to have a leadership race or a full-on election. A leadership race on its own is certainly favored by the liberals and the NDP because they don't want to face an election anytime soon.

But it doesn't solve our problems. That gets them over their political hump, but it does not give the country the kind of strong leadership that it needs at this time. Not just in terms of dealing with Donald Trump, but also in terms of the internal divisions in the country, which are about to get a lot worse. I was struck by the press conference today with the premiers, some of whom appeared to be licking their lips at the prospect of a weakened federal government. You know, Scott Moe sounded like he was

the minister of something in some parallel alternative government made up of the premiers. And I think we're going to see a lot more of this, of the premiers sort of freelancing and basically acting as if they were emissaries of sovereign states rather than as part of any kind of Team Canada until we start getting some leadership out of Ottawa. Yeah, they certainly seem to, Daniel Smith told me, we have to fill the vacuum. And that's what they were trying to do, they said today. But where does that leave us, Althea, for a country that is trying to figure out how to stave off this threat of tariffs and now has a further weakened prime minister and a finance minister who, yes, has been to Mar-a-Lago,

but I don't know if he's going to know how to handle this. Dominic Leblanc is probably the most capable cabinet minister in this government and is an incredibly capable cabinet minister. He's very charming. If anybody's on the Canada-US file, I think we're in good hands with Dominic LeBlanc. He's very good at making friends with people that he, you know, naturally you wouldn't think he would get along with. That being said, the government is not in a good position. The government is not in a good position for the country. Justin Trudeau can hang on as long as liberal MPs allow him to. Really, the ball is in their court. As far as the provincial

premiers, what they have said is accurate. Anyone you speak with who has been on those calls will tell you that there has not been the leadership that the premiers expected from the federal government. And so they do feel like they have to step up and fill in the void because they don't feel like there is enough action from Ottawa. They haven't been told really what the grand strategy is. They feel that there isn't a grand strategy. That's not good either. You know, would it be better for Justin Trudeau to call a leadership race to focus his entire attention on dealing with Donald Trump or to allow an interim leader with a clean slate to do so, maybe it would be. Yeah, I see Chantal Noreen. Chantal. And you also don't need to take six months to pick a leader.

Many countries managed to do that over a matter of six, seven or eight weeks maximum, starting today to mid-February, or just about where the House of Commons would be. But the Prime Minister, I believe, has just let slip his last best chance of scoring an upset in the next federal election. That best chance came with Donald Trump. And as some Canadians, that he was the adult in the room, that he had a team that was experienced in dealing with this. All we have seen after the first week has been chaos, disorder, out of line.

Was it only last week that Justin Trudeau was calling himself a feminist and pointing at Chrystia Freeland, the same person that a few days later he was going to fire to replace with a guy to fix her mess, which is his mess. The truth is that there was a very narrow path to a recovery for the liberals, and I believe that that path has been bombed by Justin Trudeau himself. About 30 seconds, Andrew, on what's next. I'll just point out the Brits changed leaders in a matter of days with their system. Look, we shouldn't be too fixated on the immediate term prospect of the tariff, as huge as that is.

We're going to be dealing with Donald Trump for four years. So we need, if it takes a few weeks beyond that to get the process done, whether it's an election or a leadership race, preferably an election, so be it. But the longer-term objective goes far beyond just the tariffs. The tariffs are the opening salvo of a number of difficulties we're going to have with Donald Trump for the next four years. 20 seconds to you, Althea. Wrap it up there. Well, a few weeks ago, you asked us when we thought the next election would be, and many of us thought it was going to be in the fall of 2025. And unless there's a leadership

race, I don't see how it cannot be in the spring. Like everything has changed after today. Yeah. And I will say we did a bunch of holiday panels last week, friends, and I think that one of them definitely no longer holds. So I'll be calling you tomorrow. Thank you all for jumping in on a Monday. I'll see you back here on Thursday. Thanks to everybody. That's at issue for this week. Let us know what you think about how things have unfolded today. Send us an email, ask at cbc.ca. And you can catch me on Rosemary Barton Live Sundays at 10 a.m. Eastern, a.m. Eastern.

We'll be back in your podcast feeds on Thursday. Thank you for listening. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.