At Issue - Is Trudeau’s time as prime minister up?

Episode Date: December 21, 2024

At Issue this week: After a desperate pre-holiday cabinet shuffle, the NDP says it will vote to bring down Justin Trudeau’s government, and Pierre Polievre wants to speed up the process. How long can the prime minister hang on for? Rosemary Barton hosts Andrew Coyne, Althia Raj and Aaron Wherry.

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. Hi, I'm Rosemary Barton. This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for Friday, December 20th, the third At Issue of this week. Mounting pressure on the prime minister.

The NDP is now calling for a confidence vote when the House resumes. And Pierre Poiliev wants that to happen sooner than scheduled. We're focusing on the chaotic clown show that is costing Canadians today. This cannot go on. So this week we're asking, how have the opposition capitalized on the Liberals' chaotic week? Andrew Coyne, Althea Raj and Aaron Wary join us to talk about that. Plus, what will the cabinet shuffle mean for the Liberals and for Trudeau's future? Let's start, Andrew, with the shift from the NDP.

No longer just calling for the prime minister to resign, but saying that they plan to put forward a confidence motion of their own to bring down the government. Well, assuming that they actually mean that, assuming that they actually follow through on it, that would materially affect, I mean, I've until now been, you know, team October in terms of when the election was most likely to be. I think this materially affects that and moves it forward into the spring, most likely, almost certainly. If that's the case, it's going to put a lot of pressure on the Liberals to have a new leader in place in time for such an election, in which case there'll be more pressure than before, I think, on the prime minister to step down and make way for that. So I think these are the knock-on effects of that. This really does change the landscape. Yeah, I will say I am, like Andrew, not sure about the NDP, what they're saying. Certainly it's clearer than it was earlier in the week, but it also seems to have the condition that it has to be their confidence motion. It's

not the confidence motion at the earliest possibility. So I don't know if that's intended wiggle room, but it certainly heightens the pressure on the prime minister, Althea. I think there's only so many times you can cry wolf before people just tune you out completely. So I'm less skeptical about what wiggle room they will try to find to not do it. And I have slightly a different read on this situation than Andrew. I think it actually allows the prime minister to stay. It both means that caucus is under intense pressure to pick a leader from their midst.

And it gives Justin Trudeau a pathway to say, look, we're going to face an election. We don't have time to have a fulsome leadership race. Stick with the devil, you know. Stick with me. Who it really hurts are people like Mark Carney and Christy Clark, because if you're going to have a very short leadership race, basically means the liberals need a paroch. There's no way that you can have

one party, a minority government in parliament with this filibuster that we also have in the second filibuster that we also have, like it's just going to be utter chaos. So one assumes they would prorogue. That means the liberals are going to be framed as you're suspending parliament for your own personal reasons. The governor general may say yes, but it would have to be a very short leadership race. So that's a really difficult scenario. It means that we're going to see, and we've already started to see it today, people come out and say, ah, you should pick Chrystia Freeland. You should pick Dominic LeBlanc. You know, pick heavyweights that are already there to replace the leader or just say, well, Justin Trudeau's there. We're going to suffer the loss and we're going to have a full leadership after.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, you can certainly read it both ways, Aaron, that there is pressure or opportunity here for Justin Trudeau. Yeah, I mean, I think it does at least, you know, and there's so much that's unclear at this very moment, it does offer a sort of modicum of clarity insofar as we do know now that if you assume, I guess, that the NDP is going to follow through on this, and I think, you know, their runway to kind of continue supporting this government has probably run out. But if they do follow through on this, that means that sort of in the best case scenario for Justin Trudeau, he's looking at going into an election, you know, late January, early February. So, you know, we're really talking about weeks left for him to

continue governing before he goes into an election. I think Althea is right. The only way you have a leadership race at this point is if you prorogue parliament. It would, you know, there is some sort of hypothetical number at which if they said let's prorogue parliament until, you know, June or July or something where the governor general would be under some pressure to sort of clip their wings a bit. But that is the only way this government, you know, I shouldn't say the only way, it's the only sort of justifiable way that a confidence vote gets put off much further than early February. Let's talk a little bit about Pierre Poiliev. I mean, we can get into his plan to write to the governor general, which isn't a thing that's going to work.

But he does seem quite determined for an election to happen. And I wonder, Andrew, is that because a leadership race is in some way worse for the Conservative Party as an outcome? And let's be clear, we don't know that Justin Trudeau is going anywhere. We'll talk about that in the next block. But he was really ramping up the pressure today again, Pierre Poiliev. Yeah, and I don't think it looked very good on him. I thought he'd had a few good days before this. He was looking and sounding more prime ministerial than I can recall, more measured in his tone, gave a good speech in Parliament,

appealed to blue liberals for, you know, make common cause. You know, not the usual tone you hear from him. This cockamamie business of the governor general should force the prime minister to recall Parliament because now Parliament has lost confidence. You don't lose confidence until you actually have a confidence vote it's not because somebody writes a letter somewhere or posted on twitter uh and the governor general is obliged to follow the advice of her first minister not the other way around so she can't force him to recall parliament he maybe is well advised to from a moral or political standpoint that it's you know,

this has increased the uncertainty around and the weakness of his government and his prime ministership. But dragging the governor general into it, he will know that that's not constitutional. So he's once again playing upon the ignorance of people who don't know that to score a cheap local point. So several good days in a row, I think, knocked off by this silly stunt. Yeah, I can't imagine that Pierre Poiliev doesn't know that what he's asking for is not possible, Althea. So I would imagine that it's really just about trying to create a pressure point for the prime minister. Well, it's about changing the narrative. All day, Jagmeet Singh was dominating the narrative.

We were not talking about the Liberal cabinet shuffle. The Prime Minister looked to be in hiding. Here is Mr. Poiliev rushing to Parliament. So we have the background of Parliament. Mr. Poiliev is at work. Mr. Poiliev is caring about Canadians and everybody else is caring about their own self-interest. So he got that managed through. He also got the message about calling the NDP's bluff, frankly. And I don't really think it's about trying to make sure that the

Governor General recalls Parliament without talking to the Prime Minister. Of all the things that Pierre Polyev has said that are not constitutionally sound, this is like one of the least worrisome for me. Like in that scrum, he talked about how it was completely unconstitutional that the opposition parties back in 2008 tried to form a coalition. Yes. No, that's not unconstitutional at all. They totally acted appropriately. Like he's reframing history in ways that that concerns me. This, he can write to the governor general and ask her for whatever he wants. It doesn't mean that she's going to do it. Could she call the prime minister in for like a little chitchat about what's going on? Maybe what Justin Trudeau does is say, you know, to hell with all of you. We're going to have an election. Yeah, I don't think that that's worrisome. I actually think it was a good move on the conservative part. Yeah, you're right. It was.

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Just very quickly. I just, you know, yeah, he said silly things in the past, but this is particular timing when we're in a crisis, when we're facing the bully boy down south, where people are really looking for steadiness and judgment and calm in the face of crisis. And this did not sound that way. Okay. Aaron, you got about 30 seconds to weigh in there. Yeah, I don't think you can stand in the foyer of the House of Commons and say that the other guys are a clown car and you have the brains to take on Donald Trump. And then in the next breath, say, I'm going to write a letter to the governor general and get her to recall parliament, because he just he knows that's not going to happen. To your point earlier,

you know, there is some risk to him to Pierre Polyev here, at least insofar as we know where the polls are at with Justin Trudeau as the leader of the Liberal Party. I would never suggest that they're going to completely change with a different leader, but they could change somewhat. At issue tonight, the cabinet shuffle. As the prime minister fills a depleted front bench, the elephant in the room, his future. We just had an excellent cabinet meeting that is almost entirely focused on the Canada-U.S. dynamic. We know how important it is for Canadians that we be there to protect not just the Canadian economy, but their jobs. The cost of living challenges they're facing could get worse. We have a lot of work to do and that's what we're focused on.

So will those changes help steady the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau's leadership? And what is he considering as he contemplates his future? Here to break it down again, Andrew Althea, and in for Chantal, Erin Wary. I'll start with you, Althea. I actually thought the shuffle was pretty interesting in terms of the messages it was trying to send and the channel it was trying to change. But what do you make of it? It's hard to remember that there even was a shuffle today, I'm sorry to say, Rosie.

Maybe you remember it because of your live coverage. I was on for a long time, yeah. It's such a mixed bag because it changed so much. You can easily tell that there was a plan and that that plan has changed. So some of it is like Nate Riskin-Smith for all the problems it has caused within the Liberal caucus and accentuated some of the dissenters calling for Justin Trudeau to resign. This is our new housing minister. He's a really good communicator. And he's a young person who can speak to young people in ways that don't sound like liberal talking points. But at the same time, you know, they've padded the cabinet with ardent loyalists, some of whom cannot communicate

at all. And we saw that in the scrums that followed the cabinet shuffle. It's not the greatest team. Like, it kind of looks like we went down the rank. And, you know, apologies for some cabinet ministers that are actually quite great. But, you know, it looks like this is what, you know, the DEF team looks like. It does look like a government that has run out of steam. And frankly, a lot of those cabinet ministers understand they're not in their portfolio for very long and I think some of them were disappointed today because they know that runway after Jagmeet Singh's letter has shrunk rapidly and they won't have a chance to actually implement the change that they had hoped to do. So Erin, do you see the

the cabinet shuffle as a stopgap? Do you see the cabinet as it stands now as a cabinet that could be be in an election campaign? Is it none of those things? How do you read it? I mean, I guess it may be an election campaign only by force of the NDP. I don't know that this is an election cabinet. I mean, we know, look, we know that a week ago, there was a different plan on the table. And that plan may or may not have involved Mark Carney. It seemingly involved some kind of larger move on the Kennedy U.S. front. The message that the prime minister gave after meeting with cabinet today is I imagine the sort of message he wanted to give after making that other cabinet change,

that other cabinet shuffle. And so it's hard to look at this cabinet and not see the fact that it wasn't the first choice. There are some interesting choices within it. Nate Erskine-Smith, even David McGinty to public safety, I think, is interesting, given his know, Andrew and other people are talking about the fact that Anita Anand is going to be focused on internal trade, an issue that we're supposed to be talking about to counter the threat of Donald Trump. But it's so hard to get away from five days ago. And it's so hard to get away from the fact that we, again, don't know what the prime minister is going to decide to do. Yeah, there was sort of a cloud hanging over the whole event. I'm sure for some people it was a very exciting day,

but it was still not the day that had been planned a couple of weeks ago. Andrew. Yeah, this was a patching the leaks on the listing ship type of cabinet shuffle, not bold new visions and vistas of the future. We talked about this last night. I think it was last night. It was last night, yeah. It had two purposes in mind.

One was to fill the holes left by these departing ministers, and the other was to convey a tense of business as usual, which is a basic tension between those two. It's not business as usual because they're having to fill the holes left by all these departing ministers. I think it's particularly telling that there will be such objections to Nate Ersnick's appointment in particular, on the grounds that he hasn't been slavishly loyal enough. Part of the reason that the liberals are in the trouble they're in is because they've been so slavishly loyal to one leader. And you can see it, of course, in most of these cabinet appointments, as was alluded to earlier. You're down now to the fanatics and the loyalists and the members of the Prime Minister's wedding party. It's not a great look. It's not a look of a big church, broad tent party that can appeal to lots of Canadians. You're down to sort of the hardcore, the praetorian guard of Justin Trudeau. Okay, so then let's ask the other question. Does it do what it needs to do to stabilize things for now, Althea? Does it at least do that? Well, look, the government has

to function regardless of what's happening with the Liberal Party. And it was not a tenable situation to have, you know, three cabinet ministers with two or in the case of two, three portfolios that require a lot of attention, especially in light of what's coming up on the horizon with Donald Trump's return to the White House. So there needed to be a shuffle. It's interesting that some of the people were vetted this week, which means, I'm sorry, but you weren't the top pick. Also interesting that, you know, there's sorry, but you weren't the top pick. Also interesting that, you know, there's no representation from British Columbia that's new. There's no representation from Alberta. They only had one person to pick from, but still. You know, so it's not, I don't think that the cabinet shuffle will do what it is intended to do

other than become basically a caretaker government. I think the bigger thing that happened today or didn't happen today, which is kind of outrageous and I feel like I need to point it out, is the Prime Minister did not talk to Canadians. His Deputy Prime Minister straight up quit on Monday, said he was like financially inept, the Liberal Party was too focused on itself. We had more and more Liberal MPs come out from the shadows and say they think he needs to leave. He shuffles his cabinet and he doesn't address the country. Like, this is not appropriate. This, from the leader who told Canadians nine years ago that sunshine was the best form of disinfectant

and he was going to change the relationship that the parliamentary press gallery had with liberal cabinet ministers. This is not accountability. There was that 13-second clip off the top. That's like 30 seconds coming in and ignoring all the reporters' questions. The government is in crisis. Pierre Poiliev has a right to point it out, and he's not addressing it. Aaron? Yeah, I think to Althea's point, this government kind of operates, or this prime minister kind of operates, on the idea that you don't go out to say something until you have something to say. And I think the problem is that he maybe doesn't quite yet know what he wants to say. But that in and of itself is a problem.

And I do think it is problematic, I guess, that you have all of this going on and the prime minister hasn't come out and said something. I don't think, you know, look, the country's not going to collapse. The government's not going to fall apart. The country will continue functioning. But it is, you know, it is a gap. To get back to the cabinet shuffles slightly, if there is some kind of piece of this that you can look at, you know, Nadir Skinsmith is having to make the decision that he's going to run again to go into cabinet. I think it is an interesting move insofar as he is one of their best communicators. Listen to him explain a policy and then listen to almost anyone else in this

government explain a policy. And there's a clear difference. But the other thing I wonder about is, are the liberals at a point, and they probably are, where they have to worry about winning a riding like Beaches East York? Because there really isn't a path back to government if you can't win a riding like Beaches East York. Yeah, and that's in Toronto for people that don't know where that riding is. At issue, what comes next? Justin Trudeau finally spoke in public briefly, but Canadians are still waiting for answers. How long will the Prime Minister hang on? And when might Canadians go to the polls? So here to answer those very simple

questions and what Canadians might be in for, Andrew, Althea and Aaron. This is our shortest block and I'll ask the hardest question. How long can Canadians, can Canada wait for Justin Trudeau to make up his mind? Aaron, why don't you start us off? I mean, I guess we may find out how long they can wait. I think, you know, I think taking a couple weeks is probably your maximum allowable period to reflect on things. You know, coming back in that first week of January would seem to make some sense if he's going to take the holidays to think about it. What he's going to decide, I think, is just about anyone's guess. I suppose if you're Justin Trudeau, you're thinking to yourself, you may be thinking to yourself, I'm still the best person to

lead this party into an election, either because I'm going to do the best of any of the possible contenders or because there's no sense switching leaders to an election you're going to lose, the party's probably going to lose. I think the flip side of that question is, how much worse could it get? If he comes out, say, on January 6th and says, I'm going to stay on and fight, are cabinet ministers going to stand behind him? Are there any other ministers who are going to quit? How many more Liberal MPs will call for him to resign? How many more liberal MPs will say they aren't going to run again? Those are, I think, the questions that he has to be asking himself.

And I will say, Andrew, and I'm sure everyone has had this experience, you will get a different answer based on who you talk to, who's talked to him. There is no clear sense of where this is going. We had a great story at the Globe where there you know, there were three people came out of meetings with him. One said he's definitely staying. One said he's definitely going. The third said, well, he was going to quit. And then he was talked out of it. Yes, I've experienced the same thing. So, you know, it's a matter of weeks, which makes, of course, this cabinet shuffle all the more ludicrous or indeed ghoulish. I mean, these people have

several weeks of political life left to live at most. To take Althea's point from earlier, you know, he can certainly make the case that he's the best person if there's going to be a sudden and short election to carry them in. And I might have made that case myself until fairly recently. But the problem is people can make counterarguments to that. And he's become so toxic to so many people, particularly after the events of the last week, that I'm not sure he's going to carry the day on it. But the more important point is, if an election is going to be upon us fairly shortly,

that choice is going to have to be made as to whether to stay with the prime minister or to go with somebody else. His fortunes had lain in leaving that kind of vague, oh, we'll decide that sometime in the future. Let's not get into that right now. The choice is going to be forced upon the party and upon him one way or another very shortly. Althea? I don't think it's how long Canadians need to wait. I think it's how long Liberal MPs need to wait and are willing to wait, frankly. I too have spoken to people who have spoken to the prime minister,

and if you parse some of his words, it looks like he kind of is saying both things at the same time. I think the only thing that you can really be sure is that he is actually thinking about it or wants to be seen to be thinking about it. If he wants to fight, then he probably should stay in Ottawa and work the phones and not go on holidays because he will be able to gauge whether or not he can continue.

Because with the anger that there is at the moment within the caucus, I would not be surprised to see a press conference with, you know, 50 MPs saying we're not going to support them. You know, if there is such a movement and you're already seeing the leadership camp on the Dominic LeBlanc side, on the Chrystia Freeland side start to organize. And those that are not saying anything, you wonder if they've made the calculation that, frankly, it's better for them, for Justin Trudeau, to take the loss because they can't win a short national contest. They could only win a long contest where they can get their

brand, their name recognition known. Three seconds to you, Aaron. Yeah, I, you know, my mind periodically turns back to the Joe Biden situation where, you know, there are obvious differences. I wrote a column about it. There's lots of differences between Joe Biden's situation and Justin Trudeau's situation. But the thing I come back to is, eventually, the decision had to be almost imposed on Joe Biden. There had to be someone like Nancy Pelosi, who basically could come to him and say, you're dropping out or else. And I just don't know, I guess I wonder whether liberals are willing to impose that decision on Justin Trudeau. He has to decide, you know, whether it's the best idea for the Liberal Party to go in, but liberals also have to make that decision. Listen, thank you all for this. Thanks for doing this three times. Aaron just has listened to me talk all week in the office. So thanks to everybody for all your extra work this week.

That's at issue for this week. When do you think there will be a federal election? Do you think Trudeau should lead the Liberals in that race? You can send us an email, ask at cbc.ca. I'm Rosemary Barton. Thank you for listening. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.