The Decibel - A standoff in Parliament and the latest on Trudeau’s future

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

For more than a month, the government has not been able to pass any legislation. The House of Commons has been at a standstill, as they debate whether the Liberal government breached Parliamentary privilege.The Globe’s senior politics reporter Marieke Walsh talks about why the House has been unable to put this debate to rest, and why that’s leading to no movement in the House. She also catches us up on the latest news around Trudeau’s leadership of the Liberal Party and what the Bloc Québecois ending its support for the Liberals means for our chances of an election.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

While politics in the U.S. are dominating conversations lately, there's no shortage of drama going on in Ottawa. Last week, the Bloc Québécois dropped their support of the Liberal minority government, fueling speculation about an imminent election. The Liberals are also preoccupied with infighting over the future of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's leadership. And on top of that, no legislation has been able to pass for the last month in the House of Commons because of a filibuster, a kind of theatrical standoff

between the Liberals and the Conservatives. This is a typical witch hunt from the leader of the opposition to go after people who have nothing to do with this. It sounds like there's a new story every week to justify paralyzing Parliament to cover up the truth. What is in these documents? So today, The Globe's senior political reporter, Marika Walsh, is here. She'll get us caught up on everything that's happening and not happening in Canadian federal politics. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe

and Mail. Marika, great to see you. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So we've been hearing a lot recently about tensions within the Liberal Party. Some MPs have come out saying they want Justin Trudeau gone as leader. What's the latest on this, Marika? I think the latest is that the Prime Minister and the couple dozen dissenters are almost in like a staring contest to see who blinks first. And I think in some senses, the dissenters haven't necessarily blinked, but because they don't have a next step, I think the prime minister has successfully waited them out. In a sense, where things are now is the members of the Liberal Party's caucus, the MPs who have concerns about his leadership, have asked for a secret ballot vote. And how I've been describing it is that the prime minister has essentially left them on read.

He is not answering that question to them. He ignored that issue in their caucus meeting this week, according to our sources. And so if you ask the MPs, they say the ball is in the prime minister's court, the prime minister, the prime minister's office, I think in cabinet think the ball is now in the dissenter's court, and they need to decide if they are going to stick with the current party, stick with their government and the leader who's at the top, who's made it clear that he's staying, or if they will make another move, for example, quit and sit as an independent, announce they won't run again, lots of those kinds of things. How many MPs are we talking about? How many dissenters would be here in the Liberal Party?

Very challenging to pin that down, in part because many of them are not public. This most solid number we have is that 24 unnamed MPs put their backing behind a letter asking for the prime minister to resign. But then there's this issue where not all those MPs necessarily spoke up and raised concerns in the caucus meeting a few weeks ago. And so some of the people in the dissenting category say it's actually more, because if you add up all the people who raised their voices at the microphone

behind closed doors and the 24, there's maybe dozens. Of course, this is all sort of speculation, supposition, reading between the lines. And the argument from the prime minister's office, from the prime minister, from, from the prime minister, from cabinet, and from some backbench MPs, is that the vast, vast majority of caucus supports the prime minister, and it's a small group who have raised these concerns. You can quibble with

whether a couple dozen is small. It's certainly not a tiny minority when you look at a caucus of 150-odd MPs, but they don't seem to have had the critical mass to force a change in leadership. That part is very clear at this point. Has Trudeau himself said anything about all of this, Marika? He has said very publicly that he is staying as leader. And he said that within a day of the caucus meeting behind closed doors two weeks ago, some MPs said they thought he should have reflected longer. But you can understand from his perspective, if he has decided already to stay, the longer he makes it look like he is leaving that open or seems to be rethinking it, the more of a challenge he will have in managing his caucus and in maintaining control of his party and government. So it would be hard to see how he

would let that hang, that question hang for a prolonged period of time if he was determined to stay. On the flip side, some liberals you talk to say they think the prime minister is determined to stay, but they're not convinced that that decision won't change depending on how things go over the next few months. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, because what we were hearing last week about this potential secret ballot where it looked like 13 or so MPs had maybe wanted to do this. Is there any incentive for Trudeau to actually go through with something like that? Like, why would he why would he agree to hold a vote on his leadership like that? Well, that's the million dollar question.

And obviously the answer is he wouldn't because he's not, right? The liberals are in an interesting position because they did not vote to give themselves the power to have a secret ballot vote after the last election. The dissenters do not have the same powers that the conservative caucus has, for example, to force such a vote. The conservative caucus voted in favor of the terms of the Reform Act that allow a caucus to have a say over the leadership of their party. The liberals didn't even have a vote. So this is just an interesting kind of technical thing. There's different rules, essentially, for the liberals and conservatives. There's different rules for it.

And they've decided to govern themselves by different rules. And one of the things that dissenters say is, well, you know, if he does have the vast majority of caucus support, as he says, why not have the vote and put this issue to bed? But we, of course, know that what people say to your face is not always the same as what they say in a ballot box. And Aaron O'Toole is the example of that. He's the former conservative leader who after the 2021 election went into a vote and he believed that he had the votes because they had whipped their vote. They had talked to MPs and they believed they had the numbers for him to stay on only for him to find

out as a result of that vote that he didn't. So clearly, some MPs in the Conservative caucus said one thing to his team's face and another thing on the ballot. And so there is, of course, that risk the same thing would happen for Trudeau. Adding to sort of that sentiment or that thinking is somebody like Sean Casey, who is a PEI MP, who told reporters a few days ago on Parliament Hill, he doesn't think Trudeau would survive a secret ballot vote. So there's clearly some discontent. There's some big differences of opinion on just how vast the prime minister support is within caucus. But it seems to be the loudest opinion right now is that liberals in the caucus want this debate to be closed and they want to move on to focusing on delivering for Canadians

as one of their lines and also, of course, focusing their attacks on Pierre-Paul Lievre, not on each other. Let's turn to possible election talk, Marika. Again, this is something that's kind of been in the ether in Ottawa. The Bloc Québécois ended their support last week at the end of October for the Liberals. What is the reason that they gave for doing that? Well, their support was pretty short-lived. Essentially, when the NDP, quote-unquote, ripped up their deal of support with the Liberals at the beginning of September, the Bc said, well, hey, we can be a dance partner for you. Here is our list of demands. Their list of demands was incredibly expensive and included a $16 billion top up over five years for old age security pensions. So that was,

I think, an order of magnitude higher than the government was willing to entertain. And the government has never really declaratively said how it feels on that. They say we support seniors, but hasn't actually acted on that move. So the bloc said, you know, in September and early October, we will vote with the government. We won't agree to the confidence vote, for example, that the Polyev conservatives wanted to have and did have on the liberals. But once it became clear that the liberals were not going to meet the demands of the bloc for the price of their support, the bloc said, okay, well, then we no longer support you. And so since then, the liberals now know their only dance

partner or possible dance partner is the NDP. What has the NDP said about working with the government at this point in time? Making sense of the NDP and about working with the government at this point in time? Making sense of the NDP and getting very clear and direct answers is a challenge right now. Almost to every question you ask, Jagmeet Singh says, we will vote in what's the best interest of Canadians. And so it's hard to see where they're going. The sense is that the NDP do not want an election right now. They say they're ready for one, but they also don't want a conservative tied to the liberals and also ensuring that the timing best suits their party for when an election is called. But the sense is that because of their perspective and because of the language that they've used, that they are willing to give the

liberals more time in government than the conservatives or the bloc want to give. And I should say it's not because they necessarily want the liberals to be in government. It's just that between the two choices of a snap election in which the conservatives are polling so far ahead and the current government in which they have been able to negotiate, for example, dental care and some pharma care, they want to see more of that rollout. I want to ask you too, because the NDP is a smaller party than the liberals or the conservatives. And we've also seen a lot of provincial elections this fall across the country. I think there's a total of four. Nova Scotia called an election last week. Has that affected a smaller party like the NDP? I think in some ways it absolutely has. And you could really look at this as a glass half full,

glass half empty kind of situation, right? On the one hand, you could look at the British Columbia election and say, well, at a time when incumbents are really struggling, the NDP provincial government there still won re-election. Yes, it was on the narrowest of margins. Yes, they just really scraped by, but they did it. On the flip side, that NDP government was expecting a much easier walk to re-election just a few months earlier than it got. And they lost seats that overlap, for example, with federally held NDP seats. And on top of that, because the NDP is such a small party, they have staffing issues that other parties don't have as pronounced at a level. So the federal NDP sends their staff to BC, to Saskatchewan, to Nova Scotia. And that means they have fewer resources to really get fully election ready here. They would never say we're not election ready.

They say they are election ready. But the simple math is if your senior staff are scattered across country on provincial campaigns, you are less likely to also want a federal campaign at the same time. We talked before on the show about opportunities for the opposition to take down the liberal government now that the supply and confidence agreement with the NDP is gone. Marika, when's the next time that the opposition would have the chance to do this? Well, technically, it could happen at any time, except there's this whole thing called a filibuster. And that's what we're dealing with in the House of Commons right now. So until that logjam ends, we actually just don't know. We'll be right back.

OK, so Marika, let's talk about this logjam in the House of Commons. So for over a month now, the agenda in the House of Commons has essentially been a kind of a standstill. What's going on? Well, the Liberal government's agenda has been derailed by a conservative filibuster that has been going on for, as you said, more than a month now. In the time that this filibuster has happened, I got married, went on a honeymoon and came back to work. So it's still going, let me tell you. It essentially is over this debate around whether or not the government should be releasing documents that the House of Commons passed a motion requesting back in June. The government is refusing to release those documents, and the conservatives are leading this filibuster to try and force them to do that. And what this filibuster means is that much of the debate and much of the time in the House of Commons is being used up to debate this issue. And because it's called a

matter of privilege, that sort of trumps all other matters that get addressed in the House. And so there's no votes on things like the capital gains tax hike that the liberals want to get through. There's no votes and no sort of movement forward for things like the online harms bill. And the government agenda is stalled until this issue gets settled. Okay. Yeah, there's a lot kind of going on here. So essentially, the opposition wants the government to release these documents. The liberals don't want to release these documents. This is related to Sustainable Development Technology Canada. I guess without getting into all those details, though, Marika, the one thing we should focus on is this idea of a breach of privilege, because this is kind of the factor that's holding

things up. So what exactly is that and how does it play into this? Well, parliamentary privilege is supreme. It's why, for example, MPs can't be sued for what they say in the House of Commons. And the House rules itself. The MPs in the House make the final decisions about what happens in the House. The government can't sort of ask the courts, for example, to intervene in the House as they could in other matters or as private entities could in other matters. So the house governs itself. And a privilege issue is seen as sort of something that is key and central to the work of the house. And so that's why once you raise a privilege issue, it trumps other matters of the house. So this is why other things are not being discussed because they have to figure out this privilege issue first. Exactly. So if a member's privilege is in breach, that sort of is the top issue. Now, there's lots of he said, she said, finger pointing as to who's to blame. I

think there's probably arguments on both sides. The fact of the matter is that the House passed a motion demanding these documents and the government is refusing to meet that demand. The government says it has good reason not to meet the demand because it's not appropriate for documents to be, you know, compelled in the House and then sent to the police. But the conservatives say this is the will of the House. You must meet that will. The House passed this motion. And typically what would happen in a case like this is the speaker has a ruling, it goes to a committee for it to be debated and reviewed, and then the committee comes back with a finding that, you know, the House should find the government in contempt or not. And when that committee is studying it,

the House business can continue. But the conservatives don't necessarily trust that a committee that is chaired by the liberals would get to the matter that they want, would lead to the documents. And the conservatives believe the clearest way for them to ensure they actually get the documents that were requested is through this debate in the House instead, is by stopping the other work of the House. Okay. So from what you're saying here, Mariko, the Conservatives want these documents sent to the RCMP, the police. Can we talk a little bit about, I guess, the potential strategy here? Why are the Conservatives wanting this so badly that they're holding up

the House of Commons like this? It's actually not just the Conservatives who want this. It's also the Bloc and NDP who support this motion. But it's the Conservatives who are leading this filibuster. And they say that it's so important

that they get these documents because of what has been uncovered so far around the controversy at Sustainable Development Technology Canada. That's an agency that is now defunct, has been rolled into a bigger federal agency because of the conflict of interest issues they had around spending and the decisions that were made. The Auditor General has already weighed in that there were issues here in terms

of spending of taxpayers' dollars by a government agency. And so the conservatives believe there is more to uncover here, and they want the documents to have the full understanding of what happened. Okay. So this kind of, you know, we hear the conservatives in Polyup talk about transparency. I imagine this kind of aligns with their messaging on that then. For sure. One of their key planks is to, quote unquote, fix the budget. So where they believe there's misspending or malfeasance around tax dollars, of course, they're going to focus on it. Now, it doesn't hurt, of course, that it is a controversy around the Liberals. And the Conservatives also don't support things like the capital gains tax hike. So they are not concerned by the fact that other government work isn't getting done

because of this filibuster. They believe it's a priority to get these documents, not just because of what they contain, but also because of the principle of it. It's a motion. It's the will of the House of Commons. And so the government is obliged to meet that. Yeah. And you mentioned the capital gains tax. And so the government is obliged to meet that. Yeah. And you mentioned the capital gains tax. That, of course, along with online harms, these are government policies that are not getting through the House because of this filibuster. So that's kind of where it's hurting the liberals as well.

They're not getting their agenda through. You know, it depends which liberals you talk to in government. Certainly, there are ministers and MPs who want to see bills acted on. They want to see the work that they've started completed. But there is maybe a silver lining for the liberals in that the longer that this gets delayed, the less likely they face a fall election because they just have to get through one more week of the House sitting. Then it's a break week. And then if the opposition parties trigger an election, it would be an election over Christmas. And it's hard to see anybody actually wanting that. So where does this all go from here? I mean, this sounds like we're at kind of an impasse

in the House of Commons. What needs to happen for that to end? Well, the options are the government could decide to give over the documents. That doesn't seem likely after this standoff has lasted so long, but you never know. The conservatives could decide that they don't want this filibuster to continue and allow this to be moved to committee for review. Or the NDP or block could agree with the liberals and give closure to the debate. So essentially, the liberals would move a motion of closure, and another party would support them to ensure it was a successful vote. But nobody wants to lift a finger to help the other. So it's very hard to see any of those things actually happen. While the liberals say

they are in talks with the NDP, for example, the NDP say, we don't know what you're talking about. We are not in talks with you. There are no talks going on. And so you can just see with less than a year max to the next election, the parties are already at this intense political and partisan moment where there's so much less willingness to cooperate or to ally themselves with a party who is so unpopular in the polls, who is so unpopular with the electorate, and who really is on their back feet. The liberals' entire election strategy right now, or a big part of it, is to buy time, is to get time to hopefully get to the spring where interest rates are lower, people are feeling better about the economy. And so being seen to help the liberals get to that goal is not something that any opposition

party wants to be tied to right now. But even if the liberals do find a way out of this privilege debate and this filibuster, the conservatives have already signaled that they will have another privilege motion coming next regarding Employment Minister Randy Boissoneau. So it's not that the shenanigans in the House are ever over. It's just that they might look different next time. Marika, always great to have you here. Thank you for doing this.

Thank you. Talk soon. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. This episode was produced by Kevin Sexton. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.