The Decibel - How the Conservatives tried (and failed) to trigger an election

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

On Wednesday, a Conservative non-confidence motion was voted down by the other parties in the House of Commons. But it’s just the first of many to come this fall. And most of them will land on special parliamentary days, called opposition days. Campbell Clark is the chief political writer at The Globe and Mail. He explains how opposition days work, how the different parties will use them strategically and what all of this means for the possibility of a snap election. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The federal liberals have cleared their first major hurdle this fall. They survived a non-confidence motion put forward by the conservatives during something called an opposition day. Opposition days can be used as strategic tools and they can be used as tools both for the opposition, but the timing of them is set by the government, so they can be used by the government as well. Campbell Clark is the Globe's chief political writer. And he's the colleague we turn to when we want to know more about the inner workings of Parliament. Because understanding the minutiae of how our democracy works

could be key in understanding the likelihood of a snap federal election. So today on The Decibel, Campbell is going to pick apart the political strategies at play right now in the House of Commons and the important role of opposition days. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Campbell, great to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So to start here, Campbell, let's look at the language of Wednesday's vote in the House of Commons. What exactly did they vote on yesterday? So it was a motion and a fairly straightforward

motion put forward by the Conservative opposition, Pierre Polyev specifically, that the House no longer had confidence in the prime minister or the government. So straight up non-confidence motion. And if it was passed, the government would be defeated. Yeah. And as you said, it was literally a sentence. The House has no confidence in the prime minister and his government. That was it. So how did that vote turn out? So the vote was majority against the motion. So against the non-confidence motion, the Liberal MPs, not surprisingly, voted against it. And the Bloc Québécois and NDP, as they said, they would vote against it as well.

And now this was a question of whether the House has confidence in the government and the governing liberals. And now these parties that voted the non-confidence vote down, the NDP and the Bloc disagree with the liberals on a lot. So what does it mean to have confidence in the government, even if you still disagree with them? Yeah. So we should remember that when we're talking about confidence here, we're talking about confidence convention and not confidence the way you might have confidence in an employee or a friend or whatever. We're talking about whether you're allowing them to continue as the government. The House has to have confidence in the government

for it to survive. And when it withdraws confidence, it means the government is no longer the government. So it's a far more black and white matter than a matter of opinion about the qualities of the government. All right, so that's kind of what went down on Wednesday. Let's back up to Tuesday. This is when that motion that we're talking about was actually tabled.

There was a debate. Conservative leader Pierre Polyev got up, made kind of a speech. Campbell, what did we hear there on Tuesday? So what we heard was Pierre Polyev giving a speech that essentially drew together the main talking points of the Conservative Party. You know, the sorts of things that we've seen for a long time distilled down to a speech of why this government should be defeated. Carbon tax, of course, is a big talking point for the Conservatives. Tax the tax. This will be a carbon tax referendum, a carbon tax election. The people no longer have confidence in the government. Time for a carbon tax election. Yeah. And I guess when we talk about the carbon tax, right, we should note that most individuals

actually do get their money back. But the way that the conservatives are framing this is, yes, they want to go to an election fighting over the carbon tax there. Right. So 80% of Canadians, according to the parliamentary budget officer, get more cash from the rebates than they would pay in carbon levies over the course of a year. But this was interesting, though, because Polyev really did get up and kind of made like a campaign-style speech, really, here. I guess, kind of going off of that, Campbell, how would

you describe the mood in the House between the two parties, and I guess between the leaders in the last little while? Yeah, it's certainly more abrasive, more combative. And that's because there is more tension. There's actual jeopardy attached to debates in parliament. And, you know, we're probably not facing an election tomorrow. We're probably not facing an election next week. But now we're getting into the phase where we don't know. And there is, you know, there's tension. There's real tension around the House. We saw last week, we saw the conservative leader and the NDP leader get into a fracas in the House. We had, you know, Mr. Polyev was again chastising the NDP for saying they would support the Liberal government on a confidence

vote. Mr. Polyev calls Mr. Singh a sellout. He is a fake, a phony, and a fraud. How can anyone ever believe what this sellout NDP leader says in the future? And we saw Jameet Singh get up and say, I'm right here, bro, like he was ready to go outside and start fighting. So, you know, that's an indication of the tension. You see those things from time to time in the House of Commons. Normally it is just, you know, sort of staged yay and boo. But sometimes there really are getting under each other's skin. And that's because the jeopardy of the moment is starting to rise.

Yeah, it did get pretty intense last week between those two leaders. And the speaker kind of, you know, scolded them, tried to, you know, bring back some decorum here. But it was, yeah, it was kind of disintegrating there into not necessarily a civil place to be. The colleagues. Order. Colleagues, there are some longstanding traditions at this House.

Yeah, and that will happen particularly around question period when they're all there, you know, and around the votes nowadays. So there will be more and more votes that are high pressure. So all the MPs will be hanging around the House of Commons. They'll be at close quarters. They'll be calling each other's names. It was all that kind of sort of parliamentary language police stuff that's going on. And we're going to see a lot of that over the next weeks and months, probably. Yeah. So the reason why this vote that we were talking about that

happened on Wednesday, the reason why that vote happened in the first place is because the Conservatives had something called an opposition day in Parliament. So, Campbell, we're going to get into some, you know, kind of a civics lesson here, get a little bit nerdy, because I think we should establish what this actually is. So just tell us, what is an opposition day in parliament? Okay, so an opposition day is basically what it sounds like. They're also called allotted days or supply days. And it's day when the opposition gets to put forward its own motion, saying, you know, we think the House should do this, or we think the House's opinion is that. And so that gives them all kinds of leeway, and it's a votable motion. So then the House has to vote on an

opposition idea. Now, that might sound like it's just another day in Parliament, but most of the time, the government controls the order of business in Parliament. That's the way things evolved over the years. To go back a little bit in history, opposition days or supply days are sort of based on the way Parliament evolved. It's sort of the basis of our system, right? That even before Parliaments were really legislative bodies, it was a place where the king went to get the people's approval to spend money and to raise taxes, right? So that's what the commons

was for. They had to approve the monies, the supplies for the king. So that's why they're still called supply days, because before the king would be granted supply, the commoners could raise their petitions. And there's a principle in Parliament called grievance before supply, which means essentially that the ordinary people get to air their grievances with the king before the king gets any money. Now the crown is represented by the prime minister and his ministers, but still the house has to approve the monies for the prime minister and for the government and for any spending that occurs. And so these would go into long debates every time the government tried to appropriate money for anything. Gradually over time, the government took over more control of that business. The rules

were changed so that the opposition was given days when they could air those grievances, and not every time the government wanted to spend money on anything, but the opposition would still get a chance to air its grievances. So now we've got 22 days a year when the opposition gets to move its own motion and have it voted on. Okay, so there's like scheduled days then where you can air your grievances or set the agenda, essentially. They're sort of scheduled. That's where some of the strategy comes in. So there are three supply periods. So there's one going on right now, which will end December 10th,

then another one that goes to late March, and then another one that goes to the end of June when house rises for the summer. It's basically like the school year, right? So you got the separated by the Christmas holidays and March break. Yeah. It's actually the fiscal year. It's the budget year because you have to essentially keep funding the government. Some of the listeners might remember that in the United States, occasionally the government shuts down because Congress hasn't passed an appropriation bill to fund the government. Well, that can't happen in Canada, okay? Because the basic principle here is that if the government doesn't get its supplies,

the House is not agreeing to the government's request for supplies, then the House doesn't have confidence in the government, the government fails. So that's why you always see confidence votes on money issues, essentially, then. If the government can't get supply, it doesn't have the confidence of the House, it's not fulfilling its function. Okay. Okay. Okay. So you said there's 22 opposition days and there's kind of three periods of the year. Do we know how those opposition days are spread out? No, not really. There's sort of rules and there's lots of loopholes.

Okay. So there's going to be seven in this period, seven in the next period, eight in the last period, which is the main estimates period. Anyway, so there'll be seven and the government has to give seven opposition days, five to the conservatives is the way it works in the current problem. It's based on how many seats they have in the house. But the government could schedule them basically any day they want to up to December 10th, which is the end of the current supply period. There's an exception to that that I'll get to. But the point is that they control the timing.

So they, you know, theoretically, almost, they could do it like, you know, the next seven days of sitting. They could say, here, here's all of your days. And once they've given a day, can they take that away? Or is that set? So, yes. And that's the other thing is, you know, they tell the opposition parties, you know,

your opposition day will come Thursday or next week, but they can change it because government controls the timing of business. And, you know, I was talking to someone from the House Leader's office when Stephen Harper had a minority government, a conservative minority government, and he told me he once slipped a note under the door of the Liberal House Leader to tell them they were taking away their opposition day the next day. So those things happen. Yeah, like if they feel they need to pull out the rug from the opposition to prevent them from doing something on a given day, they will do that. There's one other thing that kind of matters, and we'll see it sort of matters right now. And that is that the last opposition day of every supply period is tied to the estimates

themselves. That means it doesn't occur until after the estimates are taken. Got it. Okay. And that matters right now, because if you know because if the liberal government tried to get them all out of the way right now, which it looks like they're starting to do, there'd be one later anyway. Okay. So now we kind of understand how opposition days work. I guess, what does it normally look like, Campbell? Like a normal opposition day when the government isn't in such a precarious minority position, what does that usually look like? Generally speaking, they want to put something on the record that matters to them and their voters. And we can look back not too far, like into the period of this government, when the liberal government was still being supported by the NDP under the Supply and Confidence Agreement. The NDP, if you recall, in March, in the heat of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza,

they put forward a motion which included a call for recognition of a Palestinian state that kind of split the liberals. And there was quite a bit of back and forth in the liberal party. One liberal MP threatened to quit over that. So like opposition parties can also use it to divide government MPs or to force the government to take a stand on something. But it's often just for the opposition to get something that they think is important for them to get that out there then. Everybody has to stand up and vote, right? So it could embarrass the government. It could embarrass another opposition party. Sometimes they'll do that. For example, the Conservatives might want to embarrass the bloc, so they'll throw in a line that has some particular importance to Quebec voters that might split the bloc from, you know, whatever they want to vote on.

We'll be right back. So we've generally kind of talked about how opposition days work, Campbell, but let's look at the strategy around them now. So let's start with the liberals here. How are they thinking about this? Well, they prefer to last as long as possible, usually. And in the end, they want to, if they can't last, they want to sort of pick when they're going to die for two reasons. One, they'd like to die on a substantive thing like a budget, but also they'd like to be able to organize their campaigns around them. So when the government falls, essentially,

is what you're saying. Yeah. Exactly. When the government falls. Now, you can only put it off so long if the opposition is really determined. But what they can do is if the opposition isn't ready to trigger an election, if all the opposition parties, and it takes all of them now, aren't ready to trigger an election, then they can put some of those opposition days into the opposition's hands early so that they're over with before the opposition parties are ready to trigger their defeat, ready to defeat the government in a non-confidence vote. But there's going to be one, right? There's going to be one later based on when they get their estimates out. Do they have to have at least one opposition day after the estimates?

Well, after the estimates. And usually the estimates come out in November, right? So one of the issues is probably the opposition parties don't want to trigger an election in October, partly because there's provincial elections. Maybe they want in November, but perhaps they don't want to trigger an election over the Christmas holidays. And so they might leave it right till the end to say to the opposition, if you're going to vote for this, you're going to be campaigning over the Christmas holidays. Which most people do not want. Most people don't want. Now, it's been done before. I mean, that was the election when the Paul Martin government was defeated in 2005.

The campaign was long and it was over the Christmas holidays. But it's not something that they would expect the parties to be itching for. Okay. So it sounds like part of the strategy here is that the liberals maybe decided to give the conservatives an opposition day so early in the parliamentary session to kind of like, I guess, waste a day? Basically, because they want to get it out of the way. And they have a fair bit of confidence, the Liberals do, that the two other parties don't yet want an election. They've got some good reasons for thinking that. I mean, the Bloc Québécois want to get something out of the Liberal government. And this makes some sense for the Bloc Québécois when you think about it,

because they are parentally in opposition. They are by definition going to be in opposition. Because they literally can't get enough votes to become the government. They only run seats in Quebec. The leader of the Bloc Québécois will never be the Prime Minister of Canada. It's just not mathematically possible.

So when you think about what that entails, it means, in theory, they don't care who the Prime Minister of Canada is. Like, they don't really, as the leader of the Bloc Québécois said last week, you know, for us, it's a vote about exchanging a viper for a tarantula. You know, changing Trudeau for Poiliev would be, you know, one is as bad as the other. That's one part of the politics. But the other is they, as an opposition party, they want to show that they can do something sometimes for voters.

So one of the things that Blanchet is trying to do right now is he's trying to extract concessions out of the Liberal government, particularly on old age security. So for the time being, the bloc thinks it has an opportunity to get some things from the liberal government. So they don't want to go just yet. And we should say that on Wednesday, the bloc threatened to vote down the liberals by October 29th, if they haven't seen some policy gains by that point, like the old age security measure that you mentioned before, Campbell. And this is part of how you play the strategic game. He has a couple of things that he's asking for. And it's a bit like a sliding scale of acceptability for the government in power. So the first thing he's asking for is... This is the bloc leader then.

This is the bloc leader. Sorry, it's Yves-Francois Blanchet, the bloc leader. He's asking for something which is expensive, and that is an increase to old age security for people age 65 to 74. It would be billions of dollars a year. But it's not something that is sort of on principle something that the liberal government could not accept. I mean, they did the same increase for people over 75 a few years ago.

But some of the things they also want, but not immediately, include more powers for the province of Quebec over immigration. And that's something the Liberals would absolutely reject. In other words, that's a non-negotiable that he's keeping in his back pocket. We talked about the bloc strategy. What about the NDP? Well, the NDP have other reasons for not wanting an election. One is that there are provincial elections going on this fall in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. And the NDP is a player. In other words, if they were trying to run a campaign in a BC election while they were trying to run a federal election, it would stretch their resources. So that's one reason. They just want one thing at a time. Another is they spent two and a half

years in a supply and confidence agreement supporting the liberal government so they could get a couple of things, dental care and pharmacare in particular. The pharmacare bill is still in front of the Senate, probably won't be passed until sometime in mid or late October. It would seem kind of funny if they spent two and a half years supporting the liberals to get a pharmacare bill and then killed the government before it could be passed. So they probably want to see that go through. Part of this is always kind of the case when you start to tell people, okay, we might be going to an election. We're willing to defeat the government. Usually parties want a little bit of time to give their own people and their

potential supporters a chance to get used to that idea. Okay. Continuing on strategy here. So we kind of, we talked about liberals and NDP and Bloc. Let me also ask you about the strategy for the conservatives then, Campbell. So the liberals have given them this opposition day early on for their own strategic purposes. And Pierre Polyev decided to use that to bring up a non-confidence motion that he was pretty sure would fail, right? The NDP and the Bloc both came out early and said

they weren't going to vote with them. So what do the conservatives get from tabling a vote that they know won't pass? So, well, they get a couple of things, but basically they get to say, we are the party that is willing to push for an election and declare non-confidence in the government. And these other parties, and by that I mean the NDP and the Bloc Québécois, they're propping up the Liberal government. They're keeping Justin Trudeau in power. Justin Trudeau is unpopular. Blame the NDP for Justin Trudeau being in power. And in Quebec, blame the Bloc for Justin Trudeau being in power. And in Quebec, blame the bloc for Justin Trudeau being in power. You know, conservatives have for a while been talking about how the NDP are propping

up the liberals. But in French, if you listen to Pierre Poiliev speak French nowadays and give speeches in French, he's talking about the bloc liberal coalition as if there was, you know, an actual coalition and blaming the bloc for propping up the liberal government and for the continued tenure of Justin Trudeau. And the Conservative Party basically feels like that is an opportunity for them to portray themselves as the party of change. This has been a Conservative strategy for some time now. The Conservatives want voters to see them as the only party of change, so that when they think about, we want change, they think of voting for the conservative party, not just voting for one of the opposition parties. Okay. So there's this bigger picture

political strategy here. I wonder too about the tangible benefits though to the conservatives doing this. I guess I'm wondering about money, about fundraising opportunities. Does this play into that? Yes. Now, fundraising is important for all of the political parties now because we're getting closer to an election. And it doesn't just matter, by the way, for funding an election campaign, but there's a pre-writ period now that we know is on. We know that we're heading towards an election campaign probably in six months, but maybe in three, maybe in 12. But we're in a pre-writ period where if they had the money, they'd like to launch advertising campaigns and so on before the spending limits go into effect. So money does matter. The Conservatives aren't lacking for money, by the way. They've been raking it in pretty well for the last

couple of years, really. Just in our last few minutes here, Campbell, let's circle back to the liberal strategy here. So when is the next opposition day? And why have they decided to do that? So the next opposition day is Thursday. So literally, people are listening Thursday morning. It's today. Yeah. It's today. Yeah. And that vote will come on Tuesday because no votes on Friday, and there's a holiday on Monday. But still, it's wham bam. And I understand that the Bloc have been told that they're going to get an opposition day next week. So it sure looks like the Liberals are trying to burn out a bunch of them as fast as possible when they know the Bloc and the NDP aren't looking for an election right now. They're trying to get a few of those off the calendar as soon as they can.

And the Conservatives, from what I understand, the conservatives have already actually tabled two more non-confidence motions for Thursday. I mean, this kind of seems like, you know, we could get into this kind of, I don't know, Groundhog Day situation, right, where they keep tabling these non-confidence votes and they keep failing. So I guess just lastly, Campbell, like how will we know if an opposition day is actually going to be consequential? So there's always a risk because,

you know, there's always politics involved. Now, technically speaking, we don't know until they go to vote in the House of Commons, except that they tell us sometimes. There's a political advantage. For example, when Pierre Poiliev put forward the wording of this motion that we saw voted on Wednesday, the bloc said, we are not going to support this non-confidence motion. And they did that to take the sting out of it. Otherwise, the political heat starts to rise and there's more tension about what they're going to do. That might be useful to them when they're trying to extract something from the government, but they don't want that pressure all the time. One of the things that's going to happen is it's going to start to seem a little bit routine to have non-confidence motions,

and it might not be that the government actually falls on one of these opposition day motions. It could wait until the budget next spring, which is more of a substantive thing that if the opposition wants to, they can point to their budget and say, well, we don't like that. Campbell, really appreciate this civics lesson here today. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here and explain all this. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Today's episode was edited and mixed by Ali Graham. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer,

and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.