The Decibel - Trudeau prorogued parliament: Here’s what it means and what’s next

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

When Trudeau announced his plan to resign on Monday morning, he also shut down Parliament until March 24, giving the Liberal Party time to select a new leader. A confidence vote will follow shortly after the House returns, almost certainly triggering a spring election.Bill Curry is the Globe’s Deputy Ottawa Bureau Chief. He’s on the show to talk about how the government proceeds from here – what happens to the bills that haven’t been passed yet, like proposed changes to the capital gains tax, what we can expect when the House returns, and what all of the political upheaval means for how Canada deals with the incoming Trump administration.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

When Justin Trudeau announced he's resigning on Monday morning, he also prorogued Parliament until the end of March. I advise the Governor General that we need a new session of Parliament. She has granted this request and the House will now be prorogued until March 24th. That gives the Liberals time to have a leadership race and select a new leader. But proroguing Parliament also has other implications. Any bills that haven't been passed

are effectively stopped in their tracks. And there are questions about who can actually work in the government right now during a liberal leadership race. Bill Curry is the globe's deputy Ottawa bureau chief. He's here today to explain what happens now that Parliament is on hold, what we can expect when the House returns, and what all this political uncertainty means for how Canada deals with an incoming Trump administration. I'm Menaka Raman-WWilms and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Bill, great to see you.

Thanks for being here. Thanks a lot, Maynika. Good to see you too. So when Trudeau announced that he's stepping down as liberal leader and prime minister on Monday, he also prorogued parliament. So we generally know that means that things are paused. But can you just get into some specifics here? What exactly is affected by prorogation?

Well, the House was supposed to come back January 27, so in a few weeks, and that's not going to happen now, so we won't have question period. We won't have all of the parliamentary committees, which generate lots of news stories. We're not going to have any bills. All the ones that have not yet passed into law are now dead. So those are the big consequences of prorogation. Yeah. And we're going to come back to that soon because I do want to mention those bills. But let's just focus on the idea of Parliament being prorogued here for another minute.

We know the prorogation is going on until March 24th. What has to happen in Parliament after that date? Well, it's going to be very interesting. There's going to be a lot going on in those first few days. On the first day back after prorogation, what you have is the speech from the throne, which is read by the governor general, but it's in the government's own words kind of laying out their plans. So in this context, it couldn't essentially be an election campaign that's doubling as a speech from the throne. I think the reason why Trudeau picked the 24th is because the rules say that by the 26th, parliament has to have a vote to pass what's called interim supply, which is essentially the

funding for the government to cover the first three months of the fiscal year that start April 1. So very important vote there for MPs to exercise their role in approving financing. What that creates is a scenario where Monday the 24th would be the government reads the speech from the throne, the House of Commons then starts proceeding normally and then it would appear that by Wednesday you would have the vote on the spending. But a little caveat is that supply votes are kind of tied in with opposition days. So they would have to have an opposition day that day where the opposition gets to control the agenda. Presumably, they would move a motion of non-confidence on that day. That's an if, but I think we can assume it's likely. And that vote

would actually come before voting on supply. So, the scenario at the moment that seems most likely is the government could fall in our opposition day motion. The thing about parliament, there's always surprises, lots of procedural games can be played. Whoever becomes the new prime minister could choose not to meet the house at all, could go straight into an election. They could do the throne speech on the Monday and then call an election before we get into these votes on money bills and supply stuff. So, lots could happen but at the moment, it seems like the most likely scenario is we'd have an opposition day on the 26th and that vote would come first and so that could be the trigger for the election. But basically, Bill, in all those scenarios

you've outlined, though, it sounds like we're headed into an election then. Kind of by the end of March, it sounds like we'll know. Yeah, we should know, at least, if we're heading into an election. I think the big factor would be Jagmeet Singh and the NDP. After the prime minister's announcement, the NDP leader was adamant.

Reporters asked it every way they could imagine it. All versions of the question were, are you going to vote to bring down the government? And he said no matter what the confidence motion is, whatever type of confidence motion, he gave no wiggle room at all. He said that the NDP is going to vote to bring down the government. Now we do know that's more adamant than the NDP has been in the past, but they have in the also in the past, like in September, he talked about tearing up the supply and confidence agreement, which some people got the impression that meant that the NDP wouldn't be supporting

liberals anymore. And then in practice, they actually did support the liberals on confidence votes. So in the past, sometimes things that seemed really clear from the NDP proved not to be as clear when the actual confidence votes come. Okay. I want to just circle back to something you mentioned here about supply and government money, basically, because you said the government needs to pass something by the end of March to keep departments open, essentially.

If we go into an election, though, Bill, and that does not get passed, what happens to the funding of government departments? Well, then a new set of rules come into place called the Governor General's Special Warrants. And so this is a longstanding practice where during election campaigns, departments get their base level of funding to just kind of keep things running while the government is preoccupied with the federal election. And that actually can continue up to about 60 days after the election campaign. So if the government does fall when they come back and you head into an election campaign,

the government departments will at least be able to pay everybody's salaries and do the basics. Okay. All right. So we're in a paroched parliament right now. This is a significant move for a prime minister, but it's not unusual, I guess we can say, right? Can you just remind us, Bill, when else in recent history in Canada have we seen a prorogued Parliament? Yeah, it is very common for governments to prorogue. It tends to be more controversial

in minority Parliament. So normally in a majority government where the government is not at risk of falling, they tend to use a prorogation around the halfway point to just shut things down, reset the agenda with a thrown speech and kind of freshen things up. And so that tends not to be particularly controversial. Where things get messy is in minority parliaments. We've seen this a few times where it was controversial. I think there's been a lot of talk in recent days

about the 2008 case, which was really dramatic because that was right after a federal election that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party won. They had a minority. And in that case, shortly after the election, the Liberals led then at the time by Stephane Dion was going to partner with the NDP and Jack Layton with support from the bloc and form a coalition government. The bloc wasn't going to be in the coalition government, they were going to support it. And they were going to vote down the conservatives and propose to the governor general that they

take power. And Stephen Harper prorogued in that case. So the similarity then and now is here you have a situation where the opposition parties are saying they're going to defeat the government and the government prorogues to get out of that for a little and buy themselves some time. In the 2008 case it actually worked for Stephen Harper because it bought the government some time. The liberals ended up having some divisions and changed their leader to Michael Ignatyev who was less keen when they came back to bring down the government,

and Stephen Harper was able to survive for a little while. He also in 2009 prorogued. Through that period, the Liberals became quite critical of prorogation, to the extent that in 2015 they actually put it in their platform, saying they will never use legislative tricks like prorogation to get out of political jams. So the Liber liberals then, when they came back in 2019, they had a minority. The pandemic hit early 2020. They were, well, by the summer of 2020, they were getting in a lot of heat over the We

Charity and this program that was quite controversial. And they prorogued then. And so that revived a lot of questions from the opposition then that the government was being hypocritical for using prorogation to get out of a jam when they had promised not to do that in their 2015 platform. Interesting. Okay. So 2015, they say, the liberals say they're not going to use it. They do prorogue in 2020 and now they've prorogued again in 2025. So they've used it twice then. Yeah. And the prime minister has to ask the governor general to prorogue parliament. So Justin Trudeau did go to governor general Mary Simon and asked her about that and she did prorogue.

Was there ever the possibility though that she would have said no to that request? In theory she could say no. So in a situation where it would really be problematic was if Trudeau had gone to the governor general and asked for a really long prorogation, like maybe six months or something. Or if there wasn't a clear reason for it, so here he could argue that he's doing this so that the Liberal Party can have a quick leadership race. But if he was just proroguing to buy himself some time and hope for things to get better under his own leadership,

that might have been more problematic. The Governor General has to kind of test whether the Prime Minister and his government has the confidence of the House. And recently when the House was last sitting in December there were a few confidence votes so from the Governor General's perspective she can look at that and say yes, Trudeau did recently have the confidence of the House. And in this scenario with the timeline, as soon as they get back, there's going to be yet another opportunity for the House to say yes or no, whether they have the confidence

in the House. So, the constitutional experts are saying, like, this is not putting Mary Simon, the governor general, in an awkward spot. This kind of fits with the rules of a prorogation. People might not like it for political reasons or whatever, but constitutionally, this is within the bounds of acceptable prorogation. People might not like it for political reasons or whatever, but constitutionally this is within the bounds of acceptable prorogations. Okay. And a little bit earlier, you mentioned that one of the implications of proroging problem is that any legislation that still needs to be voted on is effectively dead.

It effectively ends. What notable legislation bill actually won't get passed here? I think some of the more significant ones would be the online harms bill. That has been debated a lot. This was supposed to set up rules to kind of regulate the internet and prevent cyber bullying, that kind of thing. I think more relevant to the fact that we could have an election right after this House comes back is there was some updates to the elections laws that would have allowed more opportunities for advanced voting and voting by mail, that kind of thing. For the Indigenous community, there was a bill that's been long in the works related to First Nations water and ensuring safe standards for First Nations water and confirming the jurisdictional responsibility of First Nations governments for managing that.

So I think there'll be some concern there that that bill didn't get passed. And another thing I want to ask you about here, Bill, is the capital gains tax. So this was a big piece of legislation for the liberals supposed to bring in a lot of money. And I recently learned that the CRA has been collecting taxes under the new rules since the summer, even though this legislation hasn't officially passed. So can you just explain that? How does that happen?

Yeah, I think this is probably the biggest mess that comes out of prorogation is this capital gains thing, because this is not a small measure. This is, was first announced in the 2024 budget and the government's counting to raise over 19 billion dollars over five years or so. So this is a major tax change and it also has, affects provincial finances because their tax systems are linked and so they're also getting revenue from this change. And in part because the House has been bogged down with this procedural battle that we discussed earlier, the legislation to bring in the capital gains change has never occurred.

The former finance minister, Christopher Freeland, had chosen to introduce that bill as a standalone bill. And that just could never advance to the next stage because of all the stuff going on in the house. So it sits there in limbo. And the reason why the CRA is implementing it right away is kind of like that's how things are done with finance bills that deal with tax issues. Because if you were to wait for a bill to pass,

then it creates some uncertainty about timing, and people could be gaming the system, that kind of thing. So generally speaking, when the finance department makes a major tax change, they take effect immediately at the time of that announcement, and then you still wait for the details to be passed into law. So it sounds like in practice, what's happening now is the Canada

Revenue Agency is going to continue collecting this on the assumption that it's going to remain the law of the land. But if for some reason a future government changes its mind, then the CRA will pay back the money. But you know, that creates a lot of practical consequences for people who own this money because then that's money that's going to be sitting in the coffers of the Canada Revenue Agency instead of their own hands that they could have been investing or doing other things with that I'm sure they would rather be doing with and give to the CRA to hold onto for a while while politics sorts itself out. We'll be back in a moment.

Okay, so Parliament is parogued, the liberals are focused on a leadership campaign now. Let's talk about what the other parties are doing during this time then, Bill. How might the conservatives use the next several weeks? Well, I think this scenario gives the parties that are not the Liberal Party a considerable advantage in terms of organizing because as Yves-Francois Blanchet, the bloc leader, said, he's essentially treating this now as the pre-election period. So they can all essentially act as if an election campaign is on. And that's the kind of stuff that can mean, you know, ensuring you have the best candidates in each riding as possible.

All those candidates just have the time to go door knocking, raise funds, that kind of thing. Can they do that before an election is officially started? You can raise money, yeah. And you can also spend it. In some ways, it's beneficial to parties like the conservatives that have more money. You can be spending like it's an election and none of that spending now will count as an election expense because we're not in an election campaign. So,

yeah, huge advantage there because the conservatives, their fundraising is leaps and bounds ahead of the other parties. So, they've got the money and, you know know anybody who watches television can see that the conservatives have ads all over the place. Liberals have just started to advertise a little bit but so this just gives the other parties all kinds of time to plan the best campaign they possibly can and the Liberals you know maybe they'll have a little subcommittee working on that but they don't have a leader they're not really going to be putting their best and brightest towards plotting out an election campaign when they are completely focused on a leadership race.

And you talked about the conservative strategy there, potentially rolling out ads and such. I wonder though, does the conservative strategy have to change at all now that Trudeau is out? Because it really seemed like a lot of their focus was on Justin Trudeau. So without him, I guess, do they have to pivot a bit? No, absolutely. That's a great question. And we're all eager to see what happens because so much, as you say, so much of the conservative

messaging and pure Poliev's messaging has been focused on Trudeau personally. And he's not going to be the person that they're campaigning against in the next election campaign. And the other focus of Poliev's messages is the carbon tax. So when you have a leadership race, that is also an opportunity for the Liberal Party to change their policies. You know, do they come out of this leadership race with the same policies, or do they elect a leader who wants to tweak, gut, completely transform their more controversial policies like carbon

tax. We don't know that yet. But at the moment, Polio's campaign is all about Trudeau and the carbon tax. And at least one of those things is not going to be in the campaign. And you know, is the carbon tax going to be there as well? I think that's going to be one of the more heated debates once the Liberals get into their leadership race. Let's talk about the NDP as well. Of course, they helped support the liberals for a couple of years with the Supply and Confidence Agreement, but recently Singh has called for Trudeau to step down, which he has now done.

But aren't the NDP and Jagmeet Singh, are they ready for an election? Well, I think from the NDP perspective, if you look at their polling numbers and their fundraising numbers, there's no particular reason for them to be particularly enthusiastic. I think they're trailing the libs. Occasionally in the odd poll we'll have them slightly ahead, but they are close to the Liberals and both of those

parties are way, way behind the Conservatives in the polling and also on fundraising. So, that would not be particularly encouraging for New Democrats who are planning an election campaign. I think the reason why they might have some hope, however, is anybody who follows Canadian election campaigns realizes they really tend to fall into a pattern of the first half is usually somewhat of a primary between the Liberals and the NDP over who's going to be the progressive alternative to the Conservatives. So both parties will always campaign as, Conservatives are really bad and we're the alternative,

and which one gets to come to the surface as the option to be the not Conservative party option. And you tend to see that in election campaigns, the liberals do this to the NDP all the time and the NDP knows it's coming. But right towards the end of pretty much every federal election campaign in the last 20 years or so, you see a bit of a dip in NDP support as progressive voters switch to the liberals. But with liberals so far down compared to their usual levels, you know, closer to 20% than 30%, does the NEPC an opportunity in that? Can they reverse that situation in an election campaign where they actually, for once, win

that primary race in a sense and get the liberals to jump to them? I mean, that would be the hope if you're the Democrats, and I'm sure that would be a big part of their campaign efforts. And I want to make sure we also ask about the Bloc Quebecois. How are they sitting right now, and how strong is the Bloc right now? Yeah, they're sitting quite well historically. Some of the seat counts out there that try to interpret polling results into seat counts would show a massive conservative majority,

and then the Bloc Quebecois as the official opposition. Wow. Which is kind of interesting because that has not happened since 1993. And what we had in that case was a progressive conservative government led by Brian Mulroney that was getting a little long in the tooth. And Mulroney had recently stepped down. Kim Campbell became a short-lived prime minister, led the party through the 1993 election, and they were almost entirely wiped out down to just two seats then. So, you know, are we gonna see that kind of thing repeat

itself? We could potentially have another very short-lived prime minister here in this situation. It's the threat of that kind of wipeout that has led the Liberal Party to take this pretty extreme step of changing their leader very late in the game, even though the timing is clearly not ideal with a new president coming in. So stakes are very high, obviously, for the Liberal Party in this situation. So, just lastly here, Bill. Of course, in less than two weeks, Donald Trump is going to be inaugurated as the President of the United States. He's already talked about tariffs on Canadian imports.

He's been joking about making Canada part of the states and recently just made a comment about how he'd be willing to use economic force to make Canada join the US. So I guess I just wonder, in our situation here, Parliament has been prorogued, there's going to be a liberal leadership race. How does our government navigate the incoming Trump administration during this time? Yeah, well, that's going to be the number one issue for sure. Cabinet continues to operate in a prorogation. And so I assume things like the Canada-US cabinet committee will continue to meet regularly and everybody will be talking

to their counterparts in Washington and responding to whatever comes out of the US. But it's going to be pretty interesting because there's two sets of rules we're waiting for. So there's liberal party's own rules in terms of what this liberal leadership race is going to look like. But also Trudeau himself is going to have to decide what kind of rules he has in place for his own cabinet ministers. Because who are the likely people in the leadership race?

Well, they're people who are currently in cabinet. And some of them with a very important jobs on the Canada US file like Dominic LeBlanc, who is the finance minister and is also responsible for border issues. So can you continue to have people in cabinet who are responsible for this very important hot button issue of dealing with Donald Trump? And can they also be leadership candidates? That's I think one of the key questions we're asking. And maybe that'll be answered by the time people hear this podcast, because things are

moving quickly. Yeah. Well, we'll keep an eye out for all this information. Bill, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to walk us through this. Oh, thanks, Manika. All the best. That's it for today. I'm Manika Ramon-Wilms.

Our producers are Madeleine 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 tomorrow.