REGINA - It seemed like all heck broke loose in Ottawa, and elsewhere, this week following the resignation announcement of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The announcement of Trudeau’s pending departure — following a Liberal leadership contest — and prorogation of Parliament to March 24 was greeted with disdain by Opposition leaders. Even NDP leader Jagmeet Singh now says he will pull the plug on the minority Liberal government when Parliament comes back.
That was followed in short order on Tuesday by the latest tariff comments from President-elect Donald Trump about using “economic force” against Canada, who he has repeatedly been referring to as the “51st State.”
To make sense of it all, Â鶹´«Ã½AV has turned to Tom McIntosh, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Regina, for his thoughts on what is going on politically in Canada and elsewhere. In our interview Wednesday afternoon, we started by asking him about his initial thoughts about the Trudeau departure.
On Trudeau’s resignation
Well, you know, this has been the longest, I think, expected resignation that we have seen, perhaps ever, certainly in my lifetime. I don't certainly remember a departure that was as long and drawn out as this was. Partly, I guess, because of the unwillingness of the main character to actually leave the stage.
Everybody else seemed quite convinced that he had to go, he needed to go, it was time to go. He was the last one, it seems, to come around to that position. You'd be hard-pressed to have left it any later than he did.
Why now?
Well, I think, you know, any government that's been in power for 10 years is going to start, they're gonna see their credibility or their popularity erode.
That just happens. It happened to Stephen Harper, it happened to Jean Chrétien, it happens to anybody who spends that much time in office. People just want a change after a while.
It's one thing, you know, to see a small dip in the polls and whatnot, but what we've seen is two solid years of declining poll numbers, where every poll was a new low for the party, to the point where they were into the process, they were into sort of, this is unprecedentedly low, like you've, the Liberal Party's never been this unpopular, right? And I think that just sort of, you know, that began to focus people's attention because, you know, if you've given up your career to be a member of Parliament, you want to continue to have that career as a member of Parliament, and you could just, I suspect, more and more members of the Liberal caucus just began to look around and go, I'm probably going to, I could lose my seat if this is going to happen, like, and we're going to lose, and we will lose the government.
And then for the last 12 to 18 months, we've seen it quite clear that not just were the Liberals eroding, but it was the sort of incredible resilience and strength of (Pierre) Poilievre’s numbers, and so that it just began to look like, you know, the next, the next election is a foregone conclusion that there is no way. And so you begin to think, maybe a new leader, maybe… a new vision, a new approach, whatever, will at least, if it won't reverse the outcome, and I'm not sure there's anything the Liberals could do to reverse the likely outcome of the next election, “can we at least mitigate it? Can we hold on to as many seats as we can if we have a new face and new ideas and a new vision of what it means to be a Liberal?”
And so, you know, that all, I think, just, you know, slowly, or maybe not so slowly, just snowballed. But again, Trudeau seemed incredibly able to ignore it or discount it, the grumbling and whatnot.
On the falling out with Chrystia Freeland
At the same time, you're the Prime Minister, you have a lot of authority over the lives of your caucus. You get to decide who's in cabinet, which is more responsibility, more profile, and a higher salary. You get to decide who's a parliamentary secretary.
You get to decide all sorts of goodies that you, that are at your discretion to hand out to your caucus. And that keeps people in line for an awfully long time.
And so we saw these little spurts of rebellion that very quickly got quelled, partly because nobody wanted to be the first one to stand up and say out loud, in public, and put their own job on the line and say, you have to go, sir.
And then along comes Chrystia Freeland.
And, you know, partly in a situation that the Prime Minister, it seems, himself created. Freeland just sort of said “Enough is enough, I'm not going to play out this farce of losing the Finance ministry, and then going into Parliament and reading the economic update,” and seemingly catching the Prime Minister off guard.
I'm not sure why he didn't see this coming. You know, he warned, he basically told her, you're fired, but I want you to go and read this economic update that will make everybody unhappy. And then you can go away after that. And she sort of said, “Well, no, I'm, if I'm going to go, I'm going to go now and on my own terms.”
And that letter that she wrote is —- it's been a long time since I've read a letter of resignation quite so pointed and, you know, definitive in its sort of outlining where she and the Prime Minister disagreed on key policy issues. You know, in calling the tax holidays and stuff that recently came about as sort of, you know, political gimmickry and all of that… That's the kind of stuff political scientists live for, letters like that. You don't see them very often. And I think that just, that really brought things to a head.
I think at that point, he probably knew he had to go and he wanted basically one last Christmas off with the kids in BC.
And then he, like his dad, took his proverbial walk in the snow. Somebody said this morning, I thought it was interesting, is that his father's walk in the snow had much more poetry and sort of grace to it than Justin Trudeau's walk in the snow had.
But I think he just —- it got to the point where he finally had to face the fact that this was, this was it. He wasn't going to lead the party.
On the events that transpired following the announcement
Well, and yeah, you know, now he's left both the country and the party in this really difficult situation. Parliament is prorogued so that the Liberals can hold a leadership process. Don't know whether it'll be a convention. We don't know who will get to vote. We don't know any of the details yet, but he only has until March 24th when he has to be back, when Parliament is expected to resume and there has to be a Throne Speech, which will in all likelihood get voted down and precipitate an election for some time in the coming months.
This leaves the new leader virtually no time to even think about what it means to be Prime Minister before they have to go out onto the election trail and start campaigning.
And, you know, the only thing in their control is they might, in fact, just not have a Throne Speech. That the new person will get sworn in as Prime Minister and then turn around to the Governor General and just say, “let's have an election.” And rather than going through the sort of pantomime of a Throne Speech and a vote of non-confidence in the Throne Speech and then an election, it might just, at least you get to do it on your own terms.
… It's all at a time when Mr. (Donald) Trump is making noises about the “51st State” and we're looking at 25 per cent tariffs and all of that sort of potential chaos around the government. We're going to be in the midst of a Prime Minister who's got one foot out the door, a new Prime Minister who doesn't even get to have one foot in the door before he's out campaigning. None of that is good timing. You know, it just, it's just, it could not, it would be hard to find a worse time to have done this.
On provincial premiers such as Danielle Smith and Doug Ford having to fill the void in dealing with the Americans
You know, it would, it would be easier, I think, if we had Premiers speaking with one voice. But we've got, you know, Doug Ford on the one hand, sort of like pushing back very hard against some of the things that Trump has been saying, and then Danielle Smith on the other hand going, oh, well, maybe there is a problem with the border and maybe we do have to do some stuff on the border. Those mixed messages coming out of Canada aren't helpful. It would, you know, and, you know, Trudeau did try this, but he didn't get very far.
What is needed is a single team Canada, for one of a better phrase, approach to, you know, you should never, a country can't have multiple foreign policies. It needs to have a single foreign policy. In the absence of a strong Prime Minister or a Prime Minister with a strong mandate, it would be helpful if the premiers could get their act together and speak with one voice.
At the same time, we have to remember, Justin Trudeau is still Prime Minister until March 24th, until the new leader is, leader of the party is sworn in and he tenders his resignation to the Governor General. And so there will be some decisions and steps that have to be taken that he can still take… Prime Ministry is all the authority of his office.
Many of these are not legislative steps, so the Parliament does not have to be in session to do a lot of this. How long-lasting any of those things will be, because we're going to be in this transition, presumably eventually a couple of months later, to probably a Poilievre government, I don't know. And again, that's not great for calming the situation down.
If the person who's responding to Mr. Trump may have those policies thrown out or changed or altered in some way by the new guy who comes in.
So yeah, there's, it's, you know, “may you live in interesting times,” is the old Chinese curse. This is probably the textbook definition of interesting times, for good and ill.
On the challenges to selecting a new Liberal leader
If you remember, the Constitution of the Liberal Party was changed so you didn't have to be a member of the Liberal Party to vote in the leadership. You just had to want to vote in the leadership. Well, they can't seriously consider doing that again.
That kind of system, especially now, is ripe for interference by foreign governments, by opposition political parties. You can see whole swaths of Conservatives going to elect, you know, somebody as Liberal leader that they know they can defeat, or whatever. It's just the games that could be played with an open leadership like that are just myriad.
And so they have to somehow change all of the process. At the same time, they don't have much time, especially if they want to try to give whoever comes out of this some kind of cushion and leeway before they have to meet Parliament to decide whether they want to call the election themselves, or if they're going to have a Throne Speech, or any of those things. So, again, we don't know the details.
This is what is both fascinating and frustrating about it is: we don't know is what role will caucus play.
You know, one of the things I've been sort of batting around my head is… maybe you have declared candidates, caucus votes, and maybe then the party in some form, through constituency associations or whoever, you have a runoff, more generally, between, say, the top two candidates. And you don't wind up with a... Andrew Scheer winning-on-the-14th-ballot kind of drawn-out process. And you know, the British Conservatives do a similar sort of thing, where the party gets to vote on the top two candidates that the caucus picks.
But they have a much stronger tradition in Britain, too, of it's almost always somebody from caucus. Very rarely does somebody step in from outside and become Prime Minister. We… have a stronger tradition of, you know, outsiders suddenly coming into the party as leader.
Brian Mulroney did it, you know. Michael Ignatieff did it, right? They came in and they were immediately leader of the party. (Justin) Trudeau actually, ironically, didn't. He actually spent some time as an MP learning the ropes as just a member of the caucus before he ran for the leadership. But, so, in that case, then I don't know how you, what do you do with a Mark Carney who's not in caucus and stuff like that. So, yeah, I don't know.
On who may run for Liberal leader
In terms of who, I suspect Mark Carney will be in. It sounds like he's gonna be in. Dominic LeBlanc apparently has said… he will not run for the leadership.
Which is probably smart. I think he was, he's a very capable man. He is far too closely tied to Mr. Trudeau. They grew up together. They're the best of friends. They were in each other's wedding parties… it would be very hard to separate himself and say this is a new Liberal party under Dominic LeBlanc.
Chrystia Freeland, maybe. She's also the person that first drew first blood in the removal. So she may have people who resent the timing of her resignation and whatnot. I'm not sure who else is gonna be part of this.
This… is not the prize it would have been three years ago, or, you know, even two years ago, where you might still pull it out of the fire. This is “I want to be leader of the Liberal Party, not because I want to be Prime Minister, but because I want to rebuild the Liberal Party from the bottom up.” Because that's what they're facing at this point.
Is the new Liberal leader set to be the next Kim Campbell?
Yeah, well, and you know, you look at the polling numbers… and I remember that (1993) election as we went east to west… you know, for the longest time it was just the two (seats) , and then it was like, okay, there'll be some, there'll be some in Alberta, there'll be… and there was nothing.
You had Elsie Wayne and Jean Charest, and that was the entire Conservative caucus.
And you know, you could just see the look on everybody's face on television, and where I was sitting at a big election party going, “did that really just happen?”
I don't think they'll go down to two seats, but we could see a Liberal caucus that is tinier than it has ever been in history. And, you know, they could wind up as the third or fourth party in the House, depending on how things break.
On NDP leader Jagmeet Singh now saying he will pull the plug
If Parliament does in fact come back, I think at this point, I don't think Singh has any choice. If Singh were to suddenly announce that they would support a Throne Speech by whoever the new Liberal leader is, I suspect his caucus would start to revolt.
… This is likely his last election, I would think. He's, you know, he didn't replicate or hold on to what he inherited from Jack Layton. The caucus is half the size it was, or even less than half the size that it was.
I don't think he has any choice but to say they're going to an election. Even though, I think it's, you know, from everything we hear, financially, neither the Liberals nor the New Democrats can afford to run an election campaign right now. They just don't have the money in the bank to do it.
The Conservatives are sitting on whacks of cash to run an election campaign. And again, that's another problem for the Liberals. Leadership campaigns cost money, even short ones, and you're going to go and tap people to contribute to a leadership campaign and then come back to them three weeks later and want more money to run an election campaign. That's a tough sell even to die-hard Liberals.
I think, you know, the NDP's got to be looking at “we've watched the Liberal support crater, and absolutely none of it has come to us. It has all gone over to the Conservative side.” That's got to be raising some serious questions inside that party about “what are we doing? What's our direction? Did we screw up the supply and confidence? By staying too long in this arrangement?” And I think there'll be some very hard questions for Mr. Singh in the aftermath of the election.
Probably won't happen now. I don't think we could deal with two political parties having leadership campaigns in a very short period of time. But I think I think he's got some really hard questions to answer at the end of this campaign, especially if their caucus shrinks again into something even smaller.
