Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives at a Ukraine Compact initiative on the sidelines of the NATO Summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, on July 11, 2024. Agence France-Presse
OTTAWA — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suffered a major political blow on Wednesday when a small leftist faction in parliament pulled its support for his minority Liberal government.
“Today, I notified the prime minister that I’ve ripped up the supply and confidence agreement,” New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jagmeet Singh said in an online video.
The move means the Liberals — at a time when both they and the NDP are trailing far behind the Conservatives in public opinion surveys — will have to find other support in parliament in order to survive confidence votes and avoid possible snap elections.
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In his message, Singh did not mince words: “The Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people. They cannot be the change. They cannot restore the hope.”
He also accused Justin Trudeau of not being able to take on the Conservative opposition.
The deal to prop up the Liberals, inked in 2022 six months after Trudeau returned for a third term, was intended to remain in place until 2025.
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Pierre Poilievre, leader of the main opposition Conservatives, had urged Singh to kill it in a letter last week.
“I’m focused on Canadians. I’ll let the other parties focus on politics,” Trudeau reacted at a news conference during a stop in Newfoundland province, listing achievements of the Liberal-NDP alliance including a national dental program and a law against the use of replacement workers during a strike.
Winter snap election unlikely
The House of Commons of Canada currently has 154 Liberal members of Parliament, 119 Conservatives, 32 Bloc Quebecois MPs, 24 NDP MPs, two Greens, three independents and four vacancies.
Lawmakers are due to return to work in Ottawa on September 16.
Political analysts told AFP it’s unlikely Canada will go to the polls before spring 2025.
“As a general rule, we avoid elections in the winter because of the climate, because we can have storms,” explained Stephanie Chouinard, a politics professor at Queen’s University.
“It’s a safe bet that the government will fall around the budget in the spring because, in the immediate future, no minority group has an interest in the elections being held now, except the Conservatives,” she said.
According to an Angus Reid poll published Wednesday, the Conservatives are well ahead of the Liberals, with 43 percent of voting intentions against 21 percent for the ruling party. The NDP is at 19 percent.
Felix Mathieu of the University of Winnipeg agreed. He noted that by convention, federal and provincial elections are not held at the same time, and three provinces are scheduled to head to the polls over the coming months.
The NDP move is widely seen as a political calculation, with Singh intending to hold a press conference on Thursday.
The party’s members likely felt stifled by the pact and that the party “needed a breath of fresh air. They needed some kind of shot to the arm. They needed some energy,” according to Dalhousie University politics professor Lori Turnbull.
The NDP deal with the ruling Liberals, she said, has also run its course as legislation on NDP priorities have all been passed. The NDP “doesn’t have the leverage to pressure the Liberals to do more. And they figured they probably have more leverage on the outside.”
“This is the cash-out time,” she said.