Canadian Liberals Pressure Justin Trudeau to Step Down

Canadian lawmakers from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party are pressuring him to step down, even though he has survived two recent confidence votes.

Some Liberals have grown so dissatisfied with Trudeau’s leadership – and so worried about a looming disaster in the next election – that they are circulating an internal petition asking for his resignation.

Trudeau’s career entered the political hospice in June, when Conservative Don Stewart won a narrow but absolutely stunning victory in Toronto-St.Paul’s. The seat had been safely in Liberal hands for thirty years.

Apprehension among Liberals turned to panic in September, when another “safe seat” in Montreal fell, this time to the Bloc Quebecois. Although the Bloc Quebecois was willing to help Trudeau survive his confidence votes, in exchange for certain concessions, losing the Montreal seat to them was seen as a harbinger of doom by Trudeau’s party.

A poll released by Nanos Research last week delivered a third shock to the Liberal system: Canada’s other left-wing major party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), is now running even with the Liberals at 22 percent, while the Conservatives soar above both at 42 percent. Canada’s next federal election is exactly one year away.

Trudeau himself responded to the Montreal loss by saying his party has “a lot of work to do” to “regain the confidence” of voters. According to CBC News on Friday, a growing number of Liberals are convinced the first step to regaining voter confidence is getting rid of the unpopular prime minister.

CBC’s sources said some Liberal lawmakers have been asked to “sign their names to what amounts to a pledge to stand together in calling for Trudeau to resign.”

The pledge was described by these sources as a purely internal document, intended to show Trudeau and his remaining supporters that the party is serious about convincing him to step down – an “insurance policy” that cannot easily be “disavowed” by its signatories if Trudeau pushes back.

“These sources said at least 20 MPs have signed the document so far, with others voicing their support for the cause. One MP who signed the document told CBC News the number of MP signatures has spilled onto a second page,” the report said.

The Liberals held a national caucus meeting on Wednesday and it turned quite heated against Trudeau, in part because he was not there º he chose to travel to Laos for an Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, carelessly leaving some important party business unfinished. 

Disgruntled Liberals made their displeasure with Trudeau’s absence clear and Trudeau’s ministers made their displeasure with that displeasure equally plain.

“I’m disappointed, because Canadians expect us to be focusing on Canadians and doing this work. I think that the conversations that we have in caucus remain in caucus,” huffed Trade Minister Mary Ng, who fielded questions from reporters in Trudeau’s stead.

Ng claimed she did not know Trudeau’s critics were mounting a fresh effort to oust him until she read newspaper reports about it, which seems improbable given how vocal those critics have become.

The Liberals asked the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) representative to leave their national caucus meeting so they could vent their spleens, which should have been a major clue that all was not well. Surely the PMO representative must have at least sent a sad-face text message to Trudeau complaining about getting booted out of the caucus meeting.

CTV News reported on Friday that some Liberal backbenchers are “in discussions to formally release an ask for the prime minister to consider the future of the Liberal party in making a decision about whether to stay at the helm of it.”

Presumably this “ask” would be some version of the internal petition the Liberals have been passing around. According to CTV’s sources, the “fraught” national party caucus was the last straw for wavering Liberals who have mostly grumbled in private, or dished off-the-record to reporters, until now.

As with CBC News, all of the Liberal MPs who spoke to CTV requested anonymity because they feared “reprisal” from Trudeau and his loyalists for “speaking out.”

Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley saw those requests for anonymity as a sign that Trudeau’s critics might chicken out of confronting him again, even if dozens of them signed a petition to launch a “secret coup.”

“Reviewing the various reports, it looks like there has been some complaining within the Atlantic and Ontario caucuses, there may or may not be a letter circulating with up to two pages of people who have signed onto the call for Trudeau to go. We just don’t know though because this is all being done in secret, behind closed doors,” Lilley wrote on Saturday.

The Toronto Star, on the other hand, thought the effort to oust Trudeau was serious, and gaining steam as disgruntled Liberals “come to realize, beyond their circles of trust, that there are more MPs who share their point of view.”

“This is not your usual rabble-rousers, this runs deeper than that,” one of those quavering anonymous Liberal MPs told the Star.

The Star noted that Trudeau’s critics could be almost halfway to the 76 signatures they would need on their petition to force the prime minister to step down, but Trudeau has a potent political weapon to keep them from getting the other half, namely Cabinet appointments:

Thirty-seven out of 152 MPs are already cabinet ministers. Several aspiring backbenchers and parliamentary secretaries hope their ticket will come up in a cabinet shuffle — one that is rumored to happen before the end of November.  

Others are hedging their bets, wanting to ensure that the resulting movement amounts to something — that they are not putting themselves into a position where they will be hung out to dry.

Trudeau announced a new campaign team on Sunday, sending a clear signal that he is not planning to step aside before the next election. Trudeau’s failure to name a replacement for campaign director Jeremy Broadhurst, who quit over a month ago, was one reason the Liberal national caucus attendees were so angry with him.