The Conservatives are using every trick to bring down the government

Article content

OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has a plan to get the “carbon tax election” he has been calling for sooner rather than later.

Article content

Article content

The Conservatives are going to reconvene the public accounts committee on Jan. 7 and use it to ship a motion of non-confidence to the House of Commons when the holiday break ends on Jan. 27.

The party believes MPs will be able to vote on the motion by the end of January. If the NDP joins the other parties and votes in favour of it, the motion would bring down the government and spark a federal election.

Article content

The move means the Conservatives won’t have to wait for one of its “opposition days” in the House of Commons, which are controlled by the government, before it can test the House’s confidence in the Liberal government.

The motion is also designed to capitalize on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s recent statement that his party is now prepared to bring down the government in the new year. In the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s dramatic resignation as finance minister, Singh wrote a letter saying the “Liberals don’t deserve another chance” and that he would vote non-confidence in the next sitting.

Singh’s pledge means that all the opposition parties have promised to bring down the government at some point in the new sitting.

NDP House Leader Peter Julian said Friday evening that the party is “prepared to support a committee-level non-confidence statement that describes how the Liberals let Canadians down.”

If the motion gets to the House of Commons it will be the first test of confidence for the government since Freeland’s resignation on Dec. 16 triggered new uncertainty about the future of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Article content

Article content

Some Liberal MPs called for Trudeau to resign and others lauded Freeland for her stand against the prime minister. At least one MP openly encouraged the former finance minister to run for leader of the Liberals.

On Friday, Trudeau’s former top adviser and close friend Gerald Butts wrote in an email newsletter that Freeland’s departure could be a political death blow for the prime minister.

Butts said Trudeau was “unlikely” to lead the party into the next campaign before Freeland’s resignation and is “now much less likely to do so.”

After shuffling his cabinet last week and spending Christmas Day in Ottawa, Trudeau’s itinerary now says he is in British Columbia with no public events on his schedule.

The motion the Conservatives plan to put before the committee will simply state that “the Committee report to the House the following recommendation: That the House has no confidence in the Prime Minister and the Government.”

One public accounts committee member, Liberal MP Francis Drouin, said he objected to the Conservatives using the committee as a jumping-off point for a non-confidence motion. The 10-member committee includes five Liberal MPs.

Article content

“Chair, thought we were supposed to do public accounts on the 7th?” Drouin said in a social media post directed at committee chair, Conservative MP John Williamson.

Conservative strategist Michael Hettrick likewise objected to the multipartisan committee being hijacked for partisan ends.

“I’m begging the Conservatives to stop politicizing Public Accounts,” said Hettrick on social media platform X.

“This is a vital committee to hold the public service to account, and treating it like any other committee is how you end up with deep rot and ignored Auditor General reports.”

The Conservatives’ parliamentary gambit is sure to set off debate among constitutional academics about whether the government can be brought down by a committee report censuring it.

In 2005, the governing Liberals endured a similar manoeuvre from opposition parties when the House of Commons instructed a committee to recommend that the government resign. The government at the time said the motion was a mere procedural motion and not a confidence vote.

This time could be different: Constitutional lawyer Lyle Skinner wrote on social media that if the Conservatives can get the committee to report back to the House of Commons it should be considered a confidence vote.

Article content

“If the public accounts committee does report back to the House a report expressing non confidence, and the House adopts it, even per the 2005 precedent, it is a non confidence motion,” wrote Skinner. “A lot of ifs but it is harder to argue it is merely procedural.”

Mitch Heimpel, a former Conservative strategist and now policy director of the public affairs firm Enterprise Canada, said the Conservatives are putting pressure on the Liberal government and the NDP with the move.

“From a tactics perspective, it puts eyes on Parliament over the break, and it puts the Liberal backbenchers on the committee (some of whom probably want Trudeau to leave) in the untenable position of potentially having to filibuster to protect him. Which will make the government look desperate and terrible, even if they manage to stall the report,” said Heimpel.

It also complicates Trudeau’s options for the new year. Whether the prime minister intends to resign or simply reset the agenda in his party’s favour, it has been widely speculated he would prorogue Parliament to do so.

Now, it would look like Trudeau was putting Parliament on hold to avoid a confidence vote that could bring down his government.

Article content

“It puts a question of confidence in front of Parliament. Which the Governor General would, at least theoretically, have to consider in the event of a prorogation request,” said Heimpel.