Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, on Friday demolished Jagmeet Singh of the left-wing New Democrat Party (NDP) for pretending to criticize embattled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau while dancing away from votes that could have removed Trudeau from office.
Singh was filled with big talk on Friday, saying Trudeau “failed in the biggest job a Prime Minister has: to work for people, not the powerful.”
“The NDP will vote to bring this government down, and give Canadians a chance to vote for a government who will work for him,” Singh said, touting an open letter he wrote to Canadian voters making those points at greater length.
In the letter, Singh boasted that he “called for Justin Trudeau to resign” because Trudeau and his Liberal party failed to address the top Canadian issues of health care, affordable housing, and inflation.
“I will be working hard to build a movement that can win in the next election. Join me in this fight,” he concluded.
Poilievre was having none of it, savagely mocking Singh for talking a good game now that the Canadian Parliament is out of session for the rest of the year – and it will be months before a new confidence motion could be introduced to boot Trudeau out of office.
“You did the same stunt in September, claiming you’d no longer prop Trudeau up,” Poilievre recalled. “Then you went back on your word and voted eight times against an election, and for your boss Trudeau.”
“Just 11 days ago, you voted against a non-confidence motion filled with your own words,” the Conservative leader lectured Singh. “Had you voted the other way, we’d be almost half-way through the elections now.”
“Only common sense Conservatives can and will replace this costly NDP-Liberal clown show, Poilievre concluded.
NDP and the Liberals are the two leading left-wing parties in Canada and, while the Liberals have long been dominant, the two are running about even in the polls at the moment. Both of them are about 20 points behind Poilievre and his Conservatives. The Conservatives currently enjoy more support than NDP and the Liberals combined.
The popularity of the Liberals cratered under Trudeau during his current term. When the Conservatives scored a shocking upset victory in Toronto-St. Paul’s in June, picking up a seat the Liberals have comfortably held since the 1980s, some members of Trudeau’s party began calling on the prime minister to resign.
Those calls reached a fever pitch this week, when Trudeau sparked a major political crisis by pushing his finance minister and loyal supporter Chrystia Freeland to resign.
Freeland had criticized Trudeau for spending money Canada does not have on irresponsible vote-buying schemes to shore up his popularity. She also felt he was not up to the job of facing U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on the brink of a possible trade war, a sentiment shared by a growing number of Liberals.
As Poilievre said in his broadside against Singh’s false bravado, NDP stepped in to rescue Trudeau from a series of Conservative confidence votes that could have brought his government down. After Freeland’s bombshell resignation, Singh signaled he was finally ready to let Poilievre give Trudeau a hearty Leonidas kick into the well of political oblivion – only to walk it back in a matter of hours and mumble that he would make up his mind when a new confidence motion reaches Parliament next spring.
“When it’s a straight-up confidence motion, the end of February, early March – if we have the continued debacle and the prime minister has not stepped down – so yes, the NDP as the adults in the room would step up on that,” NDP House leader Peter Julian stammered, sounding like anything but the adult in the room.
Singh himself abruptly changed his tune on Wednesday and said it was not yet time to “commit” himself to anything.
“Why would I box myself in and say I am going to do something definitive when we don’t know what is going to happen? I am not going to speculate. I don’t know what the votes are going to be. I don’t know what they are going to be presenting to us. So I am not going to box myself in,” Singh sputtered.
The NDP leader added that since Parliament will not resume sessions until after Trump is sworn in, it might be better to focus on dealing with Trump’s tariff threats instead of dumping Trudeau.
“He has got to end his hypocrisy and stop selling out the people and put his votes where his words are to trigger an election, to join with me in signalling non-confidence, to bring down this government as soon as legally possible using any means legally possible,” Poilievre snapped after Singh’s latest prevarications on Tuesday.
Singh’s tap-dance on the confidence vote confused even some of his fellow party members, not to mention Liberals opposed to Trudeau, who have been citing NDP’s ephemeral promise to vote against Trudeau as a reason for the Liberals to dump him before Poilievre can finish him off.
“Jagmeet Singh has already stated the NDP will vote non confidence in the government if Justin Trudeau remains as Liberal leader. MPs must consider whether you want to go into a February election with a leader whose favorability is -42, or hope to hold on for an October election with a more popular leader offering a version of change,” Liberal MP Wayne Long wrotein an open letter to his party, unaware than Singh would change his tune before Long could click “send” on that missive.
Poilievre’s jab about Singh being more worried about his pension than Canada’s future is not new. For the past few months, Conservatives have been needling Singh for ostensibly voting to keep Trudeau in office because a successful confidence vote would have dissolved Parliament before the NDP leader could qualify for a pension.
Singh’s defenders responded by arguing that Poilievre’s pension is much larger than Singh’s, a talking point Conservatives counter by noting Poilievre is not the one allowing a badly wounded administration to limp along through the end of the year.
Trudeau’s office announced a cabinet shuffle on Friday, as loyalists signaled the prime minister has no intention of resigning.
Dominic LeBlanc, Freeland’s replacement as finance minister, declared on Friday that Trudeau has the “full support of his Cabinet,” although he claimed to understand the viewpoint of Liberals who want Trudeau gone.
“That’s a view they are expressing. The prime minister listened carefully when that view was expressed to him. He listened, in some cases responded to specific things that were raised, and he said he would reflect carefully,” LeBlanc said of the disaffected Liberals.
“We all need to give him a little time to reflect,” said Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, echoing the new Trudeau talking point that the prime minister has become the most deeply introspective of world leaders over the past week.
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