FIRST READING: Conservatives are trying hard to fire him, but Trudeau holds all the cards

If he decides to prorogue, there's nothing to stop him

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Published Dec 30, 2024  •  7 minute read

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau departs after a cabinet swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, on Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Spencer Colby

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TOP STORY

During a time of year when Canadian politics typically descend into a semi-coma, the Conservatives are leading an all-out drive to bring down the Liberal government before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a chance to save it.

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Whatever they do, though, Trudeau continues to hold all the cards. The Tories can shame him, they can rally the opposition against him and they can call for the intervention of the Governor General. But – as per every available constitutional precedent – this only ends when Trudeau says it does.

Just before Christmas, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called on Governor General Mary Simon to recall Parliament before New Year’s Eve in order to hold a vote of non-confidence in the Liberal government.

When that didn’t work, the Conservatives announced an early recall of the Public Accounts Committee. It’s one of the more influential House of Commons committees headed by a Conservative, New Brunswick MP John Williamson, and it’s thus one of the only organs of state that the Conservatives can order back to work.

The committee obviously has no power to decide the Liberal government’s future, but the idea is to have them draft a shovel-ready non-confidence motion that can be fast-tracked to the House of Commons when it reconvenes on Jan. 27.

This campaign all makes political sense: Just as NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is finally signalling a willingness to bring down the Trudeau government, the Conservatives are hammering on him to actually make good on the pledge.

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“Conservatives are now presenting the NDP with this first opportunity to bring down the Liberal Government and force an election,” reads a Friday statement outlining the Conservatives’ Public Accounts Committee plan.

But whatever else the Tories do between now and Jan. 27, Trudeau’s ability to head them off is virtually absolute.

There was never any realistic chance of Governor General Mary Simon calling Parliament back to work. And if Trudeau ultimately decides to prorogue Parliament past Jan. 27 to prevent a confidence vote, it’s extremely unlikely that she or any other occupant of Rideau Hall would stop him.

Since 1867, the basic job of any Governor General is to do whatever the prime minister asks – even if they’re cynically clinging to power and the opposition parties all want them gone.

It says so right in the manual that’s given to Canadian parliamentarians. “It is very rare that a Governor General has gone against the advice of a Prime Minister,” reads the text of the House of Commons Procedure and Practice.

There’s only been two real deviations from this principle in which a Governor General has used their “reserve powers” to go against the wishes of a prime minister.

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Both happened nearly 100 years ago, and under circumstances far less extreme than what the Conservatives just requested. That is, asking the Governor General to unilaterally convene the House of Commons in order to dissolve Parliament.

The first was in 1896, during a testy period when Prime Minister Charles Tupper was refusing to cede power after decisively losing a federal election to the Liberals under Wilfrid Laurier (the figure on the $5 bill).

When Tupper attempted to appoint a batch of senators and judges anyway, the Governor General of the time slapped down the request and forced him out.

The second and most famous example came in 1926, when Governor General Lord Julian Byng denied a request by Prime Minister Mackenzie King to dissolve Parliament and call an election.

The political situation at the time was actually very similar to today: King oversaw a minority Liberal government propped up by the Progressive Party – a rough analogue to today’s NDP.

But instead of honouring King’s request for an election, Byng instead handed government to the Conservatives under Arthur Meighen.

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The Conservatives had a slightly larger caucus than the Liberals, and there were some signs that Meighen might be able to govern with Progressive Party support.

Instead, it was an abject disaster: Meighen was prime minister for only a few days before the Progressive Party brought him down in a confidence vote, yielding the general election that King had asked for in the first place.

“Byng did everything right,” wrote Canadian political scholar Patrice Dutil in a 2023 review of the affair. As Dutil put it, “no party has a ‘right’ to form government unless it can command a majority of seats in the House of Commons.”

“In theory, they all can make the attempt,” he wrote.

But King would be vindicated by decisively trouncing the Conservatives in the subsequent election.

The fact that the affair blew up so thoroughly in Byng’s face is largely the reason that a Canadian Governor General has never again gone against the wishes of a prime minister – even in cases where a prime minister is transparently attempting to stave off his own defeat. 

Byng thought he was dealing with a spent, unpopular and scandal-plagued prime minister in the form of King. He also thought he was dealing with a prime minister who was bending the rules in order to cling to power.

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But the whole saga came off as an attempt by Byng to circumvent the will of the electorate and prop up Meighen as an unpopular replacement. King even publicly accused Byng – a British appointee – of being an agent of foreign interference.

When Poilievre issued his Dec. 20 appeal for the Governor General to unilaterally recall Parliament, at least one scholar thought it had some merit.

Writing for The Hill Times, Donald Savoie – Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance – said it would be weird for the Governor General to recall Parliament based on a letter from the leader of the opposition, but that she might change her mind if Poilievre could give her a letter signed by “a majority of MPs.”

James Bowden, a frequent commentator on Canadian constitutional matters, countered in an analysis that the only time the Governor General should ever take advice from the leader of the opposition is “never.”

It’s never happened before, and on the notion of recalling Parliament from vacation, that’s actually something the Governor General doesn’t concern herself with: She only dissolves it, prorogues it or opens it.

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The House of Commons is currently adjourned not because of Trudeau or the Governor General – but because they voted for it. On Dec. 17 – when Trudeau was already facing widespread calls to resign – a “motion to adjourn the House” passed the House of Commons by 177 to 140.

Bowden notes that if MPs wanted the power to end vacations early in order to turf out an unpopular government, they should have given it to themselves rather than petition the Governor General to do it for them.

All they would have needed to do is amend the House of Commons rules (the Standing Orders) to compel the Speaker to call everybody back to work if, say, enough MPs asked him to. Instead, they just left it all in the hands of the prime minister.

“On this matter, we cannot blame this failure on the Prime Minister and authority too centralised within him and his office; only MPs themselves bear this blame,” wrote Bowden.

And if Trudeau does end up deciding to unilaterally prorogue Parliament in advance of Jan. 27 for transparently self-interested reasons, there’s pretty clear precedent for Simon going along with it.

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That’s essentially what Prime Minister Stephen Harper did in 2008, and under similar circumstances. Facing down a promised vote of non-confidence from the assembled opposition parties, Harper simply got Governor General Michaëlle Jean to prevent Parliament from convening for two months.

When the prorogation ended, the threat had passed and Harper remained prime minister for another six years.

At her retirement from the post in 2010, Jean would stand by the decision, implying that if Canadians had truly wanted a change in government in 2008, there were plenty of ways to do so without requiring her to break with more than a century of constitutional precedent in ignoring a prime minister.

“The responsibility is for the citizens who are, finally, ultimately the ones who will make the decisions. They have to participate,” said Jean in her first public comments on the affair.

IN OTHER NEWS

Canadian officialdom is not taking well to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s constant jokes about annexation. CityNews ran an entire story on how it’s not funny, Mark Carney issued a statement saying the “joke” had gone “too far,” and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to respond to the jabs with the above social media post, in which he reposted a segment from the 2010 Vancouver Olympics in which American broadcaster Tom Brokaw gives a fawning review of Canada for U.S. viewers. Photo by X.com

Hockey great Wayne Gretzky hasn’t been tremendously political over the years, but whenever he’s photographed with a politician it’s usually a right-wing one like Stephen Harper or Donald Trump. The latter recently said in a social media post that he had urged Gretzky to run for office in Canada (the two recently met at Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago). Gretzky reportedly dismissed the idea, but his wife Janet responded with a cryptic note on her Instagram page reading, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

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