Canadian Dispatch: Trudeau government now vulnerable to non-confidence votes

Canada has had 44 federal elections in its 157-year history. Seven of those elections were the result of a vote of non-confidence the sitting government lost.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal minority government stands an excellent chance to be the eighth to be toppled in such a fashion, the result of a sudden shift in the dynamics of the current Parliament.

Terminating national governments by a vote of elected representatives is a concept surely foreign and confusing to the citizens of America. The only vaguely equivalent process might be impeachment and removal of a president by trial in the House and vote in the Senate.

That has never happened and even if it did it would not mean the end of the government administration won in an election by a given party.

In Canada, though, as is the case in all parliamentary democracies, the government exists at the will of the elected legislature which periodically puts that arrangement to the test.

Of the seven examples to date of a government being thrown out in a House of Commons vote, only two might be called nail-biters where the outcome was uncertain until all the nays and yeas were tallied.

The first was in 1963 when Progressive Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker was facing a cabinet revolt, sparked mostly by his refusal to fulfill his promise to accept nuclear warheads on U.S. missiles on Canadian soil.

A small, but crucial opposition party had proposed a motion of non-confidence on a grab-bag of grievances, including the broken nuke promise, but offered to spare the government if Diefenbaker resigned.

Diefenbaker defiantly declined, and the next day his minority government bit the dust and Lester Pearson's Liberals won the subsequent election.

Sixteen years later, another Progressive Conservative government was defeated in what was a spectacular act of hubris mixed with stupidity. Young Joe Clark had succeeded in doing what was thought unthinkable: He defeated Pierre Trudeau in the May, 1979 election.

His government brought in an austerity budget and braced itself for a more or less pro forma non-confidence vote. Yet, though there were ample Parliamentary tricks at his disposal, Clark and his whip let the vote proceed without securing the essential support of a handful of members of a conservative Quebec party.

It was a squeaker of a vote, but the Parliamentary majority ruled, and Clark's eight-month old government became history on Dec. 13, 1979, and Trudeau returned to power in the February election.

It should be noted that Trudeau's second term, a minority, was terminated by a non-confidence motion in 1974, but that was more or less happily orchestrated by the government, the Liberals being confident of victory in the ensuing election.

Now, it's Trudeau's son's turn to face the Parliamentary game of Russian Roulette. This week, while Trudeau was speaking and working the rooms at the United Nations in New York — and taking time to appear on Stephen Colbert's show — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, his nemesis and presumed replacement come the next election, was proposing a non-confidence motion.

Trudeau and the Liberals have to take such a vote seriously now, thanks to the shifting dynamic referred to above. A few weeks ago, the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) ripped up the deal it had made with the Liberals two years ago to support the government in exchange for a number of demands, including a national dental care programme and a modest free drug plan.

Why the NDP chose to kill the deal at this time remains a bit of a mystery, although being married politically to the unpopular Trudeau probably had a lot to do with it.

Be that as it may, both the NDP and the separatist Bloc Quebecois voted against the Conservative motion on Wednesday, neither party being eager for an abrupt election, and neither, most emphatically, wanting to see Poilievre become prime minister, as polls show he would if a federal vote were held today.

So, Canadians are in for a game of high stakes chicken over the coming weeks and months. To continue the poultry theme, whenever the fatal non-confidence vote comes, chances are Trudeau's goose is cooked.