This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Christopher Dummitt, January 6, 2025
With all the uncertainty about just exactly who is leading the Liberal party, and when an election might be called, one thing is crystal clear: Governor General Mary Simon was wrong to approve Prime Minister Justin’s Trudeau’s request to prorogue Parliament. She should have flat out refused.
Why?
It’s based on a simple but easily misunderstood reality: the Liberal party is not the government. The whole issue of the Liberal leadership selection is irrelevant. Our government is headed by Trudeau and his ministers. These are the people who must hold the confidence of Parliament. And at present, they obviously do not.
Every single other party in Parliament has now announced publicly that they no longer have confidence in the current government. This might not matter if the Trudeau government had a majority. But, of course, it does not. It has been a government in a minority situation and at the whim of the other parties, mostly the NDP.
The leader of the NDP has announced that party will no longer support the government. The Bloc Québécois has said the same. And the Conservatives have been trying to vote the government out at every opportunity. This is what matters in a Parliamentary system — the confidence of Parliament (or absolute lack of it).
This isn’t even to speak about the public opinion polls, which put the current government’s popularity somewhere along the deep ocean floor alongside the Titanic. We are talking near-Kim Campbell blowout levels of unpopularity.
So given what we know — that the current government is on its last legs, that the other leaders in Parliament have announced publicly their lack of confidence — for a governor general to prorogue Parliament and allow the Liberal government to escape a vote of confidence would be a betrayal of the very system of government the governor general has been put in a position of authority to protect.
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