Are We Really About to Trigger an Election over This Budget?

It’s raining in Ottawa as I write this, and it’s cold. It’s not a great time to play chicken with the future of the country, but here we are. The budget is tomorrow, and rumblings in the press suggest the government could fall over it. The opposition parties are weighing their options. Everybody is making demands, but there’s no ideal world, no theodicy, in which all the pressures and tensions and inconsistencies may be resolved—lower and higher taxes, more and less social program spending, government intervention to address the climate crisis, and government abdication from that role. In short, something’s gotta give. So far, no one seems to want to be a giver.

The parties, or a sufficient number of them, may bargain down to their lowest reasonable offers and counter-offers and reach accord, or not. It could be a close call. The Liberals are just shy of a majority in the House of Commons, so close that, mere months ago, the proclamations in the press assured us Prime Minister Mark Carney had a working or functional or de facto majority. Now, we’re all hoping enough members of Parliament get leave to fake a cold (there’s always something going around), miss the vote, and forgo a winter election in the cold and the dark and amidst economic assaults from the global hegemon, who just happens to be our neighbour and top trading partner.

Fred Delorey, who knows plenty about political manoeuvring and party machinations, writes that we are indeed heading for an election. He makes a compelling case, particularly regarding the New Democratic Party, which is in the middle of a leadership election. He argues the party could gain seats in an election given their strong ground game and, at the very least, they would get to reset. He thinks the Liberals would stand a chance at winning the framing war over what the election is about and who caused it. Is that a majority they see over the snowbanks? The Conservatives can’t possibly vote for this budget and expect to remain a government in waiting. The Green Party—one seat—are out over fossil fuel subsidies. The Bloc Québécois, meanwhile, is making big demands around old-age security of the sort the Liberals can’t possibly meet.

Delorey makes a good case for an election coming to pass, but I’m not sold on it. At 338Canada, Philippe Fournier’s poll aggregator has the Liberals up two points over the Conservatives, plus or minus four points. So, it’s anybody’s ball game, which is to say, an election is risky. The NDP is up a tad over their electoral showing last spring, but they aren’t exactly flush with cash, and rumblings of a potential early election in British Columbia must have party stalwarts doing some math. A polarized race could leave them more or less where they are now. Two big losses in a row, and it’s a trend.

If the Conservatives end up in an election before Pierre Poilievre’s leadership review and lose, that would most certainly be the end of the leader’s tenure, though he may be facing a loss either way. There’s no reason to believe the election wouldn’t break in a similar way to the last one, with Carney as the reassuring father figure talking the country through a scary, changing world. Whether the talk is bogus—I think it is, at least in part—is beside the point. Again, risky business.

If you were a wise bettor considering placing a wager on the outcome of a hypothetical, sudden winter election, you wouldn’t. For one, see above: it’s a close ball game. For another, who knows who the public would blame for an election right ahead of Christmas as the snow falls and the cozy yuletide feelings are interrupted by, of all things, politics.

• Mark Carney and the Illusion of Control
• Who Is Mark Carney, Really?
• Mark Carney Promised Affordable Housing. Now Comes the Impossible Part

Gun to my head, I’d wager that we won’t have an election. It’s too risky for everybody and the timing is about as bad as it gets, both the season and the domestic and international pressures Canada is facing, including a recession risk and President Donald Trump. We have things to do. The Liberals should choose a partner—I’d recommend the NDP—and compromise until they have the votes. We might even end up with some nice things from the whole mess, as we often do in minority Parliaments in which the NDP influences the government.

As far as I can tell, nobody actually wants an election quite yet. Still, I worry we could end up in a Guns of August situation in which the belligerents—political parties, rather—mobilize themselves into an election despite nobody wanting one or knowing why one is necessary. Once the moving starts in politics, it can become self-justifying as much as it is irrational and farcical. Misunderstandings and hijacks abound. It’s like The Death of Stalin, but not ha-ha funny.

It’s good that governments fall in Canada if they can’t pass a budget. It’s far preferable to a congressional-presidential system, like that of the United States, where gridlock and government shutdowns may occur. In Canada, the government is routinely tested, and if it can’t maintain the confidence of the legislature, a new ministry is appointed or we get an election. But this Parliament has only just begun, and we ought to give it a bit more time. Let’s say next fall at the earliest.

By fall, the NDP will have a leader, Poilievre will have survived his leadership challenge or not, and the Liberals will be aching for a stronger majority—either against Poilievre or a Conservative Party in disarray. By then, we’ll either have a deal—or deals—with Trump, or we’ll have come to realize that a stable and lasting peace with him is impossible and adjusted our expectations accordingly. By then, a truly dysfunctional Parliament, if that’s what this one insists on being, will have shown itself to be a lost cause.

In the meantime, each party ought to be willing to, as I like to say, put a little water in their Niagara or Okanagan wine and get a budget passed. No party will love it, and no party has to love it. But each party must accept that blundering into a fall vote isn’t in the interests of the country and is far too risky for the parties themselves. This course of events assumes parties can think beyond their own navels, which might be meeting them more than halfway up, but for the moment, I’m an optimist.

Adapted from “Is Canada Getting a Surprise Election for Christmas This Year?” by David Moscrop (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.