LILLEY: Trudeau wounded by coup attempt, still can't run government

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Justin Trudeau stood up at the start of Question Period on Wednesday to thunderous applause from the Liberal benches and declared he was happy to have their confidence. Coming as it did just hours after an attempted coup inside the closed-door Liberal caucus meeting, Trudeau’s statement and the applause were nothing but theatre.

Still, the Liberal leader and his MPs revelled in that bit of theatre after two weeks of leadership drama.

“I want to thank all members of this House for their rousing show of confidence,” Trudeau said.

“I have to say, the Liberal Party and the Liberal government are totally united in holding the Conservative Party to account.”

Maybe that’s part of the problem with Trudeau and his government at the moment, he’s got it all backwards. Given he’s the one running the government, the Opposition is supposed to hold the Liberals to account for their running of the country — not the other way around.

Trudeau survived the coup attempt by a group of Liberal MPs, but he and his party are wounded even if the rebels were defeated — both sides are bleeding. Estimates ranged from just three MPs signing onto demands for Trudeau to step down, to as high as 60, with several more guestimates in the middle.

In the end, I’m reliably informed that it was exactly 24 MPs who backed the coup attempt and of them, only a handful went to the microphone to make the demand. Only three have gone public.

“When you strike at a king, you must kill him,” the old saying goes, or as it has been expressed more recently in HBO’s The Wire, “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

These rebel Liberal MPs clearly missed or at least miscalculated their level of support in a caucus that has long deferred to Trudeau. As MPs emerged from caucus Wednesday afternoon, long past the usual end time, few were willing to speak to reporters, and those that did, affirmed the party was united.

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On Thursday, though, Trudeau will try to change the channel from internal woes and show that he is listening to Canadians. As first reported by The Toronto Sun, Trudeau is set to announce a significant reduction in Canada’s immigration numbers on Thursday, perhaps by as much as 20%.

To show how seriously the government is taking this issue, other events have been ordered cancelled — this is the only message that will come tomorrow.

Yet, it’s an odd one for the Trudeau Liberals who came to power and quickly promised to boost Canada’s already historically high immigration numbers under the Harper Conservatives, pushing them even higher. For 2025, Canada’s target is 500,000 permanent residents, with a similar number for 2025.

Permanent immigration has increased by 59% since the Liberals came to power, but the bigger issue has been temporary foreign workers and international students, both of which have exploded in the last few years.

Canada welcomed roughly 1.3 million new people during the year ending July 1, 2024. When Trudeau and federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller announce the changes on Thursday, the questions shouldn’t just be about what will happen to permanent residency, but the temporary workers as well.

And while those are important questions, on an important issue, we should also remember that even if Trudeau has survived his internal coup, he still doesn’t have control of the House of Commons.

For the past three sitting weeks, all government business has been ground to a halt over his government’s refusal to hand over documents related to the so-called Green Slush Fund.

If Trudeau gets past the coup, he still can’t operate his government due to his own scandal, which all opposition parties are calling him on.

While Trudeau has survived one internal problem, he still faces several more. Changing the channel to immigration won’t fix any of this.