EDITORIAL: Liberal-NDP deal bad for democracy

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Ever since March 22, 2022, Canadians have known that no matter how far down the rabbit hole popular support for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal government goes, there won’t be a federal election until sometime after June 2025.

By contrast, given the average life of a minority government in Canada is less than two years, the current Liberal government, elected on Sept. 20, 2021, would normally be a distant memory by now.

There would already have been another election, perhaps in the fall of 2023, at which time polls showed Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives were leading the Liberals by double digits in popular support, as they continue to do today.

The reason there has been no election, as Canadians well know, is the supply-and-confidence motion Trudeau agreed to in March 2022 with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.

What it means is that an unpopular Liberal government, supported by an unpopular fourth-placed opposition party, are politically joined at the hip.

It also means that, for the sake of their joint political survival, they are preventing an election that, according to the polls, would result in a majority Conservative government being elected to power.

We aren’t suggesting the Liberal-NDP deal is unconstitutional, nor is it unprecedented in Canada.
We are suggesting that it is defying the popular will of Canadians for a new government.

In a traditional minority Parliament, the decisions of the party in power are tempered by the reality that it faces defeat at any time on a vote of non-confidence, since the opposition parties collectively have more seats than the governing party.

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But the Liberal-NDP supply-and-confidence motion means the Liberals are, in effect, governing as if they had a majority, with the Liberals and the NDP mutually agreed upon a big government, big spending and a big deficit agenda, financed by Canadian taxpayers.

We believe a traditional minority parliament in the wake of the 2021 federal election would have been healthier for Canadian democracy.

This is especially the case given that a supply-and-confidence motion in future could result in a party winning fewer seats than its main political opponent clinging to power, with the support of a fourth-place party, in the absence of any party winning a majority of seats.