Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came under further pressure to resign on Tuesday after his Liberal party lost a “safe seat” in Montreal to the Bloc Quebec coalition.
Current polls suggest that if an election were held today, Pierre Poirievre and his Conservative party would devastate the Liberal party, which fears a vote of no confidence could oust Trudeau long before the next election, scheduled for October 2025.
Montreal's vote Exchange Liberal Minister David Lametti won the seat in 2015. Prime Minister Trudeau appointed Lametti as federal Minister of Justice and Attorney General in 2019. Lost Current Justice Minister Arif Virani is expected to take up the post in a cabinet reshuffle in July 2023.
Lametti said He said, “Surprise![d]Lametti warned that he could be kicked out of Trudeau's cabinet. In January 2024, still hurt by losing his job as justice minister and with his confidence shaken, Lametti announced that “with sadness” he would step down as a Montreal MP.
Montreal's LaSalle-Emard-Verdun district is considered one of the safest Liberal districts in the country, and it handed Trudeau's party a landslide victory of 20 points in 2021. But when the final votes were counted on Tuesday, the Liberals Lost The Bloc Québécois Party had a close three-way race, with its candidate Louis-Philippe Sauv beating the Liberal candidate Laura Palestini, 28 per cent to 27.2 per cent, while the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP) came in third with 26.1 per cent.
Montreal handed the Liberals their second devastating defeat in three months. A phenomenal victory Conservative Don Stewart's speech in Toronto, in which he won a seat the Liberals had held for 30 years, sparking widespread fears that Trudeau was becoming a burden to the party.
Trudeau's defenders say both his losses in Toronto and Montreal were very close, and that Sauve victory He won by just 248 votes on Tuesday. The election losses in Canada's two biggest cities, including Trudeau's hometown of Montreal, remain a bleak omen for many Liberals.
Trudeau has repeatedly insisted he will not step down before the October 2025 election and on Monday refused to answer questions about the matter, insisting he wants to confront Poirievre.
That clash may come sooner than Trudeau and his party would like. loss Without solid support from his coalition partner the NDP, Trudeau would likely face a vote of no confidence. The prime minister currently has an approval rating of just 28 percent. Opinion polls show the Conservatives have 45 percent support, compared with just 25 percent for the Liberals, a lead almost unprecedented in Canada's multi-party system.
The Montreal special election was billed as a referendum on Trudeau and the leadership of the Liberal Party, but the prime minister essentially Campaign He has kept the media away from several election campaigns in his constituency by wearing a bag over his head.
Palestini, the Liberal candidate appointed by Trudeau after he broke his promise to hold a primary election, actively distanced himself from the party's dangerous leader, while Bloc Quebecois and NDP leaders vigorously campaigned for their own candidates. Even Montreal voters who professed to still have some affection for Trudeau suggested that after nine years in office, it might be time for him to step down.
Canadian National Post I did an election tarot reading for Trudeau on Wednesday and it turns out he's not hiding anything. Featured Every aspect of the Montreal special election was a historic disaster for the Liberals: their first by-election loss to the Bloc Québécois, their first Montreal by-election defeat since 1990, their first election in Winnipeg to receive less than 5% of the vote (a separate election held on the same night), and only the second time in 22 years that a cabinet seat had been flipped in a by-election; the first having been a fiasco in Toronto three months earlier.
Poirievre Confirmed On Wednesday, Trudeau said he planned to table the no-confidence motion on Tuesday, with a vote the next day. He called on the NDP and its leader, Jagmeet Singh, to help him bring down the Trudeau government.
“Are they going to vote to keep the Prime Minister in power to impose this costly carbon tax? Are they going to betray us again, or are they going to vote to trigger a carbon tax election so Canadians can choose to repeal the carbon tax, build housing, fix the budget and stop crime?”
In theory, the Liberals should have tried to win the NDP back over to their side, but Singh's refusal to immediately reject Poirievre's offer infuriated many Liberal leaders, some of whom said he was a fool to break his pledge of unconditional support for Trudeau.
“People in my community are now very disappointed in Jagmeet Singh. We will continue to work and promote progressive and liberal policies, but he is stepping down purely for political reasons,” said a frustrated Liberal MP Yasir Naqvi.
