Juno News - October 19, 2019


Are we going to see a Liberal-NDP Coalition？

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Jagmeet Singh Stephen Harper Andrew Scheer Paul Martin Pierre Trudeau Peter Mansbridge Joe Clark
Barack Obama endorses Justin Trudeau Toronto Public Library’s stand for free speech

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

176.2

Word count

768

Sentence count

37


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the final stretch of the federal election campaign, there's a growing number of voices in the media and political circles saying that if Andrew Scheer wins a majority government, then Jagmeet Singh should try to form a coalition with Justin Trudeau to block him from becoming Prime Minister. Is that even possible?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We're at this interesting point in the last leg of the federal election campaign when it looks
00:00:13.240 like pretty much any result could happen. Well, not quite. In fact, a lot of people are ruling
00:00:18.940 out majorities. The numbers do not suggest that anybody will get a majority government,
00:00:23.120 not Justin Trudeau, not Andrew Scheer. So it looks like we're in a situation where we'll
00:00:27.280 have a liberal minority, in which Justin Trudeau remains prime minister, and a conservative
00:00:31.900 minority, in which Justin Trudeau remains prime minister. No, I didn't misspeak. Yeah, that's
00:00:38.700 actually what we're hearing right now from a whole lot of voices, particularly some of the people at
00:00:43.000 the top. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh musing, although he's since walked back, the idea that if Andrew
00:00:48.500 Scheer wins the most number of seats under the conservative banner, then Jagmeet Singh will form
00:00:54.440 a coalition with Justin Trudeau to block that from happening, to thwart Andrew Scheer from
00:01:00.680 becoming prime minister. Can you do that? Is that legal? Is that even a thing? Now, we have this
00:01:06.800 sort of thing happen a lot. We have a lot of majority governments, but we do have parties like
00:01:12.400 the NDP prop up minority governments. We saw it happen with Paul Martin recently. We saw it happen
00:01:18.020 for a couple terms with Stephen Harper, where they don't have enough to have a majority, so they get
00:01:22.500 support from another party, like the NDP, to pass their main confidence motions, their throne speech,
00:01:28.200 their budget bills, and so forth. But what we don't have is a case where you go and you use a
00:01:35.700 coalition to thwart the person who did get the most seats from forming power. Those examples I just gave,
00:01:43.520 the Paul Martin case, the Stephen Harper case, they did win the most number of seats. They won a plurality.
00:01:48.320 They just didn't get a majority. In fact, the situation that Jagmeet Singh is proposing,
00:01:53.780 it's only been done once before, about 100 years ago. In most cases in the past century,
00:02:01.860 well, every case except that one example, when there has been a situation where there's a prime
00:02:06.920 minister in office, and then there's an election, and that prime minister finds that they no longer
00:02:12.280 have the most seats, that somebody else has more seats than them, they resign. That's what Paul
00:02:19.160 Martin did back when he lost to Stephen Harper. That's what Pierre Elliott Trudeau did when he
00:02:24.620 lost to Joe Clark. Now, I'm already hearing a lot of chatter out there where people say, no, no,
00:02:29.380 it's perfectly fine for Justin Trudeau to remain as prime minister, even if he only gets the second
00:02:35.180 most number of seats, because the rules actually say that in that case, the prime minister has the
00:02:41.160 ability to go to the governor general and say, oh, hold on, I still got this. I can still command
00:02:45.880 the confidence of the House. I can still have a majority because, hey, I got my friend Jagmeet Singh
00:02:50.520 with me, and he's going to vote for it. Now, that is true. Academics, experts, they'll say, yes, that is
00:02:56.760 the way the system can work. But here's the thing. It's not the way the system has worked, and it's not
00:03:03.940 the way most Canadians think the system works. So what does that mean? Does that just mean that people have
00:03:09.700 been misinformed, that they haven't been spending enough time in civics class dusting off the rule
00:03:14.460 books and learning about the nuances of it? No. It's a little thing called tradition. It's a little
00:03:20.320 thing called, this is how we've agreed we're going to do things for the past century. So it's very
00:03:26.600 troubling right now to hear Justin Trudeau, who back in 2015 told Peter Mansbridge, the party that gets
00:03:33.780 the most amount of seats, gets to govern. Is your belief that whatever party has the most number
00:03:39.540 of seats has the right to try to govern at that point? Yes, that's the way it's always been. Whoever
00:03:49.240 commands the most seats gets the first shot at governing. That's not always the way it's been.
00:03:56.540 It's troubling to hear that this same individual, I mean, we're hearing it from Jagmeet Singh,
00:04:01.220 we're not hearing it from Justin Trudeau, but we're hearing it from that, from the circle,
00:04:06.480 the media circle, various people in political circles saying, oh no, it's perfectly fine if this
00:04:11.480 happens. Look, just because something can be done, just because you're allowed to do it,
00:04:17.320 just because it's legal, doesn't mean you should. It doesn't mean it's right.