Juno News - October 19, 2019


Are we going to see a Liberal-NDP Coalition？


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

176.20067

Word Count

768

Sentence Count

37


Summary

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

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.