How much confidence do we have in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? No, stop with the heckling, or cheers, because I’m asking in a technical sense. Apparently we’re all supposed to have the self-help-staple psychological confidence in ourselves, and arguably many politicians do to excess. But I mean the kind where a ministry looks at a legislature then hums a happy tune or lunges for the Help Wanted ads. And if you have the good fortune to live in a functioning parliamentary system you should take confidence more seriously than we in Canada seem to.
We’ve been looking at technical confidence, with varying degrees of anxiety and distaste, for much of the time Justin Trudeau has held office. His Liberals won a majority of House of Commons seats in 2015, which those who mistake ours for a presidential system wrongly think means he was elected prime minister for a four-year term. But in 2019 the Liberals only won a Commons plurality, as in the 2021 snap COVID election, so some say he’s been propped up ever since 2019 by our officially socialist New Democratic Party.
Actually, as the crumbling capstone of our constitutional system, the Trudeau cabinet has been propped up ever since 2015 by winning Commons majorities on every key bill, from throne speech to budget. So long as a ministry can pass its measures, it stands. When it can’t, it falls. There’s “confidence” in a nutshell.
Thus, nobody is “elected” Prime Minister. It is of course understood during elections that should a party win a majority of seats, its leader will become prime minister. But only because when and if summoned to present a program by the King or Governor General, he or she will be able to put one forward for which a majority of MPs votes. That their own party MPs normally supplies that majority is of distinctly secondary importance.
It would be odd if those who agree on a program did not to some degree coalesce formally, to assist in drafting and implementing it including soliciting public support on election day. But in Canada we’ve seen NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh pillory Trudeau repeatedly as a conservative clone plotting with plutocrats against the public, only to persuade his MPs to vote for every key Trudeau bill.
Strange as this behaviour was, it has had the potential clarifying effect that it doesn’t matter what Singh says about Trudeau, only whether when the chips are down the orange ones are with the red stack. As they indeed were again on a facsimile confidence vote right after Singh theatrically repudiated his semi-deal with Trudeau.
If the House calls the PM Balloon-Face it means nothing. Whereas if it calls him The Great and Terrible Oz while defeating a money bill, the entire ministry is out as functional head of the Executive Branch. At which point the monarch or monarch’s representative can invite some other member of the current Parliament, from any party, to try to pass a program, or dissolve the House and trigger an election to produce a new House that will sustain either the previous ministry or a different one.
Hence, it’s of secondary importance who votes with a prime minister. You’d expect it to be her own party, or why are they in it together? But if half her caucus bailed on some vital bill which passed anyway because of strong support from other parties, she’d still be prime minister.
We don’t see such votes today because party discipline is so strong that Parliament scarcely functions. But it was very different in the mid-19th century parliamentary high noon (and still is to some degree in Australia). So it’s worth going back to basics, first among them that in our increasingly massive and unresponsive government, the only people we actually choose are MPs. We don’t elect judges or bureaucrats. And nobody elected Justin Trudeau prime minister, nor could they.
The only people who elected him to anything were the voters of his Papineau riding, and they elected him MP for Papineau. But he’ll be prime minister exactly as long as a majority of MPs elected by anyone, including Quebec separatists, stand with him on key bills.
On that basis, I have great confidence in the parliamentary system. We really should try it.
