Canada’s Corrupt Liberal Government

OTTAWA — A growing number of Liberal MPs publicly declared their support on Tuesday for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership to be tested through a secret ballot vote, with one even suggesting he would be unlikely to survive.

Questions about the level of support Trudeau enjoys within his 152-member caucus continue to swirl nearly a week after he met behind closed-doors with Liberal MPs, two dozen of whom had signed a letter asking Trudeau step aside.

He’s single handedly destroying the Liberal Party. Don’t interrupt him.

For months, the Trudeau Liberals have dismissed allegations of foreign interference into elections, only to seemingly take them seriously as part of a strategy to nod to conspiracy theories about Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

Pity Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who can’t so much as order a coffee in Ottawa Centre without being asked, “Cream or sugar, sir? And also: why won’t you step down?”

The question has dogged the Prime Minister for months, ever since it became clear, after the Liberals’ by-election defeat in its former stronghold of Toronto-St. Paul’s in June, that the party rescued by Mr. Trudeau more than a decade ago is now being marched into electoral oblivion by his lead.

Justin Trudeau, who promised “sunny ways” as he won an election on a wave of public fatigue with an incumbent Conservative government, is now facing his darkest and most uncertain political moment as he attempts to defy the odds – and a bitter public – to win a rare fourth term.

The Canadian prime minister appears to have ignored both the demands of a handful of his own MPs calling for him to resign and threats from a separatist party looking to unravel his party’s tenuous hold on power.

Nearly two dozen backbench Liberal MPs signed a letter last week calling for the prime minister to step down amid fears within the party that his unpopularity could lead to a crushing electoral defeat in the coming months. The letter was separate from a “code red” petition to grassroots party supporters calling for a secret ballot vote on Trudeau’s leadership.

Plagued with caucus dissent, a gridlocked minority Parliament, bleak public opinion polls, and a mounting slate of domestic and foreign policy problems, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faces an immense challenge to carry on effectively in his job.

“More and more Liberals are recognizing Trudeau can’t recover, and they would like a chance of winning the next election,” said pollster Greg Lyle, president of Innovative Research, in an interview with The Hill Times.

Lyle said the prime minister’s circumstances are “only going to get worse.”

In February, 1978, pollsters told Nova Scotia premier Gerald Regan that he was facing certain defeat in an election that could no longer be avoided. Despite the rout forecast, Mr. Regan wasn’t discouraged. Blessed with an irrepressible ego and supported by enthusiastic partisans, he believed that beating the Conservatives would be easy. That wasn’t the case. In September of that year, his Liberal government was summarily defeated. “Honest” John Buchanan held the premier’s office for the next 12 years.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rebuffed calls to step aside last week — but that doesn’t mean the disaffected Liberal MPs who called on him to quit have given up the fight.

Some of the MPs who said the prime minister should resign by today or face some unspecified consequences are now trying to push a secret ballot caucus vote on Trudeau’s future.

Some MPs say that if Trudeau won’t go willingly in the face of this caucus revolt, they want to try to force him out of the job another way.