Jordan: Mid August, the dog of summer. Everything slows down. People take vacations. Even the most hardcore political pundits can relax for a couple of weeks, right?
News Clip: He is covering it up by blocking it out and shutting down our investigations. Then I am Canada’s first woman finance minister. It’s about time that we broke that glass ceiling. The move by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to prorogue parliament until late September. Big shake up this evening in the Trudeau government. Bill Morneau has announced he’s resigning as the federal minister of finance. Which wil include a confidence vote. A failure on that vote will trigger a new election.
Jordan: I hate to tell you this, but everything that you just heard there happened over the span of about 72 hours. From a scandal the Liberals were hoping was fading into the distance, to a resignation, to a history-making appointment, to a prorogation of parliament in the middle of a pandemic, to more damning revelations about the WE charity deal, and now the looming threat of a non-confidence motion and a fall election when the government returns. It’s been a week! And Hey, it’s only Thursday. So if you hoped that you could escape politics during these last couple weeks of summer, I am truly sorry. But if you happen to be wondering what the hell is going on in Ottawa, well we can help you with that at least. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. And this is The Big Story. Cormac MacSweeney is our reporter on Parliament Hill. He works for us, for Rogers radio, and for CityNews. Hi Cormac.
Cormac: Hello.
Jordan: What the hell just happened up there? Sorry, I’m just jumping in, but like my head’s spinning.
Cormac: Yeah. I’m still trying to process everything myself, but there’s been a lot. You want me to walk you through everything?
Jordan: Yeah. And maybe just, because we’re going to get into all of the issues, appointments, et cetera, but just maybe start from when the finance minister called the press conference. So just walk us through like event by event.
Cormac: Sure. Okay. I’ll give you, I’ll actually start a little bit before that, just to give a little bit of context as to how we got to Monday. The press conference from finance minister Bill Morneau, or at the time, finance minister Bill Morneau, came after days of leaks and rumours and speculation about the future of Morneau in politics. The Globe and Mail had written a story saying that his job may be in jeopardy, that there were growing policy differences between Bill Morneau and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, specifically around emergency measures to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. And that led to Trudeau overruling Morneau on several measures. So there was information coming out, leaks from insiders. Also we had heard before that the Prime Minister’s office was caught off guard when Moreno revealed at committee testimony over the WE controversy, that he had to repay the WE charity about $41,000 in expenses for trips that he had taken with the charity. They had been unaware up until that point. And that’s coupled with a story that had broke around the same time that Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor, a very well respected person when it comes to economics, had been brought on as an economic advisor to Trudeau an informal advisor, to discuss the recovery from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the optics of all of these stories in one sort of spelled trouble or seem to indicate that there was trouble or maybe the Prime Minister was undercutting his own finance minister. And so the Prime Minister last week released a statement saying he had full confidence in minister Morneau. Then over the weekend, Bloomberg runs a story saying Morneau and Trudeau were to meet face to face on Monday. On that day, I think everyone was waiting for news about this meeting between Morneau and Trudeau. Was it face to face in person? Was it face to face over Zoom? What was being discussed exactly? What was the outcome of this meeting? And I know I’m not the only journalist in Ottawa who got radio silence basically, from the Prime Minister’s office and the Finance Minister’s office. And usually when that sort of stuff happens, that tells you something is happening behind the scenes that could be big. And a lot of journalists were hanging outside the Prime Minister’s office, waiting to see if we could spot either person. Anyway, I think by late afternoon, a lot of journalists just sort of said, eh, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get much just standing around here. And neither man was spotted. I think it was about 6:40 PM. Eastern Ottawa time where I saw an email saying the finance minister was going to hold a news conference at 7:00 PM. That left a lot of journalists, myself including, scrambling to try and get back to the office, and try and figure out what was going on. The news conference was slightly delayed and at that time the news had broke. And then, it was confirmed moments later when finance minister Bill Morneau came out and said that he was resigning, not just as finance minister, but also as MP for Toronto centre. And that he would then be applying to become the Secretary General of the OECD, a big international economic development organization. And he denied that he was being pushed out by the Prime Minister. The next day, of course, while that news is still settling on the minds of Canadians that morning, we got word that there’s going to be a cabinet shuffle taking place. And I believe CTV first broke that Christia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister would be named the new Finance Minister. And she was one of the names that was being rumoured about to take over for Morneau. Later in the morning, news started trickling out, I believe CBC was first to break this, that the government was going to prorogue parliament, on top of this cabinet shuffle. This is all before either event even happened. And so the cabinet shuffle took place early afternoon, as expected at Rideau Hall. And then we got the Prime Minister’s media availability shortly after the cabinet shuffle, where he announces he is proroguing parliament until September 23rd, when they will deliver a new throne speech to set out a new path forward for the country, as we look towards the economic recovery from the pandemic. So a lot of news packed in less than 24 hours here in Ottawa.
Jordan: I’m going to talk for just a couple of minutes now, just so you can catch your breath, really. No we’re going to get into all of that, but just first, can you really quickly explain for people who haven’t lived through it once before or paid attention to it once before, what it means to prorogue parliament and how that’s done?
Cormac: Essentially, it’s not, you know, we often say the Prime Minister prorogues parliament. Technically, that’s not true. It’s the Governor General that prorogues parliament. She is the Queen’s representative in Canada, and what happens is the Prime Minister usually approaches the Governor General and in between election cycles, if for whatever reason it may be, the Prime Minister feels that both the House of Commons and the Senate kind of need a break, that they can go to the Governor General and say, we need a bit of a break. They give their reasoning to the Governor General, the Governor General agrees or disagrees, but I don’t think they’ve ever disagreed with the prorogation to my knowledge. But nonetheless, it effectively shuts down the parliamentary proceedings. The House of Commons will not sit. Committees are done at that point, and only standing committee has get brought back after the prorogation is over. Legislation from the government that’s been still on the table effectively dies. And what it does is it allows the government to sort of reset its agenda. So this has been used many times in the history of our country. It allows a government of the day to say, look, we need to hit the reset button. Whatever we were doing before this point in our mandate, we have to sort of change things. And so, sometimes the government has completed all the tasks they had set out to do at the start of their mandate, and they want to create a new vision in the lead up to the next election. Stephen Harper did something like that. I believe Stephen Harper prorogued parliament four times in total. It allows for a new throne speech and allows the reset of the agenda. And that’s what the government’s trying to do.
Jordan: Is that the reason the Liberals gave for that.
Cormac: It is. So the Prime Minister was asked why prorogue parliament? He said that, basically, the pandemic was unexpected after the last election. It’s been less than a year since the last vote. But at the time, no one predicted what would happen this spring with COVID-19. And so the Prime Minister said, look, our mandate letters to our ministers, the agenda we set out from our first speech from the throne in this minority government, that’s now all out of date. That doesn’t make sense anymore in this new reality that the government and our country is facing. And so what they want to do is hit the reset button so that they can issue a new agenda, a new roadmap for our country moving forward in this pandemic, specifically centred around the economic recovery. Because up until this point, you know, the focus has been the emergency response measures. Now that we have these measures in place, now that we know that COVID is not going away anytime soon, they want to start looking to reshape and reform the economy and society moving forward under this new reality. And that’s the reasoning that the Prime Minister is giving, and denies that, you know, there’s anything else to do with that. Now, you know–
Jordan: I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and guess that the opposition, and various pundits did not necessarily buy into that reasoning. What are they saying is behind this?
Cormac: They think this is a coverup. They say that, you know, there are new developments in the WE controversy, and the government didn’t want to face questions, didn’t want to face committee investigations that had been ongoing. And so they believe that the government is trying to bury that story. And that’s why their proroguing right now. Because they have, you know, you could prorogue for a day, a week, you don’t need to prorogue a month before you recall parliament, especially when we’re already in the summer sitting. There was only one more House of Commons sitting in the summer before Parliament was set to be recalled. Did it have to come at this time? So that’s leading to the opposition saying that there is more here. And the Prime Minister prorogued parliament on the same day that about 5,000 pages of documents were released from the government. These are documents, internal emails, memos about the WE controversy. The government said that it was going to give these to the committees that were investigating. The issue at hand is the opposition is not happy because they say, look, we get all these documents, we just start to look these through, we have a lot of questions about what’s in these documents, and now we can’t investigate it any further. We can’t call witnesses to testify. We can’t compel them to come and give us more information about what’s in these documents. And so therefore, they say that the Prime Minister is just trying to cover up a scandal.
Jordan: Will those investigations resume when Parliament resumes? Have they been, indefinitely shut down? Cause so here’s the thing, and I’m glad you explained what was happening around prorogation, because as the last that I think casual, political, followers had tuned into this, the WE scandal seemed to be, at least according to the polls, kind of fading into the background. And then all of a sudden, you know, it’s a cover up, and there’s 5,000 new pages of documents and nobody can ask a thing for a month.
Cormac: Yeah. So you’re right. I mean, the polls were showing that things might have started to turn around for the government. And if you were following the committee testimony, things were starting to appear at least like they were petering out a little bit. We weren’t getting a lot of new information. But these documents, now I will say I have not reviewed all of the documents, and some of the information I have is based on some reporting from Canadian Press. But yeah, in some ways these documents verify what the Prime Minister has said about his involvement, because there’s no, I guess, smoking gun that the Prime Minister was directly involved in, in this beyond what he has already said. But there are questions that are being raised through all of this. You know, the opposition says that there are some emails here that show the Prime Minister’s office was involved in discussions on the student grant program, which is what the WE charity was basically brought on to run back in April, when the Prime Minister has said that he wasn’t made aware of their involvement until early May. And so, the opposition says that there are some questions around that, whether the Prime Minister himself knew or not. There was a bureaucrat in one email describing the program or the situation itself as an s*** show. I’ll let you fill in what a word is in there. But also, there are a lot of blackout pages. Now redacting information is not an uncommon practice when releasing things publicly. Governments, regardless of the party in power, usually take out information that could be considered cabinet confidence. They also take out information that could be, you know, personal information about people involved. But there are pages that are blacked out and the opposition says, look, we want to know why these were blacked out. What’s the information that we can see here? And why was it necessary to get rid of that information? What is the Prime Minister’s involvement? Did he know earlier than he has said? There’s also a question of whether the public service was nudged or lightly nudged into choosing the WE charity after some of these documents sort of came out. And so there are a lot of questions that are involved. They can’t investigate this further. But to answer your initial question about whether they can bring these investigations back, yes, yes they can. This is minority government. The opposition parties have a majority on some of these committees, on the committees that are investigating. So when Parliament resumed and committee procedures return, they can basically pick up where they left off. But the issue at hand here is you’ve got more than a month now, and you’ve got all these documents that have been released publicly, and yet you don’t have the same ability as an opposition to investigate this matter on the record at a committee, compelling witnesses to testify in front of you. And we’re not talking about just the Prime Minister, you’re talking about bringing bureaucrats to committee to respond to, you know, interactions that they had in these documents, et cetera. So —
Jordan: Sounds like a legitimate point to me.
Cormac: Yeah. I mean, this is the basis of this argument about prorogation right now, is the Liberals claim that they need this time to work on their roadmap for the throne speech moving forward. The opposition says, you know, that’s hooey, that basically you could have done this a week before we were supposed to return, and you didn’t necessarily have to do it so far in advance. They believe that the reasoning is to try and cover up the WE controversy. The Liberals say no, it’s about the pandemic. And, I will point out out, in the history of prorogations and arguments about prorogations, the Harper Conservatives prorogued at a time when there were increasing questions about the Afghan detainee issue back in the day. There were times at which the government of the day was being heavily criticized for proroguing Parliament, the Harper conservatives, and yet it didn’t really hurt their electoral chances. They ended up getting a majority government in 2011. So, you know, maybe the Liberals are taking a gamble here. Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re honest. Maybe they’re not. Those are all the questions that were that are going to be put forward in the weeks ahead as the opposition and the government do battle over this prorogation.
Jordan: Well, let’s leave the prorogation and the scandal at that until the committees sit again and can pick it back up. In terms of, I guess, what the government says they need this time to do, what will Christia Freeland, be doing, I guess, over the next month that Bill Morneau was not doing? And what kind of a financial roadmap are we likely to see? And lastly, just to add on, does she really need another job right now? Should we be making her do everything? It seems like she’s got a lot on her plate.
Cormac: Yeah. Now I will say that she’s had some responsibilities taken off of her plate, over the years, but she’s had a lot of responsibilities in this Trudeau government. You know, she’s negotiated NAFTA, she helped bring the European trade deal across the finish line, she’s negotiated with provinces during a pandemic, she’s done a lot in this government already. And now she’s got more to do. She’s been a fixer, if you will, for the Prime Minister, she’s been a go-to person, when there’s a tough file, a difficult task, he has turned to Freeland. And depending on your political view, you could debate either way, but I think Liberals would say that she’s gotten the job done when she’s gotten these tasks. Her job ahead of her will not be easy. She’s Deputy Prime Minister, she’s finance minister. I don’t believe any more has responsibility for the US relationship and implementing NAFTA as she was before when she was dealing with that. She no longer has the intergovernmental affairs file, so she’s not responsible for dealing with the premiers anymore. But nonetheless, she faces an immense challenge, an immense task here. We have an economic crisis. Unemployment is at rates not seen in generations. And she needs to get people back to work. She needs to spark this economy again, get it roaring on all cylinders. That may take time, that may take a lot of foundational work. Not only that she has to deal with the political aspect of a deficit that is record setting. You know, in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And then looking to next next year, about how much can they spend in this economic recovery, that won’t be as much as what they’ve spent already in responding to this pandemic. It will not be easy. What can we do you expect out of that recovery plan? Well we’re getting some hints. Before Freeland was picked as the new finance minister, I spoke with a senior source who talked to me about where they might have moving forward. And they said that what the government was looking at is monumental changes for our country. And we got a few hints from Freeland and from Prime Minister Trudeau himself, when they announced the prorogation of Parliament. They talked about changing and fixing some of the problems that they saw in the past. Things that were brought up include longterm care. During the pandemic the situation with longterm care was a crisis. Not everywhere in the country, but parts of the country, and the military had to be called in in provinces like Ontario and Quebec. The outbreaks were very troubling. A lot of lives were lost. Most of the deaths in Canada were people from longterm care, at least in the initial stages. So that’s something that the government says they want to fix. Whether that means the federal government starts to impede on provincial jurisdiction and responsibility, whether they team up together to address this moving longterm, remains to be seen what the plan is. They’ve talked about a greener economy and a greener society. They’re talking a little bit about childcare, equality in the workforce. And of course, when it comes to gender equality, childcare is a big issue at hand here. Something the Prime Minister has already talked about in helping the provinces, at least in the short term, deal with childcare through funding, but it’s a provincial responsibility again, so a lot of the questions here. Freeland has a relationship with a lot of the premiers, but a lot of the questions will come down to jurisdiction as well. And making Canada more competitive. What does that mean? What are the finer details out of all of these things that they’re talking about potentially moving forward with monumental changes? That remains to be seen. There are a lot of outstanding promises as well, like national PharmaCare. That’s something they promised in the last election, they had already looked into. Kind of got put on the back burner because of the pandemic. But of course it’s directly related to this pandemic when it comes to health care, especially since you had, you know, you hear anecdotally about stories about people not getting checked right away or dismissing things. There are a lot of questions about drugs going up in price as a result of this pandemic. So PharmaCare becomes another issue moving forward that will be put right back on the front burner. So a lot of issues at hand. How this roadmap, if you will, to the economic recovery will look? We’ll just have to wait till September 23rd and we get our eyes on that throne speech. But it’s definitely sounding like the Liberals are taking a go big or go home approach and hoping to reshape the country. It was described to me by the senior source as a once in a lifetime opportunity. And if you think about it, the economy, society has been brought to a certain point, to a standstill, in some areas of the economy, been put into the gutter. To rebuild all of that, you now have an opportunity to shape that rebuild. And so, for our government data, it is a unique opportunity. But we’ll see whether businesses buy in, whether the country buys in, and whether the other opposition parties buy in, because this is a minority government and that throne speech will go to a confidence vote. And if they don’t get enough parties on side, the country could be heading to another election in this fall. As if 2020 wasn’t already full of surprises.
Jordan: Well, there had been, and this is one of the last things that I did want to ask you about, there had been whisperings of potential confidence votes or a fall election before this. So, not withstanding the fact that it should be a big ambitious throne speech, what’s the feeling in Ottawa about the chances that this really could trigger an election?
Cormac: One thing that 2020 has taught me is never rule anything out. At the moment, there’s only one party that is directly talking about bringing down this government and launching the country into a fall election, and that’s the Bloc Quebecois. They said they want Finance Minister Bill Morneau, the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and his chief of staff, Katie Telford, to all resigned. And if they don’t resign, then they’ll move a confidence vote in the fall. Now they’re going to get that confidence vote because of this latest move. And the throne speech will be put to a confidence test. The Conservatives have been very hesitant. So far they’ve said, you know, this is not enough to bring down the government. And the reason for that is they are in the middle of a leadership– well, they’re actually at the tail end of a leadership contest. By the end of this week, they will have a new leader in place. How that new leader decides to handle this remains to be seen. Conservatives, in responding to the prorogation, have said they will wait to see what their new leader decides before they decide to move forward. The Conservatives, if their new leader ends up having a honeymoon and skyrockets in the polls over the next month or so, maybe they think now would be a good time to go to the polls. New Brunswick, Saskatchewan are two provinces that will be holding elections during this pandemic. Lessons can be learned. Maybe we wait to see how that plays out before the opposition parties decide whether an election can be held safely in our country during a pandemic, and whether there are any problems with that and whether it benefits one party or another. So I think they’re going to hold their cards close to their chest about what they want to do on this until they see how certain things play out, such as their leadership contest, other elections, and whether or not the polls are right for them to, you know, dive into a vote at that time. The NDP is the other factor in all of this. And I think they’re the party that will likely be the one to prop up the government if it comes down to that, because the NDP are stuck. Financially, they’re not doing great. They have yet to recover from the last election. Even before that election, when they did see a spike in donations, they were facing financial troubles, where there were stories talking about how the party finished a year in the red, which is not great. They did see a spike in donations during the election. But thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people are not donating the same way they were. And each party is dealing with this lack of donations. It costs a lot of money to run an election campaign. So they might hesitate to pull the trigger on an election, unless maybe there’s a poison pill in this throne speech that they just cannot support. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, because governments of the day have sometimes added poison pills in order to force an election to claim that they never were the ones to want that when the public is really ticked off about it. They say, blame the opposition. It’s a political tactic, whether that’s the case here or not, we’ll have to wait and see. There are a lot of question marks about where this will go, but I guess for Canadians, at least keep it in the back of your mind that there could be a potential fall election. Whether that comes to fruition or not, it’s up to the opposition.
Jordan: Man, I hope you at least get the next month off the way the government does.
Cormac: I will try and take it as easy as I can.
Jordan: Thanks Cormac.
Cormac: Anytime
Jordan: Cormac MacSweeney, Parliament Hill reporter for us and CityNews and Rogers radio. That was The Big Story. For more, you can head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. If you want Cormac’s past episodes, just type his name in the search bar and you’ll find him. You can also find us on Twitter at @thebigstoryFPN. You can write to us. You should know the email address by now. It’s thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com. And of course, in your favourite podcast player, we are there. We love ratings. We love reviews, or we just love when you cut the link out and send it to a friend. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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