Bloc leader says he won't support non-confidence vote against Trudeau government

OTTAWA — Saved by the Bloc. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet was quick to deflate anticipation over a Conservative push to topple the Trudeau government on Wednesday, stating that his party will vote to save the Liberals from an immediate election that the Tories so keenly desire. Without prompting from reporters, Blanchet strode to the microphone outside the House of Commons to say Bloc MPs will not vote to topple the government since voting with the Conservatives — riding high in the polls for more than a year — would simply help Pierre Poilievre replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister.

“The Bloc Québécois is in service of the Québécois. It’s not in service of the Conservatives,” he said in French. Blanchet said he does not have confidence in Trudeau’s minority government, but believes he can push it on his party’s priorities, including a boost in pension payments to seniors.



“And if the Liberals don’t deliver our demands, we will have a lot of time to make them fall,” he said. Earlier, Poilievre vowed to present a straight-up vote of non-confidence in Trudeau and the Liberal government next week. The wording, according to his office, is to be stripped of any reference to “carbon tax.

” The Conservative motion will ask the House of Commons to vote in favour of the following: “The House has no confidence in the Prime Minister and the Government.” In French, Poilievre made no reference to the Liberals’ carbon pricing regime being at the crux of his attempt to bring down the Trudeau government. Poilievre said it would be a motion the Bloc Québécois should support.

“The Bloc will have to decide if it is going to keep in power the most centralizing, costly and expansionist prime minister in the country’s history,” he said. But in English, Poilievre had a different message and made clear his motivation is to trigger an election centred on the carbon pricing (without mentioning the rebates that go along with the consumer fuel charge). “It’s time to put forward a motion for a carbon-tax election,” the Conservative leader said.

He pointed to scheduled increases to the federal fuel charge which Poilievre said would hike costs for households and businesses. This week, Poilievre warned that would bring economic “nuclear winter” to Canada. He also taunted NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh: “Don’t wait for the Bloc to bail you out.

You need, on this motion, to trigger a carbon-tax election.” To topple the government, Poilievre would need both the BQ (which has 33 MPs) and the NDP (with 25 MPs) to support the Conservatives’ 119 MPs in order to defeat the Liberals’ 154 in any vote. In contrast, the Liberals only need one other major opposition party to vote with their ranks to survive.

The motion is scheduled for debate in Parliament next Tuesday, with a vote the following day. It is unclear how Singh will vote. In remarks to his caucus early Wednesday, the NDP leader suggested his party could vote non-confidence.

“The Liberals and Justin Trudeau don’t deserve another chance,” he said. “We’re ready to stop Conservative cuts, and we’re ready to form the next government.” The Star has talked to NDP MPs and strategists who suggest the party is not interested in triggering an election at this time, but Singh and his top officials have refused to answer a direct question on whether Singh would support the Conservative motion.

Singh, who is sick, cancelled a news conference midday Wednesday. If an election were held now, polls suggest the Liberals would lose. During a raucous question period in the Commons on Wednesday, Trudeau took sharper aim at his political rivals, especially Poilievre, saying the Conservative leader is in a “bad mood because inflation has come down.

” He mocked Poilievre’s “little performance,” his “climate-change denialism,” and said the Conservative leader feigns empathy with the concerns of ordinary Canadians “so he can sit in the big chair” — prompting heckles and a retort by Poilievre that Trudeau has failed to acknowledge the true cost of his carbon pricing plan. “You can’t sit in the big chair if you can’t read your own government documents,” Poilievre said. The prime minister has faced down dissenters in his caucus and only one MP, Wayne Long, has gone public with concerns about whether Trudeau is the best leader to take the party into a next election.

Another byelection loss Monday raised questions about the party’s readiness to hit the hustings. But Quebec Liberals have not publicly aired criticisms of Trudeau and his team. Still, MPs are contemplating the prospect of an election sooner than the scheduled date of October 2025.

“I could imagine a non-confidence vote being successful at some juncture in the next three to six months if there’s a real issue where there’s disagreement on this between the Bloc, the NDP, and the Liberals, but on carbon pricing, it’s impossible to see we’re going to have an election on that,” said Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith. House leader Karina Gould said Conservatives are taking advantage of the NDP’s withdrawal from the parliamentary co-operation deal, and Singh failed to weigh the consequences of his decision two weeks ago. As a result, she said, he is putting at risk some of the programs that have yet to pass into law.

Health Minister Mark Holland said he’s still pushing through the government’s dental care and pharmacare programs, and that the government will focus on its own agenda instead of opposition efforts to extract “some sort of political win” from the Trudeau Liberals. Asked about the Bloc’s demand to increase seniors’ pensions, Holland said it is “myopic” for a party to suggest it will trigger an election over a single policy issue, but that he’s willing to have a debate about whether the government can do more. Blanchet had made clear last week that his party would not vote in favour of a motion centred on the “carbon tax.

” It said its support for the Liberals is conditional on the government enriching benefits for seniors aged 65 to 74 to match the benefits of those over 75, among other demands including more power for Quebec to decide immigration rates and to protect its dairy farmers. Blanchet told CBC’s Power and Politics on Tuesday that he’s willing to give the Liberals a chance and suggested that mid- to late October would be time enough to see whether the Liberals are willing to work with any other party to ensure its minority government’s survival. BQ House leader Alain Therrien told the Star the estimates of the fiscal cost of increased payments to seniors are between $2 billion and $4 billion, but more analysis is needed.

A senior Liberal source said the government has not yet undertaken any kind of discussions with other party leaders about what kind of horse-trading could be done in exchange for their support. Erskine-Smith said he could support more support for seniors, depending on what exactly the BQ proposed. “If it’s support for low-income seniors on (the Guaranteed Income Supplement), that’s worth looking at for sure.

If it’s to build support further for (Old Age Security), which is not as means tested as it could be, and is — with the growing seniors population that we have — is not the most efficient way to spend our dollars for seniors, I don’t think that’s the best idea.”.