Prime Minister Mark Carney rises in the House of Commons as members vote on the federal budget on Monday.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
You have to understand: it was always going to end this way. For all the efforts to hype the budget vote as suspenseful, for all the speculation over what the NDP or the Conservatives might or might not do, for all the indignation directed at the Liberals for failing to negotiate with the opposition, there was never any chance that the vote would fail.
Well, there was always a slim possibility of an accident, I suppose: a miscount, a misunderstanding, a bluff gone wrong. But there was never any chance that the opposition was going to deliberately bring about the defeat of the budget and the fall of the government.
This has nothing to do with the merits or demerits of the budget, or the government, and everything to do with politics.
An average of the most recent polls shows the Liberals four to five points ahead of the Conservatives, slightly more than the 2.5-point margin they eked out in the election. Other than that, not a lot has changed since last April. Even the provincial breakouts look largely the same: the Conservatives well ahead on the Prairies, the Liberals in Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces, B.C. a toss-up.
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Nothing about that damp squib of a budget, or the public reaction to it – “meh” would be a good summary – suggested it was likely to alter things that much. So there was little to be gained by bringing the government down over it. There was, however, much to be lost, potentially.
The NDP was not just decimated electorally in the last election, reduced to just seven seats and 6 per cent of the popular vote. It was also left more or less destitute. Most of their candidates failed to get the minimum 10 per cent of the vote needed to qualify for public reimbursement of their expenses.
Today, the party is not only deeply in debt, but divided, directionless and leaderless. Maybe it couldn’t do any worse than it did last time: maybe seven seats is rock bottom. But another load of debt on top of the pile it has already accumulated would put the existence of the party in doubt.
The Conservatives, for their part, have just come off a very rough period, losing one MP to the Liberals and another to a sudden desire to spend more time with his family. The party caucus is restive. Many are described as having doubts about Pierre Poilievre’s “leadership style,” shorthand for “I don’t think he can win.”
The Conservatives may be only a few points behind the Liberals in the party preference surveys, but Mr. Poilievre trails Mark Carney by more than 20 points. That sort of leadership gap often cuts into party support under the strain and scrutiny of an election campaign, especially one the public views as unnecessary.
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That was the risk in triggering an early election. It isn’t as if a winter election would be some harrowing ordeal for the public: journalists who talk about it in such terms are almost certainly projecting. But polls showed the public firmly of the opinion that it was “too soon” for another election, six months after the last.
It was not terribly surprising, then, to find that, on the night, four opposition MPs, two NDP and two Conservative, failed to vote or abstained. That turned out to be two more than the Liberals needed, after Elizabeth May’s dramatic declaration that, earlier dramatic declarations to the contrary, she would in fact vote for the budget, in return for Mr. Carney’s statement that his government was “determined” to hit its Paris emissions reductions targets – a promise Ms. May can redeem at some future date in exchange for six magic beans.
The NDP discomfort was entertaining to watch, interim leader Don Davies having to explain to incredulous reporters that while the party was unalterably opposed to this “Conservative budget,” it was not so unalterably opposed as to want to see it defeated. The Conservatives were merely devious. House leader Andrew Scheer and caucus chair Scott Reid waited until it was clear the budget would pass before rushing into the House, claiming that, owing to a “technical difficulty” with the requisite app, they had been prevented from voting electronically – as MPs in this country, four years after the pandemic, are still allowed to do – and demanding to have their “no” votes recorded.
That in itself is a good argument for scrapping electronic voting; MPs should not be able to game the system in this way. But while we’re on the subject: I get that MP Shannon Stubbs is recovering from surgery, and was thus unable to attend the vote in person. But why was she unable to vote electronically? Did her app fail, too?