Chris Selley: How to fire a party leader who won’t leave

A very odd and telling talking point has taken hold among federal Liberals in recent times — including among those who seem to think Justin Trudeau ought to step aside as party leader: It’s the notion that Trudeau has somehow “earned the right” to decide whether he stays on or not.

“I have enough respect for him and his function, and the sacrifices that it entails, that I’d rather let him decide for him,” Quebec City MP Joël Lightbound averred this week.

“The prime minister has earned the right to make any decision about his leadership on his own,” said former B.C. premier Christy Clark, who seems to be eyeing a run at replacing him.

“We’re here because (Trudeau) brought us here in 2015, and so he’s earned the right to decide,” former justice minister David Lametti said during the summer, apparently forgetting the Liberals’ somewhat less successful 2019 and 2021 outings.

This “earned” language couldn’t really be any more explicit a representation of how Liberals conflate the party’s interest with the country’s. “Earned the right” is the sort of concept you hear about when pro athletes sign one last contract with their hometown team, or when popular artists run out of creative steam. If the Rolling Stones want to release a half-assed new album, people would say they’ve “earned the right” to do so.

But this isn’t sports or music. It’s supposed to matter, a lot, who’s in charge of the country. And it’s also completely untrue. By definition, Trudeau cannot govern — could never have governed — without support from his caucus. There are 152 of them and one of him. (There used to be 183 of them and one of him.) He has accrued no additional “rights” to his position by dint of his longevity. The opposite makes more sense.

It’s a uniquely Canadian situation, among Westminster parliaments. British and Australian MPs in the Liberals’ position in the polls would be howling for a leadership change if they hadn’t already executed one.

Michael Chong’s Reform Act, passed from the Conservative MP’s private member’s bill in 2015, offers MPs an ounce of courage in situations like these. It codifies rules for removing a party leader from office, as well as for expelling members from caucus; both are decided by a secret-ballot vote of caucus. Conservative MPs used these procedures to eject Derek Sloan from caucus in 2021, and to terminate Erin O’Toole’s leadership in 2022.

The idea was to rebalance the relationship between party leaders and MPs. (Not so long ago, MPs chose their leaders themselves.) But caucuses have to vote to adopt those rules after each election, or else they don’t apply. And Liberal MPs didn’t just vote against adopting them after the 2021 election. They voted unanimously against adopting those rules.

Then-caucus chair Brenda Shanahan declined to offer a rationale for the vote or to weigh in on the matter herself. “It’s not really important what my opinion is,” Shanahan told the Hill Times — rather perfectly encapsulating the problem.

That unanimous vote of confidence in the prime minister and his office, let us recall, came after Trudeau called a pointless early election about nothing in the middle of a global pandemic and delivered them a weakened minority government.

But hey, at least they actually held the vote. Reports suggest they didn’t even bother in 2019, after Trudeau lost the Liberals their majority and had to admit he didn’t know how many photos there might be of him wearing blackface. (It’s a legal requirement in the Parliament of Canada Act that caucus votes on the leader’s powers after an election, but the Liberals apparently didn’t let that trouble them.)

It was also just a few months after Trudeau demonstrated how corrupting and damaging a party leader’s overinflated power can be, when he expelled Jody Wilson-Raybould from caucus for doing her job and Jane Philpott for supporting Wilson-Raybould.

If ever there were a perfect moment for Liberal MPs to claw back some of the power they used to have — and still have, if they choose en masse to vote to use it — the aftermath of that debacle was surely it. They didn’t. Apparently not one of them even had the inclination to try. As they agonize about the future — their leader’s, their party’s, their own — the idea of a simple secret vote to move on from the Justin Trudeau era must look pretty appealing.

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