Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre announced that he will submit a letter to the Governor General asking to recall the House for a confidence vote.
This follows Jagmeet Singh’s letter earlier this morning saying the NDP “will vote to bring this government down.”
This is a breaking news story… Previous story follows.
After months of being non-committal, in a new letter, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says his caucus “will vote to bring this government down,” sometime in 2025.
In the letter, addressed to Canadians, Singh says he will “put forward a clear motion of non-confidence in the next sitting of the House of Commons,” and “give Canadians a chance to vote for a government who will work for them.”
This latest blow — seeing the NDP pull out the only pillar of parliamentary support the embattled Liberal government was relying on to stay in power — comes just ahead of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arriving at Rideau Hall to shuffle his cabinet.
“I called for Justin Trudeau to resign, and he should,” Singh said, not specifying how early into the 2025 sitting this motion moving to defeat the prime minister’s Liberal government could be advanced.
The House of Commons is currently on a six-week holiday hiatus, and is not scheduled to resume until Jan. 27.
“The Trudeau Liberals said a lot of the right things. Then they let people down again and again. Justin Trudeau failed in the biggest job a prime minister has: to work for people, not the powerful. To focus on Canadians, not themselves,” Singh said. “The Liberals don’t deserve another chance… No matter who is leading the Liberal Party, this government’s time is up.”
Singh first called for Trudeau to resign on Monday, amid the intense chaos of Chrystia Freeland’s resignation. That day, more Liberal MPs joined the chorus within caucus calling for the prime minister to resign. In the days since, additional Liberals have added their names to the list angling for a leadership race.
What happens now?
According to Kathleen Monk, a former NDP strategist and director of communications to the late Jack Layton, the NDP had an emergency caucus meeting on Thursday night.
“Obviously Jagmeet Singh and his leadership came to the clarity that actually, it doesn’t matter whether Prime Minister Trudeau is leader or not, that it’s time to take this government down and so, yeah, this changes the stakes that we could be in an election much sooner than we anticipated,” Monk said.
Noting Singh’s declaration makes it clear that his party is ready to bring the government down no matter who is leading, Scott Reid, CTV News political analyst and former communications director to then-prime minister Paul Martin said “the writing is on the wall.”
“It’s on the ceiling, it’s on the carpet, it’s everywhere. And the writing’s quickly becoming on the face of every single Liberal across the country, the prime minister can’t stay,” Reid said. He added that the government “might be able to stretch this out into the end of March, but the political gravity is going to start to hit caucus members, that they are going into an election.”
Kory Teneycke, who was Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s campaign manager and former director of communications for then-prime minister Stephen Harper, agreed that prorogation is “a likely outcome here.”
“This government has everything except time on its side, and particularly if it wants to have any sort of a more broad-based leadership selection process. So I anticipate that we’re going to get clarity on the prime minister one way or the other, very soon, and if he’s leaving, I think they need the time for the leadership, and they need to prorogue,” he said.
Singh pivots stance
This move comes two days after Singh said he wouldn’t “box himself in” by committing to help bring down Trudeau’s government.
In an interview with CTV’s Your Morning with Anne-Marie Mediwake, Singh was asked repeatedly to explain how he’s calling on the embattled Liberal leader to resign, but won’t say he’s ready to help trigger an election.
“If there’s a vote on the table about retaliatory tariffs to fight back against Trump, versus calling an election in the midst of threats to hundreds of thousands of jobs, I want to make a decision that’s in the best interest of Canadians,” Singh said on Wednesday.
Despite more than two years of refusing to set a red line to back out of the supply-and-confidence deal with the Liberals, Singh announced in early September he’d “ripped up” the pact.
The House of Commons has since been mired in minority government dynamics, seeing several non-confidence motions presented by the Conservatives failing, including one using Singh’s own wording, while the NDP continued to prop up the Liberals.
Bloc, Conservatives react
The Conservatives, leading by a safe margin in the polls for more than a year, have been working to bring down the Liberals for months, using most of their opposition day motions this fall to push for a snap election.
Reacting, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called Singh’s statement a “stunt,” with his office noting that the NDP have voted to prop-up the Liberals eight times since tearing up their two-party pact.
“Now that Parliament is closed and there is no chance to introduce any motion for months—until after you get your pension,” Poilievre said. “Just 11 days ago you voted against a non-confidence motion filled with your own words. Had you voted the other way, we’d be almost halfway through the election now.”
Earlier in the fall, Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-François Blanchet issued an ultimatum to Trudeau: ensure two bills — one intended to boost Old Age Security (OAS) and the other to protect supply management in future trade talks — become law by Oct. 29, or his party would start negotiating with the Conservatives and NDP to topple the government.
The Liberals, however, refused to capitulate to those demands, leading to them losing the Bloc’s support. Blanchet then ended the fall sitting pushing for the prime minister to visit Rideau Hall and launch the country into a federal election campaign by the end of January.
In a social media post on Friday, Blanchet wrote that Singh’s letter comes “better late than never.”
There is no scenario in which the Liberal government survives any coming opposition days or budget, Blanchet also wrote in French.
The next fixed election date is Oct. 20, 2025, but with the political ground under the prime minister becoming increasingly unstable, the odds of the next federal election being called early, are rapidly increasing.
This is a developing story, check back for updates…