Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will remain in power until 2025 thanks to a supply and confidence agreement between his Liberals and the NDP, but will it last?
“Justin Trudeau could be looking at the tea leaves and wondering if he wants to run and this gives him and his party a few years cushion to determine if they want to move on with the Trudeau legacy or try something else,” Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock MP Jamie Schmale said in an interview with Moose FM morning show host Rick Lowes, adding it also gives the NDP time to figure things out as well.
Schmale also wondered if the agreement will be broken if either party starts to see a sharp rise in poll numbers.
The agreement between the two parties will keep the Liberals in power until 2025, but Trudeau has promised to advance the ND’s priorities of national pharma and dental care.
Schmale said the two priorities come with “enormous” price tags. “They have very real and very complex federal, provincial, jurisdictional issues and so whether or not they can achieve it, I don’t know,” he added.
“This wasn’t necessarily a surprise given the fact that the Liberals and NDP have been working very closely to pass an umber of key pieces of legislation in the Liberal agenda,” Schmale said.
He doesn’t call this a coalition government but says it’s similar to one. “In parliamentary democracy itself, particularly a minority parliament, governments usually look for a dance partner and they need a dance partner,” he explained, but added they usually work off of individual agreement, not pacts like this.
“I think we need to hang onto our wallets because fiscal vanity is not coming back to Ottawa,” Schmale finished.