When Parliament resumes on September 16, things will be more unpredictable than they’ve been in quite some time.
On September 4, New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh announced that his party was withdrawing from the supply and confidence agreement that it had negotiated with the Liberals to provide stability to a minority government. With that agreement torn up, and no party or coalition holding a majority of seats, lawmakers will be shifting into campaign mode, and parliament will likely get a bit more raucous.
“I fear that open and thoughtful discussion will be in short supply this fall,” says Katherine Scott, a senior researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). “The Conservatives will be trying to trigger an election as soon as possible, using their position on parliamentary committees to attack and derail the government’s agenda, while working to out-maneuver the NDP and Bloc Quebecois. All process, no substance—as the Canadian economy weakens and economic distress spreads.”
What programs survive an election?
“There’s plenty on the line this fall session for the Liberals in terms of cementing their legacy,” says CCPA Senior Economist David Macdonald.
For Macdonald, this session will be key in determining which of the past few years’ big legislative projects survive or get cut in the years to come. When speculating whether a program would survive or not, he says the key question to ask is whether it’s already in motion.
Dental care, for example, should survive, he says—the program is “well underway, it has been fully passed and doesn’t depend on any additional legislation.” That, coupled with the political unpopularity of scrapping programs that people—particularly seniors—are already benefiting from, makes dental care likely to survive an election, even if one were to be called this fall.
“The train has left the station on this one,” Macdonald said.
He has a similar assessment of the $10 per day child care program, saying that “there’s no real way to cancel it now” due to agreements with provinces.
His view is less optimistic about the Canada Disability Benefit, which is only set to begin providing benefits next summer—leaving it vulnerable to being cancelled before rollout is complete.
The national pharmacare program, too, might not survive a fall election because legislation still needs to pass through the senate and return to the house, Macdonald says. The legislation is moving through the senate this fall, but may face amendments—so it is unclear whether it will be cemented by the end of this parliamentary sitting.
“Everyone has their eye on pharmacare,” Scott says. “The bill will hopefully pass, but it remains to be seen whether the government will be able to quickly strike the necessary deals with the provinces and territories to get the program off of the ground before the writ is dropped.”
Also keep an eye out for new policy proposals finely tuned to electoral dynamics in Quebec. Quebec will be critical to the electoral fortunes of the Liberals–where environmental issues track more positively and un-tied federal dollars are always welcome. The Bloc Quebecois will be keen to broker some deals before it heads to the polls.
A renters’ bill of rights?
Poll after poll confirms that Canadian voters place the out-of-control housing costs near the top of their great concerns for politicians to address, and every party is looking to “own” the issue with proposed solutions.
For Ricardo Tranjan, political economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Ontario Office and author of The Tenant Class, the Liberals have an opportunity to take meaningful action with a previously promised piece of legislation—the “renters’ bill of rights,” which they announced in the last budget.
“This bill could be this government's most concrete action on housing affordability. If done right,” Tranjan says.
“An effective Renters’ Bill of Rights would standardize and expand tenant rights,” Tranjan says. “It would include well-defined protections against all forms of displacement, ensuring that new housing developments don’t negatively impact the number of tenants currently housed in affordable units. It would also include a national rent control policy that prevents and punishes price gouging in rental housing.”
The Liberals could, feasibly, introduce such a piece of legislation, but it’s not on the public-facing agenda, as it stands. They would be hard-pressed to pass it this parliamentary sitting—making the legislation something of an electoral promise for a potential future mandate, if the party manages to turn its fortunes around.
In the meantime, Tranjan says, tenants across the country are hurting. “An estimated 70 per cent of tenant families earn too little to buy a house and too much to qualify for rent subsidies,” he says. “Rents are out of control and financial incentives to developers are failing to deliver relief to renters.
“The Renters’ Bill of Rights is this government’s chance to deliver immediate relief to tenants, should it have the political courage to do so.”
Climate: An afterthought in an emergency
“Every single month for the past year has been the warmest month in recorded global history,” says Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, a senior researcher at the CCPA. “Yet the imperative of tackling climate change has all but disappeared from Canada’s political discourse.”
For the most part, Mertins-Kirkwood says, the government’s key pieces of climate legislation are now passed—including the Net-Zero Act and the Sustainable Jobs Act. A cap on oil and gas sector emissions and a national clean electricity standard are both nearly done, and likely to be completed in the fall.
“The government will need to get those regulations in place this fall while staving off industry efforts to water them down,” he says. “But once they do, it’s anyone’s guess as to the next steps for this government on climate.”
Preparing for the election
Every politician, party, and political observer knows that an election is coming—and the smart money, Macdonald says, is that it likely won’t arrive before the spring. But in an unpredictable minority government situation, anything is possible.
If an election were to happen tomorrow, the Conservatives would almost certainly win a majority of seats in parliament. It’s what observers describe as a “change election,” and the Conservatives have effectively managed to present themselves as the only real option for a different path. That situation is not helped by the fact that Canada is effectively a two-party system, with only Liberals and Conservatives having ever won federal elections.
Such a result is not inevitable, but it is the result of structures in place in the country’s political system. Trish Hennessy, senior strategist at the CCPA, points out that the voting system itself encourages false majorities for parties.
“According to Fair Vote Canada, based on April 2024 voter preferences,” Hennessy says,” Conservatives would win 60.3 per cent of seats under the current first-past-the-post system but it would be 44.3 per cent under a proportional representation system.”
If the government were to reform the voting system—as the Liberals promised to do under their first mandate under Trudeau's leadership—then the possibility of such a false majority would decrease substantially. “Canadians would get what they actually voted for,” Hennessy says. “And political parties on the Hill would be forced to work together, to compromise and collaborate. That would be good for democracy.”
Of course, electoral reform is not on the agenda for this parliamentary sitting. But once the results of the next election come in, it’s distinctly possible that the Liberals and NDP will be wishing they had implemented it when they had the chance.
