Why Canadian prime ministers stay past their expiry date
CONTROL OVER CAUCUS MEANS FEW REVOLTS
Something just happened in Scotland that never seems to occur in Canada: An unpopular political leader resigned voluntarily. Amid questions over his ability to hold together a coalition government, Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf stepped down Monday as leader of the Scottish National Party.
Yousaf is the second Scottish First Minister to resign in just the last 13 months; his predecessor stepped down amid a controversy over prison transgender policy. The U.K. as a whole, meanwhile, has famously seen the sudden resignation of four consecutive prime ministers since 2016.
It’s a similar story across much of the world’s other Westminster parliaments. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern resigned in early 2023 in response to polls showing that her personal popularity was in free fall. For the last decade, Australia has sworn in a new prime minister roughly every two years — the result of a political culture of caucus members “knifing” leaders at the first sign of vulnerability. But not Canada.
As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resolutely clings to power despite months of plummeting popularity, he’s following an age-old Canadian tradition of political leaders refusing to leave.
Of the 22 prime ministers that precede Trudeau, only four can be said to have resigned early due to unpopularity or a caucus revolt. The other 18 died in office, lost elections, retired due to old age or health reasons, or were fired by the Governor General after losing the confidence of the House of Commons.
The four resigners are Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, Pierre Trudeau and Mackenzie Bowell.
And of those, it was really only Bowell who resigned under circumstances that would be familiar to an Australian or a Brit. After fumbling a controversy over school funding in 1896, Bowell was forced out within a matter of days by his own cabinet.
Mulroney and the elder Trudeau, by contrast, stayed on right up to the point that their parties were irretrievably on the verge of annihilation. Both yielded power to doomed successors who had only a few months in office before being wiped out in a general election.
And while a caucus revolt would push Chrétien into announcing his resignation in 2002, he clung to power for another 18 months before stepping aside.
The Liberal party is consistently polling 20 points behind the Conservatives, and there’s no shortage of data to show much of this is due to Trudeau’s personal unpopularity. One Ipsos poll from December found 69 per cent of respondents saying they wished Trudeau would resign.
Trudeau knows the numbers are bad (they’ve often been meticulously detailed to him in press interviews), but in his responses he’s repeatedly indicated an intention to stay prime minister right up until the moment that the Governor General evicts him from Rideau Cottage.
“I am not giving up on the progressive vision of progress that we have been fighting for every single day over the past years,” was how he explained it in a year-end interview with Global News.
The usual explanation for this kind of behaviour is the outsized level of control that Canadian party leaders exercise over their caucus.
Despite the Liberals promising in 2014 to mandate “open nominations” for all their candidates, most Liberal MPS (and most MPS generally) got into Parliament the old-fashioned way: Party brass appointed them as a candidate.
A 2019 review by the Samara Centre for Democracy found that of the 6,600 candidates who ran for a major federal party between 2004 to 2015, just 17 per cent had to first win a competitive nomination race. In 2019, the centre found that 46 per cent of Liberal candidates were appointed to their nominations.
For Trudeau, this means he’s disproportionately surrounded by both a cabinet and a caucus composed of people who owe their initial nomination to his signature.
Furthermore, in addition to the usual powers of doling out cabinet posts and other perks, Trudeau also retains unilateral power to eject MPS from caucus and bar them from future nominations. This was a power he exercised most famously in ejecting his former attorney general, Jody Wilson-raybould, for publicly questioning his actions during the Snc-lavalin affair. “Our political opponents win when Liberals are divided,” Trudeau said upon stripping Liberal party status from both Wilson-raybould and Treasury Board President Jane Philpott, who had publicly endorsed the former’s case.
A British prime minister, by contrast, is surrounded by a caucus of MPS whose nomination has to be confirmed every election by their riding’s local executive council. A PM can deny cabinet posts to dissident caucus members, bar them from committees and shut them out from perks — but is unable to eliminate them altogether.
And every once in a while in Britain, these caucus dissidents are able to team up and force the leader out. In Canada, it seems all a dissident Liberal MP can do is give anonymous interviews to the Hill Times.
Given that Trudeau heads a minority government, in most Westminster parliaments this would mean facing the risk of an ouster co-ordinated by the opposition. In Scotland, Yousaf stepped down because he badly alienated the Scottish Greens — one of the parties keeping his minority government in power. In exchange for not bringing down the government, the Greens appear to have demanded that the Scottish National Party pick a more amenable leader. Similarly — even if the NDP caucus propping up Trudeau’s government didn’t want to plunge Canada into a general election — it’s feasibly within their power to push for a new Liberal leader. But nothing of the sort has been suggested on the NDP side. Despite near-constant criticism of Trudeau’s leadership, the party has proved reliably willing to retain him as prime minister. This was demonstrated most recently when NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — despite immediately slamming Budget 2024 as being filled with “Conservative handouts” — said two weeks later that his caucus would support it without amendment.
There may also be a more intangible reason for why Canadian prime ministers never, ever leave on their own: fear of the abyss.
The life of an ex-canadian prime minister is often particularly unglamorous. Ex-british prime ministers get knighthoods and life peerages. EX-U.S. presidents get lifelong Secret Service details and multimillion-dollar budgets to design their Presidential Library.
But Canadian first ministers are immediately stripped of security and staff, evicted from their home and cast aside from every trapping of their office except the authorization to use the title “Right Honourable.” They also lose access to a level of executive power that is famously well beyond that of any other Western democratic leader.
In a matter of weeks, the Canadian prime minister goes from G7 summits and Five Eyes security briefings to marking time at a law office and going incognito to the local Mcdonalds.
THE LIFE OF AN EX-CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER IS OFTEN PARTICULARLY UNGLAMOROUS.