Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the federal Liberal caucus holiday party, the day after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unexpectedly resigned, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada December 17, 2024.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
Justin Trudeau is expected to announce as early as Monday that he will resign as Liberal Party Leader, three sources said Sunday, as the Prime Minister faces a caucus revolt and dismal public opinion polls that show his party will likely be swept out of power by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
The sources stressed that they don’t know definitely when Mr. Trudeau will announce his plans to leave but said they expect it will happen before a key national caucus meeting on Wednesday. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to discuss internal party matters.
One of the sources, who spoke recently to the Prime Minister, said Mr. Trudeau realizes he needs to make a statement before he meets the Liberal caucus so it doesn’t look like he was forced out by his own MPs.
The three sources said they are unsure about what the Liberal Party national executive plans to do to replace Mr. Trudeau as leader. They said it remains unclear whether he will leave immediately or stay on as Prime Minister until a new leader is selected. The Liberal Party national executive, which decides on leadership issues, plans to meet this week, likely after the caucus session.
On Friday, The Globe reported that Mr. Trudeau’s advisers are looking at how he can remain Prime Minister while a new Liberal leader is selected. A fourth source said on Sunday they believed that Mr. Trudeau would stay in his position until a new leader was chosen. The Globe is not naming the source, who was not authorized to discuss the private deliberations.
However, several MPs have expressed a preference for an interim leader, including Alberta Liberal George Chahal. He wrote a letter to his caucus colleagues with that request last week.
The party has two options: appoint an interim leader on the recommendation of national caucus or hold a shortened leadership contest. A leadership contest would require the Prime Minister to request that Governor-General Mary Simon prorogue Parliament, which constitutional experts say is not guaranteed.
One of the sources said that the Prime Minister discussed with Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc whether he would be willing to step in as interim leader and prime minister. But the source said that would be unworkable if Mr. LeBlanc, as expected, plans to run for the leadership.
Another of the sources said it makes sense for Mr. Trudeau to remain as Prime Minister until a leader is chosen so he can deal with the incoming administration of Donald Trump and his threat of 25-per-cent tariffs.
A separate Liberal Party source said a leadership race would take at least three months, although the party constitution requests at least four months. Besides, the source said, a leadership race needs enough time to be a true contest. The Globe is not identifying the source, who was not authorized to discuss party matters.
The national executive is aware that shorter timelines can lead to bad choices, the source said. The individual played down an interim-leader scenario, noting that no modern sitting prime minister has ever given over leadership in such a manner.
Complicating matters is a scheduled March 28 vote on supply to allow the government to operate. The Prime Minister could make a request for prorogation before that date, the Liberal Party source said.
Mr. Trudeau has remained largely silent since Chrystia Freeland’s surprising resignation as finance minister and deputy prime minister on Dec. 16 that led to renewed calls from Liberal MPs for him to leave. She quit on the day she was to deliver her economic and fiscal update, citing concerns over what she called spending gimmicks, such as the GST holiday and $250 rebates, and lack of seriousness in dealing with possible Trump tariffs.
The Atlantic, Ontario and Quebec caucuses have signalled that most of their membership no longer supports Mr. Trudeau remaining at the helm. Of the 153 seats that the Liberals hold in the House of Commons, those three regions account for 131 of them.
The Prime Minister subsequently told MPs that he’d reflect on his future, and his inner circle made it clear just before the holiday break that he wouldn’t announce any decisions over that time period.
During the past two weeks, however, Mr. Trudeau’s closest advisers have been consulting with senior Liberals about how it could work if Mr. Trudeau remained as leader and Prime Minister until the end of a leadership race to replace him.
Though there is yet no firm answer from Mr. Trudeau nor any concrete rules in place for a leadership race, talk of who might replace him and how they’d structure their own campaigns is already taking place.
Prior to the Christmas break, The Globe reported that one of the questions that the Prime Minister was contending with was whether he still had the team behind him to stay on as leader.
The fourth source, who has been in contact with Mr. Trudeau, told The Globe Sunday that if the Prime Minister steps down it’s not because he doesn’t think he’s the right person to lead the party but rather because he came to the conclusion that the caucus is no longer behind him.
In the wake of Ms. Freeland’s resignation it was not immediately clear how MPs would respond given that many in the Liberal backbench were unhappy with her performance as finance minister and advocated for her to be replaced. But the source said that over the past few weeks reports from regional caucus meetings and individual calls between MPs and the Prime Minister’s team have made it clearer that he doesn’t have the team in place any more.
The source said their sense is that Mr. Trudeau knows that there’s no longer a path for him to stay on.
Liberal candidates who are possible leadership contenders: Ms. Freeland, Mr. LeBlanc, former housing minister Sean Fraser, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Transport Minister Anita Anand, former central banker Mark Carney and former B.C. premier Christy Clark.
Polls over the past year have shown the Conservatives with a double-digit advantage over the governing Liberals. An Angus Reid survey, released Friday, suggests that under Mr. Trudeau, the Liberals only have the support of 13 per cent of voters, but those numbers do change if a new leader is in place.
If Ms. Freeland were to take over, 21 per cent of voters would cast a ballot for the Liberals, the highest number among the leadership candidates tested.
Angus Reid conducted an online survey from Dec. 27 to Tuesday among 2,406 Canadian adults who are members of Angus Reid Forum. Online polls cannot be considered truly random. But for comparison purposes, a sample of this size would carry a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
