FIRST READING: Could the Liberals unintentionally vote down their own government?

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Twice in the past two weeks, the Conservatives have tabled a non-confidence motion despite no realistic chance of it ever passing.

Both the Bloc Québécois and the NDP gave ample warning that they would not be backing Conservative calls to trigger an election. Nevertheless, on both Sep. 25 and Oct. 1 the Tories have introduced motions to bring down the government — only for both to fail along party lines.

There are various political reasons for doing so.

By repeatedly giving the NDP a material chance to trigger an election, they’re able to challenge the notion that the party is no longer propping up the Trudeau government.

It also makes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appear weak. When Trudeau made his appearance on The Late Show last week, host Stephen Colbert noted “your rivals are calling a vote to possibly force you out of office.”

It has also been international news that Trudeau is facing official attempts to oust him from power. “PM Trudeau survives no-confidence vote, remains on thin ice,” read a headline published in France’s Le Monde just as their president, Emmanuel Macron, prepared to make a state visit to Canada.

But there might be another reason to continuously table non-confidence motions: There’s always the slight possibility that one of them could accidentally pass.

A version of this has happened before. In 1979, the short-lived Progressive Conservative government of Joe Clark unexpectedly fell on a confidence vote that it had apparently expected to win.

On Dec. 13, 1979, the Clark government tabled its first budget since winning a minority government six months prior. The PCs had managed just 136 seats in a 282-seat House of Commons, meaning any vote would require the vote of at least six opposition MPs to pass.

The Progressive Conservatives had apparently expected that the six-member Social Credit caucus would endorse the budget. But the SoCreds ended up abstaining. Further compounding the problem was that three PC MPs didn’t show up to Parliament Hill that day; one was in hospital and two others were overseas on ministerial business.

Clark’s brief tenure as prime minister ended up crumbling by a vote of 139 to 133.

It would be harder for the current Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre to engineer a similar outcome given the current shares in the House of Commons.

Even if the NDP, Bloc and four independent MPs abstained from a non-confidence motion, it would still be 119 Conservatives against 153 Liberals. To obtain the same result as 1979, the Tories would have to rely on the unlikely result of 35 Liberal MPs somehow not showing up to the House of Commons in time to vote down a non-confidence motion.

It would be a different story in a more tightly divided Parliament. In 2005, for instance, the Conservatives came within a hair’s breadth of sinking the government of Paul Martin over a budget vote. The Tories and the Bloc Québécois banded together to vote down the budget and trigger an election, giving them 152 votes against the 151 enjoyed by the Liberals and the NDP.

But the Martin government was saved at the last minute by Independent MP Chuck Cadman, who flew to Ottawa despite ongoing chemotherapy treatments to register a tie vote. The speaker then broke the tie by passing the budget.  It was the last-ever House of Commons vote by Cadman before he died a few months later.

While snowstorms and other adverse weather events can occasionally block an MP’s passage to Ottawa, the current House of Commons is also still subject to COVID-era hybrid voting rules, which allow MPs to register their votes via a smartphone app.

Thus, even if a record-breaking ice storm managed to prevent all 38 members of the Liberal cabinet from getting to Parliament Hill, they’d all be able to log their votes remotely in order to block a non-confidence motion.

That still leaves open the possibility of an ice storm that also manages to wipe out the cell networks. Although, presumably, if the entire Liberal cabinet was missing without any news of their whereabouts, some level of decorum would intervene to prevent the Conservatives capitalizing on the misfortune by tabling a non-confidence motion.

An even more remote possibility is that a non-confidence motion passes because Liberal MPs accidentally vote for it.

The current Parliament is certainly not a model of attentiveness: It was only a year ago that MPs from all parties unquestioningly gave a standing ovation to a former SS member who was introduced as a Second World War veteran who had fought “against the Russians.”

Nevertheless, it’s really hard to screw up a House of Commons vote.

Votes are recorded in the House by the Speaker slowly reading out the text of what is being decided, and then asking the “yeas” to stand, followed by the “nays.”

Making it even easier is that votes are usually conducted party by party. The Liberals vote first, then the Conservatives and so on based on the size of a party’s caucus.

So for a Liberal MP to accidentally vote for their own government’s destruction, they would have to be so tuned out that they not only missed the reading of the motion, but stood up to vote “yea” even as their still-seated colleagues screamed at them to sit down.

In both 2022 and 2023, Liberal MP Ken McDonald notably went against his party in endorsing Conservative motions to abolish the carbon tax. Each time, McDonald’s vote was extremely conspicuous: He was the only member to rise during the Liberals’ “yea” vote on the motion, yielding a general hubbub throughout the chamber.

One of the only times a Canadian MP accidentally voted the wrong way was in 2020, when Bloc MP Alain Therrien accidentally voted against a routine amendment supported by his own party. It was the first time the House of Commons had ever employed remote voting, and Therrien reported that he voted wrong due to “all the confusion” surrounding the new system.

Still, if an MP accidentally clicks the wrong button during a remote vote, they still have the chance to change it by verbally announcing that their vote has been miscounted.

It’s been about a month since former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney was appointed as an economic advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His appointment was always a little odd; rather than being employed by the Prime Minister’s Office as would be typical, he was instead hired by the Liberal Party of Canada – which the Conservatives have claimed is a ploy to insulate Carney from ethics disclosures. Well, Carney’s official job title is as head of the “Leader’s Task Force on Economic Growth.” The National Post’s Ryan Tumilty looked into this task force, and determined that it doesn’t seem to exist. It has no known mandate, no scheduled events and no members other than Carney.

Just as inflation was starting to stabilize, it’s now a virtual guarantee that prices are going to start climbing again now that most of North America’s ports are suddenly on strike. The Port of Montreal, which handles 40 per cent of Canadian container traffic, went on strike on Monday. And any hope of picking up the slack with U.S. imports has been put to an end by 36 major U.S. ports also shutting down on Tuesday.

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