Weekly Writ 11/20: How the Liberals spent their election money
A look at 2025 election expenses. Plus, is this Parliament built to last at all?
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.
With the budget getting (barely) passed on Monday, the potential for a holiday election has been taken off the table. But the way the vote broke down does not suggest that an election will be off the table for very long.
The Liberals passed their budget with only one vote from a member of an opposition party: the Greens’ Elizabeth May. The Bloc voted as a block against the budget, while two Conservative and two NDP MPs abstained. Shannon Stubbs, one of the Conservatives’ two abstentions, did not vote due to a scheduled surgery, while the other abstention came from Matt Jeneroux, which we are meant to believe has nothing to do with the drama surrounding his rumoured floor-crossing from a few weeks ago.
Lori Idlout and Gord Johns abstained for the NDP. Don Davies, the NDP’s interim leader, explained that the New Democrats did not support the budget but also understood that Canadians don’t want an election right now (and, let’s be frank, neither should the leaderless NDP).
The Conservatives also appear to not want an election right now, based on what happened with Andrew Scheer’s and Scott Reid’s supposed IT difficulties. (Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.)
But the Conservatives and NDP won’t be wary of an election forever. The Liberals have shown little appetite of their own for compromising with the opposition parties to avoid a campaign, meaning that when push next comes to shove we shouldn’t expect the NDP to abstain and the Conservatives to forget the WiFi password again.
It is simply unusual for a budget to pass without any support from a major opposition party in a minority parliament. And it’s also unusual for a government to increase its support in the House of Commons on budget votes the longer it is in office.
That was certainly the case for Justin Trudeau when his Liberals had a minority. Their first pandemic budget got the support of 211 MPs in the House. Their next budget in 2022 had only 202 votes in favour. That dropped to 177 votes in 2023 and stayed around the same level at 181 votes in 2024.
Trudeau’s government banked on Bloc support to get its first two minority budgets passed and it relied on the New Democrats afterwards. Stephen Harper, when he had minorities between 2006 and 2011, also initially got backing from the Bloc before he got support from the Liberals (first through their votes, then through their mass abstentions).
Indeed, the last time a minority government presented a budget that got no support from at least one other major party (either explicitly or implicitly, as was the case with the Harper-era Liberal abstentions) was in 1979, when Joe Clark’s PC government fell.
It’s possible that the Liberals will drop their “take it or leave it” approach and be able to woo one other party over to their side for future budgets, but it’ll be a bigger ask to get one of the opposition parties to turn today’s ‘nay’ into tomorrow’s ‘yea’ then it would have been to keep them on board from the beginning.
With a prime minister seemingly uninterested in watering down his wine and opposition parties unwilling to do more than the minimum required to avoid a Christmas election, this Parliament does not look built to last very long. Probably sooner rather than later, the bluffs will be called.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on how election spending compared between the Liberals and Conservatives. Plus, a new premier in Nunavut, a renewed premier in B.C. and some big drama within the Quebec Liberal Party.
Polls show trouble for Pierre Poilievre and a shrug for the NDP’s leadership contestants. Plus, Doug Ford keeps his lead.
Book Review: Times of Transformation: The 1921 Canadian General Election.
#EveryElectionProject: The first partisan election in Yukon’s history.
NEWS AND ANALYSIS
Liberals kept pace with Conservative ad-spending
Outspent by their rivals on television advertising, the Liberals nevertheless kept pace with the Conservatives in overall ad spending in the last campaign, putting more into online and radio ads than did their opponents.