Leah Golob and Zi-Ann Lum
Posted: Mar 23rd, 2011
“On Friday or Saturday, the Prime Minister will take a walk across the street from his residence to the Governor General’s office to dissolve Parliament,” Justin Trudeau, MP for the Montreal riding of Papineau, Quebec, said this afternoon.
“The government will fall,” Trudeau said. They presented a budget “nobody would find acceptable.”
Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff said Liberals were prepared to defeat Stephen Harper’s minority government with a motion of non-confidence, CBC reported earlier in the day. NDP leader Jack Layton and Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe both offered their support for the motion.
“This government has lost the confidence of the House of Commons of Canada on its economic agenda, that’s what happened. We will fight them on the economy and we will win on the economy,” Ignatieff told CBC.
Stephen Harper, in defence of the motion, said he believed that opposition parties were imposing an unnecessary election. “It is not too late for them to step back, to think about the fragile global recovery,” Harper said, according to the Globe and Mail . “Our economy is not a political game.”
Ignatieff commented that Harper’s concerns about an election during a destabilized economy are “absolutely hilarious.”
“This is a democracy, for heaven’s sakes. This man showed flagrant disregard for democracy. It’s time to bring democracy back to Canada,” Ignatieff said.
At this point, Harper is refusing to make amendments to his contested budget. Before the Liberals can move their non-confidence motion this Friday, it’s plausible that the government could fall on a budget vote instead.
