The minority government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau survived a high-risk vote in parliament on Wednesday, avoiding a snap legislative election, a year to the day after being returned to power.
A small left-wing political party and the Greens refused on Wednesday to vote in favor of an opposition motion to relaunch an investigation into an ethics scandal directly targeting the prime minister.
Read also: Canada: Trudeau's minority government survives a vote of confidence
The Conservative Party's motion called for the creation of a parliamentary commission to shed light on a case that shook Justin Trudeau's government this summer.
The Prime Minister made the vote on this motion a matter of confidence in his government.
He threatened to call an early parliamentary election if the opposition approved it, believing that this commission risked paralyzing the work of the executive in the middle of the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
By 180 votes against and 146 for, the motion of the Conservatives, supported by the separatists of the Quebec bloc, was finally defeated.
"We are going to vote against an election, we are not giving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau an excuse to call an election,"
said Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) before the vote.
The commission, proposed by the conservatives and in which the opposition would have been in the majority, was to investigate the
“United”
affair
, the
name in French of the charitable association We Charity at the heart of this scandal.
Now dissolved, this association had received at the beginning of the summer an important government contract while it had paid members of the family of Justin Trudeau, including his wife, his mother and his brother.
The government contract was finally terminated, but the affair also prompted the resignation of Finance Minister Bill Morneau, one of whose daughters was also an employee of the Unis association.
Justin Trudeau closed parliament for a month and a half in August, which resulted in the dissolution of opposition-dominated committees investigating the ethics scandal.
The Trudeau government had already survived a vote of confidence two weeks ago on the
“Speech from the Throne”
setting out its priorities for economic recovery, thanks to the support of the NDP.
A Léger poll this week credited the Liberals with 36% of voting intentions in the event of an election, against 29% for the Conservatives and 18% for the NDP, suggesting the formation of a new minority government led by the Liberals.