The Conservatives on Wednesday renewed calls for the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Greg Fergus, deeming him biased after he, the day before, expelled their leader, Pierre Poilievre, from the room because of his repeated refusals to simply withdraw his comments calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “crazy”.
“He must resign. It’s a shame,” said Alberta MP Michael Cooper in the morning, rushing into the room where the Conservative caucus meeting was going to be held.
Mr. Fergus did not give in to new pressure from the official opposition, if we trust his spokesperson, Mathieu Gravel, who declared in the afternoon that “the president […] has no intention of resigning.”
Conservative MP Michael Barrett criticized President Fergus for having a double standard approach, not having sanctioned the Prime Minister for “personal insults” against his leader.
John Brassard, a former Conservative House leader, found it particularly “outrageous” that Mr. Trudeau “implies and infers that we are in one way or another white nationalists or racists” without him saying anything. there are consequences.
“Can you imagine the leader or prime minister of a G7 country referring to the opposition party like this? “, he asked journalists. According to him, this “unparliamentary language” from Mr. Trudeau makes him “more at fault” than the Conservative leader.
Mr. Trudeau did not answer journalists’ questions as he also went to his own caucus meeting on Wednesday morning.
The Conservatives do not know if their party will table a motion of no confidence in President Fergus in the hope that the House of Commons will show them the door.
During a previous attempt last December, Mr. Fergus held on after obtaining a slim majority of support thanks to the Liberals and the New Democrats.
Although the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, had fun Tuesday by affirming that the expulsion of the conservative leader was a decision of “common sense”, the political party maintains having lost confidence in the president.
A pending support
Greg Fergus was criticized for not only participating in a partisan event after being elected president, but also for having taken part in his presidential outfit and in his office in a video to congratulate a colleague, a video which was presented at a convention of the Ontario Liberal Party.
“We have already made our bed for a long time,” summarized the Bloc leader in the House, Alain Therrien, questioned near a parliament building. He added that Tuesday’s events “confirm” that Mr Fergus is struggling to keep the peace in the Commons.
At the New Democratic Party, where support is decisive, the deputy leader, Alexandre Boulerice, declared that he had personal confidence in Mr. Fergus and that he simply “applied the rules”, but that the meeting of his caucus which was at coming will clarify the group’s position.
“Mr Poilievre knew exactly what he was doing. It’s a kind of set-up where he wanted to look like a victim, then a martyr. Besides, a fundraising email went out immediately afterwards,” he insisted.
In the Liberal ranks, the interim House leader, Steven MacKinnon, explained to journalists his similar reading of the situation. He added a layer by drawing a parallel between Mr. Poilievre’s conservatives and the “playbook of the extreme populist right all over the world”. He, in the same breath, in all likelihood alluded to the actions of former American President Donald Trump.
“What the conservatives do is they enter democratic institutions, break the rules and, when we call them to order, they come out and say they are victims. […] You will have noticed that there is another leader who did this yesterday, leaving a court in New York, saying that he was muzzled,” launched Mr. MacKinnon in the press scrum.
“Fuel on the fire”
Asked about the fact that Mr. Trudeau affirmed in English, during question period on Tuesday, that Mr. Poilievre “showed us exactly what shameful and shameless leadership looks like,” Mr. MacKinnon did not took the opportunity to assign any blame to the Prime Minister.
Asked whether the Liberals are adding fuel to the fire, Justin Trudeau’s lieutenant for Quebec, Pablo Rodriguez, instead defended his leader by asserting that he was only stating facts.
Asked whether the Liberals recognize that they are also adding fuel to the fire, Justin Trudeau’s lieutenant for Quebec, Pablo Rodriguez, instead defended his leader, believing that he is only stating facts.
“Mr. Poilievre went to meet white supremacists, people from the far right. We just ask that he denounce them, he can’t do it. That’s a problem in itself,” he said.
On Tuesday, after describing Mr. Poilievre’s leadership as “shameful and shameless,” Mr. Trudeau took the opportunity to allude to the latter’s recent meeting with demonstrators who allegedly have links with the far right.
The Liberals have been emphasizing in broad strokes for several days that the symbol of the anti-government and far-right group Diagolon is drawn on the door of a trailer that Mr. Poilievre visited while going to encourage demonstrators against carbon pricing who set up a camp along a highway on the border of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
In a video of the visit to this demonstration which circulated on the web, we can notice the presence of Canadian flags and “F*** Trudeau” and hear the Conservative leader affirm, regarding the Prime Minister, that “everything what he says is bullshit, from start to finish.”
Mr. Rodriguez, in answering another question in a press scrum on Wednesday, used the expression “to throw fuel on the fire” to turn it against Mr. Poilievre.
“ [M. Fergus] asked Mr. Poilievre five times to withdraw his comments, unworthy of a parliamentarian and which add fuel to the fire,” said the man who is also federal Minister of Transport.
Greg Fergus was elected under the Liberal banner in the riding of Hull-Aylmer, but in his role as Speaker of the House, he must be an impartial arbiter of the work in the Commons.