(Montebello) Alberta Premier Danielle Smith wants nothing to do with the idea that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are negotiating with “the separatists” of the Bloc Québécois to stay in power during confidence votes.
“The federal government does not have the mandate to negotiate with Quebec separatists at the expense of Alberta, the West and the rest of the country,” she warned Monday on X.
Mme Smith added that an election should be called “immediately” if the Liberals go down that path.
His comments come as the Bloc has announced it is willing to trade off support in confidence votes now that Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats have torn up their deal with the Liberals.
Bloc parliamentary leader Alain Therrien explained that his party’s balance of power has increased considerably as the Liberals will “truly” become a minority government again and he sees “a window of opportunity” there.
In a press scrum in Montebello, in Outaouais, where the Bloc Québécois is holding its pre-sessional caucus until Tuesday, its leader, Yves-François Blanchet, called on Premier Smith not to “fall into this conservative culture of being very aggressive, very belligerent, almost insulting.”
“Do as we do. Create an Alberta bloc that will speak only for Alberta or a Prairie bloc that will speak only for the Prairies, and then you will have a negotiating lever in a Parliament that, in such a context, would certainly not have a majority,” he continued.
A few minutes earlier, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, published on X a montage where Mr. Blanchet hesitates between a t-shirt displaying the logo of the Liberal Party of Canada and another where we see that of his party.
In front of journalists, Mr. Blanchet affirmed that this “distress of the conservatives” highlights the importance that the Bloc will have in Parliament over the coming weeks.
“We try to appeal to it (the Bloc) while hating it a little. It’s a bit of a strange relationship,” he said in passing.
The Bloc Québécois has many demands that they intend to put on the table in their eventual negotiations, but two seem to them to be “easier, more feasible and clearer”: those concerning seniors’ pensions and immigration powers.
They therefore want the government to grant royal recommendation to their bill C-319, which aims to increase the pension for seniors aged 65 to 74 to the same level as that paid to those aged 75 and over.
The Bloc also wants Quebec to obtain more powers in matters of immigration, particularly in the area of temporary foreign workers.