Today's News: Trudeau decides not to decide

After a day of breathless anticipation, Trudeau is still Prime Minister tonight. But tune in tomorrow....

Here's Scrimshaw's liveblog of what happened through this afternoon and caucus meeting: Liberals In Crisis LiveBlog: Freeland Resigns On The Ongoing Crisis 

TLDR: at 5 pm it looked like Trudeau wouldn't survive the meeting, but by 6:45 pm he is still PM. Scrimshaw writes "Trudeau isn’t resigning tonight, but it also looks like caucus hasn’t actually backed the PM." 

On Twitter and Bluesky, there is lots of mixed opinions.  

Here's one way to look at it:

The only chaos is in the frenzie spewing from MSM. Two Ministers left - one left to be with family (but is staying with the Liberal party) & the other was pulled off the file for incompetence. This is called attrition, not chaos. Get. A. Life. PMJT’s not going anywhere. Cope.🇨🇦 pic.twitter.com/lC41UiGse7

— BKBelton (@bk_belton) December 17, 2024

If JT does resign, I’d like to see what Poilievre even talks about. His whole platform is about hating Trudeau. Trudeau made me proud of our country again, after feeling shame and disgust with Harper for 10y. Poilievre, like Harper, is a small minded coward. #IStandWithTrudeau

— ElleWitch61 🇨🇦🐈‍⬛ (@ElleWitch61) December 16, 2024

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says following a meeting with all of Canada's premiers today, the provincial and territorial leaders will remain united as ``Team Canada'' in the face of a tariff threat from the United States, despite the ``chaos'' in Ottawa.https://t.co/88rC3iQdoZ

— AM800 CKLW (@AM800CKLW) December 17, 2024

Here's another:

And while everyone is talking about the Liberals and the Conservatives, Dale Smith saves some ire for the NDP:

Dale Smith / Routine Proceedings

Roundup: Being precious about participating in the gong show

...this has been an ongoing problem in the past two parliaments, since the Liberals lost their majority in 2019. That was when the Conservatives began a campaign of procedural warfare that the Bloc and NDP gleefully participated in because they would do anything to embarrass the government—right up until the end of the sitting, every December and June, and suddenly realize they had bills they wanted to pass, so they started to cooperate. The Supply-and-Confidence agreement mellowed this out a little, but only slightly, as committees continued to get worse, and the NDP were hit-and-miss on whether they wanted to make things work or not.

I am somewhat ruefully reminded of the litany of books and articles that used to constantly come out to praise minority parliaments, and how great they were because they would force parties to work together to get things done for Canadians. That hasn’t been the case for a long time now, and given that the NDP proved themselves to be bad faith actors in how they ended the supply-and-confidence agreement, it’s going to be a long time before they are awarded any trust again, at least not until they have a new leader who can earn it back. But if they do want to make the remainder of this parliament work, they have a lot to answer for, and it would be great if more people could call them on their bullshit.

Justin Ling thinks we are seeing a world-wide decline in "liberalism"

Justin Ling / Bug-eyed and shameless

Goodbye to the Liberal Order

Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer, Joe Biden are bungling towards Bethlehem

...When the [G7] leaders met last year, they were building a consensus on achieving a ceasefire in Gaza, strengthening Ukraine’s defence against Russia, fighting climate change, implementing a global minimum corporate tax, and reducing migration flows. All of those agenda items are now, functionally, dead.

The new agenda? Whatever Trump wants it to be.

The promise of this liberal block, which existed both as a bulwark against Trump and as an ideological rejection of right-wing populism, always relied on it being the safe harbor for institutionalists. Put more simply: This brand of liberalism, practised by Trudeau and Macron, worked because it was a default. A functional shield against a rising intolerant, illiberal kind of hard-right politics.

In existing solely in opposition to something, however, this liberalism stopped being an end onto itself.

What defines liberalism today? Trudeau’s undoing comes because he was trying to mail $250 cheques to his voters, a move his erstwhile finance minister, rightly, rejected as cynical and irresponsible. Macron is trying to slay his obscene budgetary imbalance by taxes on the rich and pension cuts, something that rarely goes over well in France. As his government imploded, Scholz earned faint praise from the far-right AfD, who congratulated him for refusing to provide more equipment to Ukraine.

Is this modern liberalism? Vote-buying schemes, pension cuts, and a half-hearted struggle against modern imperialism? Is this what we are asking voters to put faith in, as the barbarians rattle the gates?

Conservatives, like those in Germany and Canada, are becoming a natural alternative to the progressive-tilting liberals, but they are fundamentally the same. They have no real plan for how to handle Trump’s economic nationalism, whilst rebooting productivity, whilst handling a chaotic and uncertain world, whilst combatting an extraordinary rise in distrust and anger. If they have a plan to succeed on those fronts, we haven’t seen it. These people are just liberals without a plan to pay for anything....

At least Canadians now have this to celebrate:

In a Canada that’s divided in many ways, something that I suspect is as close to universally supported as you can get. And it’s about damn time. #TerryFox #Hero

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— Brent Toderian (@brenttoderian.bsky.social) December 16, 2024 at 9:22 PM