Why Liberal MP Sean Casey is speaking out against Trudeau now

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OTTAWA — Liberal MP Sean Casey said he was still hopeful until last week that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would decide to step down and trigger a leadership race, but that has not happened, and Casey felt he owed it to his constituents to speak out.

Casey, the MP for Charlottetown, became the first Liberal MP on Tuesday to publicly say he wants Trudeau’s resignation since news broke this past weekend that some members of the party’s caucus have been organizing behind the scenes to collect signatures and force the leader to step down.

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Speaking to the National Post, Casey said he has not been part of those efforts and that he is not comfortable being an anonymous source. He said that his decision to go public has been “brewing for some time” and he decided now was the right time to speak out.

“Until last week, I guess I was living under the delusion or hope that (Trudeau) would make the right call,” he said.

Casey said many of his constituents tell him that while they are “absolutely scared to death that Pierre Poilievre is going to win” and fear Conservative cuts to programs in Atlantic Canada, they find it hard to vote Liberal because they have tuned Trudeau out.

“People say to me, ‘Sean, I want to vote for you, but I can’t.’ And I hear that over and over again and with more strength and more regularity in recent weeks,” he said.

Casey said that it became more evident over the past week that many of his colleagues were hearing the same thing as him, and that the issue is “becoming more urgent” in their respective ridings as the threat of an early election is getting closer and closer.

“I think that there are many like me that quietly hoped that it was going to get better, or that we were going to see some change,” he said.

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“But here we are with the collapse of the supply-and-confidence agreement, with the loss of two byelections that we should have won and with weekly non-confidence votes, the people that want to vote Liberal are feeling the pressure,” he said.

Casey said he voiced his concerns directly to Trudeau days after the party’s devastating loss in a Toronto byelection and has spoken up in the privacy of caucus meetings.

The prime minister has until now given no indication that he is ready to resign.

“I guess there was wishful thinking that he’d come to his senses,” said Casey.

Several Liberal MPs have expressed frustration about Trudeau privately, with one saying they had added their signature to formally ask him to resign, another saying that they could consider adding theirs and another one saying it is not the right way of doing things.

Speaking in Winnipeg, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says Trudeau continues to have his support and suggested the same is true for most other Liberal MPs.

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“I would argue that he has the support of the vast majority of the caucus,” he said.

Casey said that his calls for Trudeau to step down were not part of a coordinated effort and that he has acted entirely on his own because he felt he owed it to his constituents in Prince Edward Island to say something. But he is unsure what could happen next as part of the mutiny efforts.

“My sense of this campaign that’s being organized is that it’s not going to fizzle, but whether it works is completely another question,” he said.

Casey also said he is not vouching for any potential leadership contender and that he will be interested to see who comes forward. But he already knows what he is looking for.

“I think in this environment, we need someone who’s going to inspire because I do think that the affordability challenges and the many other challenges are very real and the rage that has been farmed has people not feeling very good about their options,” he said.

“I really do think that there’s … a real place for a positive message that will inspire people. So that would be the quality that I’m looking for.”

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Not everyone in the Liberal caucus agrees with that view.

Over the weekend, Liberal MP Chandra Arya wrote an email to his colleagues urging them to not precipitate the party into a leadership race with no clear successor waiting in the wings.

“I foresee a vicious battle for leadership which will fracture the fragile party structure with vastly different ideas and personalities — the results will be disastrous.”

— With files from Stephanie Taylor

National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com

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