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Trudeau Says He’ll Call Election If Conservative Motion For New COVID-19 Committee Passes

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives for a news conference in Ottawa on Oct. 20, 2020.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives for a news conference in Ottawa on Oct. 20, 2020.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he will call an election that “nobody wants” this week if the House of Commons passes a Conservative motion that he says will confirm it has lost confidence in his minority government.

“It will be up to parliamentarians and the Opposition to decide whether they want to make this minority Parliament work or whether they’ve lost confidence in this government’s ability to manage this pandemic and continue to govern this country during this crisis,” Trudeau told reporters at a press conference in Ottawa Tuesday.

The prime minister was responding to a high-stakes motion introduced earlier in the day by Tory Leader Erin O’Toole that calls for a new parliamentary committee to investigate alleged misuse of public money on COVID-19 relief programs, including the WE Charity controversy.

Watch: O’Toole says Tories don’t want to force election

Though the original text of the motion stated the group should be called an “anti-corruption committee,” the Tories scrubbed that language after Liberals announced they would treat the vote as a confidence matter.

The Liberals counter-offered to create a special committee to examine the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of spending his government has put forward since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Trudeau said. He called it an “extraordinary measure” in exceptional circumstances.

“We have rolled out unprecedented measures to support Canadians, to support small businesses, to support families, to support communities right across the country. And we feel that parliamentarians should, in this exceptional time, have an ability to look very carefully at all that spending and that’s why we’re proposing this special committee,” he said.

If the House instead votes to create the Tory-proposed, 15-member committee — on which the Liberals would hold six seats and lack the power to control the agenda — he’ll ask Gov. Gen. Julie Payette for the dissolution of...

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