Jean-Yves Duclos, the newly appointed Procurement Minister and Lieutenant Premier of Quebec, has warned the NDP that withdrawing support from the ruling Liberal Party would jeopardize a dental care program that the NDP helped put in place.
“Four million adults between the ages of 18 and 64 will only be covered in the first six months of 2025,” Duclos said in an interview with CTV’s Question Period host Bassey Kapelos on Sunday. “The NDP needs to decide whether those four million Canadians are eligible for dental care. This is a serious question and the NDP needs to answer it.”
When asked by Kapelos whether his comments should be taken as a threat that the Liberals would scrap the dental expansion plan if the New Democrats passed a motion of no confidence in the government and an early election was called, Duclos replied, “It’s not a threat.”
Two and a half years later, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh announced earlier this month that he was terminating a pact with the Liberals that was struck in 2022 to prop up the government in exchange for progress on certain policy priorities.
One of those basic policies is dental care, which began receiving coverage last spring but is not yet fully extended to all eligible Canadians.
Meanwhile, the balance of power in the House of Commons has shifted with the Liberal-New Democrat agreement being scrapped and the Conservative Party looming a motion of no confidence.
For a motion of no confidence to pass, only 334 of the 336 sitting MPs can vote for the resolution this week – and a majority of them would need to vote to express no confidence in Trudeau.
Currently, the Liberals hold 153 seats and the Conservatives 119. After Monday’s by-elections, Bloc councillors have 33 seats and New Democrats have 25. The Greens hold two seats and there are four independents.
That means the Liberals need to get the votes of either the Bloc or New Democrats this week to defeat the Conservative motion.
Meanwhile, the Bloc Québécois is using its new voting power to pressure the Liberals to vote in favor of expanding and increasing pensions for seniors. Duclos has refused to accede to the Bloc Québécois’ demands.
“We’re going to have discussions with the Bloc Party,” he told Kapelos when asked if the Liberals would give in to the Bloc’s demands. “We also need to have discussions with the NDP, because they’ve worked with us on implementing dental care.”
Pressed again, Duclos would not say whether his party supported expanding the old-age pension, which he called a “complex budget process” and said the decision was not his alone.
“I can’t answer that right now,” Duclos said. “We’ve seen the Ottawa bubble burst in the last few days. Clearly we need to get this under control in order to serve Canadians.”
“I don’t want to distract anyone with political games in the House of Commons,” he insisted, “and it certainly won’t distract us from our purpose of serving Canadians every day.”
And during an interview on CTV’s Question Segment, Kapelos asked NDP MP Peter Julien if he intended to continue supporting the government to ensure dental care is fully rolled out, to which Julien responded that the party would make the decision “vote by vote.”
Since abandoning the deal with the Liberals, Singh has called the Trudeau government “weak” and “selfish”, and said this week that the Liberals “don’t deserve another chance”.
Despite this, both Julien and Singh indicated this week that the NDP would oppose the Conservatives’ no-confidence motion and support the Liberals.