There's a way to force leaders out if they overstay. Canada's political parties just need to use it.

Prime ministers in Canada tend to overstay their welcome. That’s a problem. With an iron hold over their party, government, and caucus, there are few ways to ditch a leader who doesn’t realize it’s time to go. The same can be true of opposition leaders, but prime ministers also have the particular power of government – and the implied threat of losing it.

This conundrum is of particular interest now as the country waits and watches and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — way down in the polls and certain to lose the next federal election — decides his future and the Liberals seem unable to force him out.

Stretching back to the 1960s, with the invention of the contemporary model of a central Prime Minister’s Office with awesome and growing power and control over caucus and government affairs, heads of government developed formalized fiefdoms which allow them to hang on, sometimes longer than they should. Since 1968, Canada has had seven prime ministers, three of whom combined — Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Jean Chretien, and Stephen Harper — make up roughly 35 years of governance. 

Canada also had long-serving prime ministers prior to the emergence of centralized governing offices. Mackenzie King governed for a total of 21 years, off and on, between 1921 and 1948. And we’ve now come to basically expect a prime minister to hang around until they’ve worn the welcome mat to threads. 

There is a better way. But it requires the parties to play ball and give themselves the power to do the right thing.

Canada doesn’t need term limits, which would fit awkwardly at best with our parliamentary system if they were at all constitutional. But we do need a culture of turning over prime ministers more frequently — though perhaps not as frequently as the hop-on-hop-off bus that is the British or Australian system. There are several ways to ditch leaders, as Canadian politics expert Lori Turnbull argues, both through internal and external pressure. But I think one in particular stands out as most useful. 

There is a provision in the Reform Act that allows members of Parliament to call for a leadership review. At the outset of each parliament, government caucuses should vote to adopt the provision and exercise it in the case of a leader who won’t resign, leaving the party with no other option. 

The Conservatives gave former leader Erin O’Toole the Reform Act treatment in 2022, making him the first party head ever removed under the provisions of the law. They had the power to do so because they adopted the provision in 2021 when the new Parliament assembled.  But the Liberals did not. They may be wishing they had at this point.

Members of Parliament should give themselves the power to review and remove their leaders as a rule. There’s no reason not to, other than fear of what the leader’s office – particularly the PMO – will do to them if they stand up for themselves.

When prime ministers stay on too long, things tend to go bad for the country and policy predictability. The country ends up with unpopular leaders and policy agendas the next government is keen to reverse. Pierre Poilievre is primed to dismantle some of Trudeau’s legacy, particularly the carbon tax. This is known as a policy lurch, a process by which a country lurches from one set of policies to the next and back from one government to the next. It also drives the public nuts. They become utterly sick of the person in charge and project onto them every frustration they can muster, which diminishes trust.

Overstaying one’s welcome as prime minister is also bad for one’s party. Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien, and Brian Mulroney resigned before they could be defeated, but only when the writing was on the wall. In all cases, their parties were left in a less-than-ideal situation and soon lost government. By the end of his time, Stephen Harper, who had managed nearly ten years as a Conservative prime minister – about a year longer than Mulroney — was headed to electoral defeat over the embarrassments of the barbaric cultural practices snitch line idea and anti-hijab tirades — the stuff of utter and pathetic desperation. He would have been better off calling it a day before attempting to win a fourth election in a row.

If we normalize the practice of leaders leaving before their time is fully up, there will be no need for the Reform Act provisions. But adopting them and maintaining a credible threat that they will be used would incentivize prime ministers to go on time. It would also diminish the power of the central office and empower MPs to keep up with the spring cleaning, rather than wait for the public to force them to tear down the house.