Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was last night after press time to announce he would step down as Liberal Party leader, but stay on until a replacement is chosen, CBC News reported yesterday, citing sources.
Trudeau was due to hold a news conference at 3:45pm GMT, it said.
After a Globe and Mail report on Trudeau’s possible resignation on Sunday, a source told Reuters Trudeau was expected to announce as early as yesterday that he would quit as leader of Canada’s ruling party after nine years in office.
Photo: Reuters
The source requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Trudeau’s departure would leave the party without a permanent head as polls show the Liberals would badly lose to the official opposition Conservatives in an election that must be held by late October.
Sources told the Globe and Mail they expected Trudeau to resign before an emergency meeting of Liberal legislators tomorrow.
An increasing number of Liberal lawmakers, alarmed by a series of gloomy polls, have publicly urged Trudeau to quit.
The prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours. The prime minister’s regularly published schedule for yesterday said he would participate virtually in a Cabinet committee meeting on Canada-US relations.
Trudeau took over as Liberal leader in 2013 when the party was in deep trouble and had been reduced to third place in the House of Commons for the first time.
If he resigns, it would likely spur fresh calls for a quick election to put in place a stable government able to deal with the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump for the next four years.
The prime minister has discussed with Canadian Minister of Finance Dominic LeBlanc, who is also minister of intergovernmental affairs, whether he would be willing to step in as interim leader and prime minister, one source told the newspaper, adding that this would be unworkable if LeBlanc plans to run for the leadership.
Trudeau, 53, had fended off Liberal legislators worried about the polls and the loss of safe seats in two special elections.
However, calls for him to step aside have grown since last month, when Trudeau tried to demote then-Canadian minister of finance Chrystia Freeland, one of his closest Cabinet allies, after she pushed back against his proposals for more spending.
Freeland quit instead and penned a letter accusing Trudeau of “political gimmicks” rather than focusing on what was best for the country.
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