A deep dive into the CPC palace intrigue this past week...

All the background you can handle on the story that dominated Canadian politics and pushed the budget out of the headlines.

It’s been an intriguing week in Ottawa with lots of drama and a healthy dose of palace intrigue, and I’m about to give you all the background, behind the scenes info that I can muster.

It’s a long one, so grab a coffee and get comfortable as I give you the best information that I have.

But first...

Remember that today at 2pm ET, I’ll be hosting another Ask Me Anything livestream for paid subscribers.

You can join me live and ask a question about what happened this past week, ask about the budget, or ask me what certain politicians are really like. I’ll go live at 2pm and you will either get a notification via the Substack app or via email.

Just follow the instructions and join the conversation.

I’ll talk for a bit to give people time to join.

If you can’t join live, but are a paid subscriber, then you can watch it on replay later on at brianlilley.com or via the app. If you want to send questions for me to answer ahead of time, email them to me at brian@brianlilley.com.

What really happened this past week on Parliament Hill...

There is a lot we know about the floor crossing and the resignation and a lot we don’t know.

There are also competing storylines that have emerged, and it can be difficult to put together a coherent story.

Was there intense pressure put on Chris d’Entremont to stay in the Conservative caucus? Did Matt Jeneroux meet with Mark Carney and look to join the Liberals?

Those are just two of the questions where the answer depends on who you talk to.

Rumours of people looking to cross the floor have been raging for weeks. Some seemed plausible, others were ridiculous and not worth even checking.

Liberals have be courting Conservative MPs for months…

One thing is clear, the Liberals have been trying to poach a lot of Conservative MPs and doing everything they can to convince them to cross the floor.

“They’ve been making approaches and offers all over the place,” one senior Conservative told me in the middle of last week.

We’ve known that Carney and his team have been trying this since shortly after the April 28^th election. They finished that campaign with 169 seats, three shy of the majority Carney desperately wants.

He’s governing for the most part like he has a majority, and he clearly doesn’t want to engage in the horse trading that a minority Parliament requires, so poaching MPs can solve his problem.

It was shortly after noon on October 22 that things started to heat up for me on this file. A Liberal texted to ask if I was hearing anything about a floor crossing happening.

Don’t laugh, I talk to Liberals, I talk to people in all parties, remember, it was me that broke the news that the NDP was ending their coalition agreement before Trudeau’s PMO was informed.

I replied that I hadn’t heard anything at that point and then I got a text with names.

“Names I just got are Dominique Vien, Joel Godin, Chris d”Entremont and potentially Michael Chong. I don’t buy Chong,” the text said.

I didn’t buy Chong either but Liberals kept pushing that narrative. As someone who knows Michael a bit, I simply didn’t believe it didn’t even reach out to ask - he later called me to confirm the rumours were bogus.

Godin and Vien responded to the rumours saying they weren’t crossing the floor. Meanwhile, d’Entremont was on a Parliamentary junket in Geneva and didn’t respond at all.

When he returned, he spoke to his Conservative colleagues and joked about what a wild week it was with all the rumours flying around, but denied he was even thinking of crossing the floor to join the Liberals.

Just over a week later, he would do just that.

The budget day surprise that changed it all…

On budget day, there are rarely any other stories in political Ottawa, all eyes are on the government’s spending plan, and most political journalists spend their day in “the lock-up” where there used to be no communication with the outside world and now there is little. As most of the Parliamentary Press Gallery was focused on dissecting the more than 400-page budget, Politico’s Ottawa Bureau dropped a bombshell.

They posted a story from Mickey Djuric and Zi-Ann Lum stating that Conservative MP Chris d’Entremont was considering joining the Liberals.

The story sent shockwaves through Ottawa, not only with the media caught off guard as they pondered the budget, or with the Conservatives who were about to lose a member, but I am told with d’Entremont himself who apparently didn’t realize his words would be published before he made an announcement.

Just like there is no half-pregnant, you are or you aren’t, there is no publicly thinking about crossing the floor. If you muse about it, you are gone.

Shortly thereafter, d’Entremont announced that he was leaving the Conservatives and would join the Liberal caucus.

The pressure that wasn’t there…

News outlets like CBC have reported that there was intense pressure placed on d’Entremont to stay in the Conservative caucus. That’s the opposite of what I’ve been told and what the Toronto Star is reporting on this issue.

My understanding is that Warkentin and Scheer asked if there was anything they could do to change his mind and d’Entremont said no, and that was that, though the Star does report yelling.

Scheer and Warkentin did not attempt to persuade d’Entremont to stay, nor threaten or pressure him, the MP told the Star Friday. “I was just yelled at for making my decision, and there was no negotiation over that decision,” d’Entremont said.

Yelling is pretty normal in politics, on all sides, so that’s not shocking.

That d’Entremont was able to have a private meeting with Mark Carney and discuss the budget with him and negotiate his move over – though he swears with no reward – is the shocking part.

What was d’Entremont’s motivation...

This is where things get dicey, figuring out someone’s motivation from the outside can be very difficult.

Was d’Entremont unhappy with the direction of the Conservatives under Poilievre?

Was he worried about winning the next election amid a sea of red?

Or was he still pissed off at his party not backing him for speaker?

All of these things can be true at the same time.

Much has been made of the fact that d’Entremont has described himself as a “Red Tory” which many people take for being a more “progressive” kind of Conservative. That doesn’t quite fit the true description and Ben Woodfinden has done great work at explaining what a Red Tory truly is in a series of posts on X.

Let me just point this out, d’Entremont was comfortable running for the Conservatives in 2019, when he was first elected, under Andrew Scheer. For those that don’t know, Scheer and Poilievre are attached at the hip, Scheer is as much of a fiscal hawk as Poilievre, and he’s also a so-con.

Are we really to believe that he’s not comfortable under Poilievre but was under Scheer? If that is true, it comes down to personality and not policy.

It was clear that d’Entremont was worried about winning the next election. He said as much to his former caucus colleague Rick Perkins just days before he crossed the floor.

As for wanting to be speaker, d’Entremont had previously served as deputy speaker in the House of Commons and saw the perks that came with the big job. An apartment in the House of Commons, hosting parties and receptions for all kinds of dignitaries, a full staff, a car and driver, a pay bump and a beautiful home in the Gatineau Hills known as The Farm.

When the election for speaker came after the election, I assumed the Conservatives would back their guy and so did d’Entremont. They didn’t back him, they didn’t want to lose a vote in case there was a confidence vote – the speaker doesn’t vote except in a tie – and he lost the secret ballot election.

My guess on d’Entremont is that his loss as speaker soured his relationship with party leadership, he was worried about re-election whenever the next campaign comes, and the Liberals are making sweet, sweet overtures to him while his own party was not.

Matt Jeneroux is another story completely...

As names were floating all around Parliament Hill, Matt Jeneroux’s name wasn’t on anyone’s list of possible floor crossers until this past week. He had won his riding of Edmonton Riverbend handily in April with more than 50% of the vote and he had spent a long time in federal and provincial conservative politics.

Jeneroux is someone who isn’t a hyper-partisan but has Conservative bona fides. He’s able to be a party guy and work with MPs from other parties which has earned him respect.

Suddenly on Tuesday, after d’Entremont’s floor crossing, speculation began about Jeneroux.

The Toronto Star is reporting that Jeneroux met with Carney on Monday to discuss the possibility of crossing the floor. They cite anonymous sources, but based on some of their reporting on who else was at the meeting – Braden Cayley and Tom Pittfield – we can guess that one of them was a source for the Star and their reporter Tonda McCharles.

PMO has neither confirmed nor denied the meeting happened, but Jeneroux has directly denied the meeting ever happened including to senior CPC leadership such as party whip Chris Warkentin and house leader Andrew Scheer.

Someone is lying here and I’m not saying for a second that it’s McCharles and the Star, Tonda is a pro and it’s clear that someone is assuring her a meeting took place.

But either Jeneroux is lying to his longtime friend and colleague Chris Warkentin, or anonymous Liberals are lying to McCharles. It’s difficult to know what’s true, but McCharles has a level of detail that makes me think she has something here.

What’s the real story with Jeneroux…

There’s no end of rumours swirling around Jeneroux and his decision to announce his resignation just over six months after the last election. His weird statement telling people not to contact his family in the second sentence didn’t help, that looked weird.

Here’s what I can confirm.

Jeneroux is married to Dr. Elizabeth Clement, a colorectal surgeon who recently took a position in Victoria. She had completed her education and training in Edmonton, had worked in Vancouver, tried to make it work with a position in Montreal which is closer to Ottawa, but that didn’t pan out.

When she took her job in Victoria, the couple bought a home for them and their three children and Jeneroux planned on stepping down in the months to come. Representing Edmonton in Ottawa and seeing your family when you can in Victoria is untenable and what I’m told is that Jeneroux was leaving no matter what.

Was he talking to the Liberals?

Maybe, maybe not. No one is offering proof and the Liberals definitely benefit from destabilizing the Conservatives by floating but not officially confirming that there was a meeting.

At the end of his appearance at the Canadian Club in Toronto on Friday, Carney went so far as to encourage those in attendance who didn’t have Liberal MPs to reach out and encourage them to join the government. The PM is clearly courting any MP he can and knows it helps keep his opponents off their game.

It’s quite Trumpian to be honest.

As I said to Bill Carroll on 580 CFRA on Friday morning while this story was still very fresh, we have the official word. If something isn’t true, it will come out in time, and that still stands for the stories involving both me.

About all those frustrated Conservatives…

CBC is reporting that there are 12 Conservative MPs frustrated with Pierre Poilievre and his leadership, while the Star is reporting 10-15 are frustrated. That’s probably accurate, and I’ve written about the frustrations of party faithful, including MPs, over the past several months.

Let’s put some context around this though.

The Conservatives have 143 MPs after the defection of d’Entremont, so roughly 10% of them are frustrated. In an organization that big, those are pretty good numbers, and if Liberals were being honest, you’d find the same in their ranks - remember some formed a climate change caucus recently frustrated at Carney’s changing stances.

The other thing I would say is that my in my experience, the frustration goes across the different factions of the Conservative Party. The main media narrative on this will be that it’s old Red Tories or Progressive Conservatives who are upset with Poilievre and if he were only kinder and gentler, if he were less conservative things would be better.

The reality is, the frustrations exist for a number of reasons but Pierre being too conservative is not the main issue here, it’s that they didn’t win in April. It all goes back to that and how different people interpret that loss and the leader’s response to the loss.

That’s not to dismiss the disgruntled MPs, it’s just to say like on many fronts, it is more complex than most in the media will tell you.

MPs have now left Ottawa, they’re on a break week to attend Remembrance Day ceremonies in their ridings and that should allow things to calm down. When Parliament resumes on November 17, we will see if the chaos continues or has been halted.

The craziness of the last week resulted in a rough ride for Poilievre at a time when he should have been in the spotlight attacking an almost universally panned budget.

These problems aren’t the end of the world for the Conservatives, but they aren’t nothing. How Poilievre and his team respond to this will determine his fate at the leadership review and the months that follow that.