Will Prime Minister Trudeau resign?

Notwithstanding, the knives are sharp.

- 

On the day when the Fall Economic update was set to be delivered, Chrystia Freeland's resignation letter, polite though it was, detonated like a political bomb in Ottawa, sending Liberals scrambling in all directions. Beneath the calm prose lies a sharp, pointed truth: the Finance Minister took what she believed to be the only honourable exit, and in doing so, she may have invoked a constitutional coup de grâce.

Let me explain. Freeland created her de facto definition of the Notwithstanding Clause a political escape hatch rarely seen, let alone tested, in Canadian federal governance.

But instead of invoking it for legislation, she applied it to her own moral compass. Faced with a Prime Minister who "no longer credibly" offered her the confidence or authority to lead, Freeland effectively called his bluff. If Trudeau was going to pull the chair out, she chose to blow up the whole table instead.

But let's set the table for irony.

Many decades ago, there was an infamous political story called the "Night of the Long Knives". It was how then Premier Rene Levesque wrote of the events of November 1981.

"I have been stabbed in the back during the night by a bunch of carpetbaggers," The unfolding of what Lévesque dubbed "The Night of Long Knives" began in the spring of 1980 when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's lifelong ambition might be realized: to bring home the Canadian constitution.