P.E.I. MPs express sympathy for Freeland amid calls for prime minister to step down

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mishandled the circumstances leading to Chrystia Freeland's resignation as finance minister Monday and should step down for the good of the country, say two Liberal MPs on P.E.I.

Freeland told a stunned nation on Monday that Trudeau had planned to replace her as finance minister, but not before she was expected to deliver the fall economic statement in the House of Commons that would reveal the government overshot its spending projections by more than $20 billion.

Malpeque MP Heath MacDonald, who once served as a finance minister in the P.E.I. government, said Freeland was put in a difficult position.

"I can't imagine being asked or told a couple of days prior to being put on a national stage to address the fall economic statement, that the PM basically has lost confidence in you but expected you to carry on," he said in an email response to CBC.

Charlottetown MP Sean Casey went so far as to say there was a long-running campaign to undermine Freeland, who was also the deputy prime minister.

The people conducting this campaign are either loyal to Justin Trudeau or to Mark Carney, a special adviser to the prime minister and a former Bank of Canada governor, but, "don't have the courage to say their names," Casey said during an interview Tuesday on Island Morning.

"It has not been productive, it has not been fair," he said. "It's undoubtedly part of the reason why she has taken the decision that she has."

Freeland posted her resignation letter online Monday morning, just hours before she was set to deliver the economic statement. By the evening, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc had been sworn in as the new finance minister.

While Casey said he believes Trudeau is not, and has never been part of that campaign, Casey brought his concerns to the prime minister at a caucus meeting Monday night. 

"I said to the prime minister that, 'You have the power and the influence to stop that. Please call the dogs off.'" 

Casey was among the first MPs to call for Trudeau's resignation in October of this year. Since then, several other Liberals have publicly called for the prime minister to resign. 

"The caucus is united in their view that Pierre Poilievre would be very, very bad for Canada," Casey said. "For many people, the best way to ensure that doesn't happen is for Justin Trudeau to move along." 

Despite these calls for his resignation, "the prime minister has made it very clear that he's staying," Casey said. 

"He has the right to make that decision," he said. "As I'm fond of saying, he has the right to be wrong."