game name generator Article content OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has a plan to get the “carbon tax election” he has been calling for sooner rather than later. The Conservatives are going to reconvene the public accounts committee on Jan. 7 and use it to ship a motion of non-confidence to the House of Commons when the holiday break ends on Jan. 27. The party believes MPs will be able to vote on the motion by the end of January. If the NDP joins the other parties and votes in favour of it, the motion would bring down the government and spark a federal election. The move means the Conservatives won’t have to wait for one of its “opposition days” in the House of Commons, which are controlled by the government, before it can test the House’s confidence in the Liberal government. The motion is also designed to capitalize on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s recent statement that his party is now prepared to bring down the government in the new year. In the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s dramatic resignation as finance minister , Singh wrote a letter saying the “Liberals don’t deserve another chance” and that he would vote non-confidence in the next sitting. Singh’s pledge means that all the opposition parties have promised to bring down the government at some point in the new sitting. A request for comment to the NDP was not returned by press time. If the motion gets to the House of Commons it will be the first test of confidence for the government since Freeland’s resignation on Dec. 16 triggered new uncertainty about the future of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Some Liberal MPs called for Trudeau to resign and others lauded Freeland for her stand against the prime minister. At least one MP openly encouraged the former finance minister to run for leader of the Liberals. On Friday, Trudeau’s former top adviser and close friend Gerald Butts wrote in an email newsletter that Freeland’s departure could be a political death blow for the prime minister. Butts said Trudeau was “unlikely” to lead the party into the next campaign before Freeland’s resignation and is “now much less likely to do so.” After shuffling his cabinet last week and spending Christmas Day in Ottawa, Trudeau’s itinerary now says he is in British Columbia with no public events on his schedule. The motion the Conservatives plan to put before the committee will simply state that “the Committee report to the House the following recommendation: That the House has no confidence in the Prime Minister and the Government.” One public accounts committee member, Liberal MP Francis Drouin, said he objected to the Conservatives using the committee as a jumping-off point for a non-confidence motion. The 10-member committee includes five Liberal MPs. “Chair, thought we were supposed to do public accounts on the 7th?” Drouin said in a social media post directed at committee chair, Conservative MP John Williamson. Conservative strategist Michael Hettrick likewise objected to the multipartisan committee being hijacked for partisan ends. “I’m begging the Conservatives to stop politicizing Public Accounts,” said Hettrick on social media platform X . “This is a vital committee to hold the public service to account, and treating it like any other committee is how you end up with deep rot and ignored Auditor General reports.” The Conservatives’ parliamentary gambit is sure to set off debate among constitutional academics about whether the government can be brought down by a committee report censuring it. In 2005, the governing Liberals endured a similar manoeuvre from opposition parties when the House of Commons instructed a committee to recommend that the government resign. The government at the time said the motion was a mere procedural motion and not a confidence vote. This time could be different: Constitutional lawyer Lyle Skinner wrote on social media that if the Conservatives can get the committee to report back to the House of Commons it should be considered a confidence vote. “If the public accounts committee does report back to the House a report expressing non confidence, and the House adopts it, even per the 2005 precedent, it is a non confidence motion,” wrote Skinner. “A lot of ifs but it is harder to argue it is merely procedural.” Mitch Heimpel, a former Conservative strategist and now policy director of the public affairs firm Enterprise Canada, said the Conservatives are putting pressure on the Liberal government and the NDP with the move. “From a tactics perspective, it puts eyes on Parliament over the break, and it puts the Liberal backbenchers on the committee (some of whom probably want Trudeau to leave) in the untenable position of potentially having to filibuster to protect him. Which will make the government look desperate and terrible, even if they manage to stall the report,” said Heimpel. It also complicates Trudeau’s options for the new year. Whether the prime minister intends to resign or simply reset the agenda in his party’s favour, it has been widely speculated he would prorogue Parliament to do so. Now, it would look like Trudeau was putting Parliament on hold to avoid a confidence vote that could bring down his government. “It puts a question of confidence in front of Parliament. Which the Governor General would, at least theoretically, have to consider in the event of a prorogation request,” said Heimpel. National Post, with files from the Canadian Press Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here . Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here .

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Can ordinary citizens solve our toughest problems?JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Greg McGarity had reason to be concerned. The Gator Bowl president kept a watchful eye on College Football Playoff scenarios all season and understood the fallout might affect his postseason matchup in Jacksonville. What if the Southeastern Conference got five teams into the expanded CFP? What if the Atlantic Coast Conference landed three spots? It was a math problem that was impossible to truly answer, even into late November. Four first-round playoff games, which will end with four good teams going home without a bowl game, had the potential to shake up the system. The good news for McGarity and other bowl organizers: Adding quality teams to power leagues — Oregon to the Big Ten, Texas to the SEC and SMU to the ACC — managed to ease much of the handwringing. McGarity and the Gator Bowl ended up with their highest-ranked team, No. 16 Ole Miss, in nearly two decades. People are also reading... "It really didn't lessen our pool much at all," McGarity said. "The SEC bowl pool strengthened with the addition of Texas and Oklahoma. You knew they were going to push traditional SEC teams up or down. Texas ended up pushing just about everyone down." The long waiting game was the latest twist for non-CFP bowls that have become adept at dealing with change. Efforts to match the top teams came and went in the 1990s and first decade of this century before the CFP became the first actual tournament in major college football. It was a four-team invitational — until this year, when the 12-team expanded format meant that four quality teams would not be in the mix for bowl games after they lose next week in the first round. "There's been a lot of things that we've kind of had to roll with," said Scott Ramsey, president of the Music City Bowl in Nashville, Tennessee. "I don't think the extra games changed our selection model to much degree. We used to look at the New York's Six before this, and that was 12 teams out of the bowl mix. The 12-team playoff is pretty much the same." Ramsey ended up with No. 23 Missouri against Iowa in his Dec. 30 bowl. A lot of so-called lesser bowl games do have high-profile teams — the ReliaQuest Bowl has No. 11 Alabama vs. Michigan (a rematch of last year's CFP semifinal), Texas A&M and USC will play in the Las Vegas Bowl while No. 14 South Carolina and No. 15 Miami, two CFP bubble teams, ended up in separate bowls in Orlando. "The stress of it is just the fact that the CFP takes that opening weekend," Las Vegas Bowl executive director John Saccenti said. "It kind of condenses the calendar a little bit." Bowl season opens Saturday with the Cricket Celebration Bowl. The first round of the CFP runs Dec. 20-21. It remains to be seen whether non-CFP bowls will see an impact from the new dynamic. They will know more by 2026, with a planned bowl reset looming. It could include CFP expansion from 12 to 14 teams and significant tweaks to the bowl system. More on-campus matchups? More diversity among cities selected to host semifinal and championship games? And would there be a trickle-down effect for everyone else? Demand for non-playoff bowls remains high, according to ESPN, despite increased focus on the expanded CFP and more players choosing to skip season finales to either enter the NCAA transfer portal or begin preparations for the NFL draft. "There's a natural appetite around the holidays for football and bowl games," Kurt Dargis, ESPN's senior director of programming and acquisitions, said at Sports Business Journal's Intercollegiate Athletics Forum last week in Las Vegas. "People still want to watch bowl games, regardless of what's going on with the playoff. ... It's obviously an unknown now with the expanded playoff, but we really feel like it's going to continue." The current bowl format runs through 2025. What lies ahead is anyone's guess. Could sponsors start paying athletes to play in bowl games? Could schools include hefty name, image and likeness incentives for players participating in bowls? Would conferences be willing to dump bowl tie-ins to provide a wider range of potential matchups? Are bowls ready to lean into more edginess like Pop-Tarts has done with its edible mascot? The path forward will be determined primarily by revenue, title sponsors, TV demand and ticket sales. "The one thing I have learned is we're going to serve our partners," Saccenti said. "We're going to be a part of the system that's there, and we're going to try to remain flexible and make sure that we're adjusting to what's going on in the world of postseason college football." Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox!