Thank you for this info!!!
Because the Liberal Party has a minority in the House of Commons, they must rely on the support of at least one other party, and if they lost an important vote like a budget or finance vote, there would have to be new elections.
We recently went to a system of mandatory elections every four years (previously a government could wait five years to dissolve and call an election). But that four year timetable is only valid as a necessity for majority governments, for a minority parliament it’s quite likely that the parliament would be dissolved before four years elapses. The key to this is how the most likely coalition partner, the socialist NDP, sees their chances of improving their seat count. If they sense an opportunity they could withdraw support and force Trudeau to try to get support from either the Conservatives or the Bloc Quebecois who have enough MPs to keep them afloat too.
It is considered probable that there will be an election within a year. The fact that the Conservatives dumped their leader, Erin O’Toole, means that they have only an interim leader while a leadership convention is prepared. Trudeau might figure he could use this opportunity to call a snap election. To do that, he has to lose a confidence vote, he can’t just call the election, the Governor General would not accept that. To make sure he would lose the confidence vote he would need to propose legislation that he knows the opposition parties would not support.
It’s a weird system and we only have these minority parliaments on rare occasions, like maybe once every twenty years on average.