{"id":6196,"date":"2026-04-15T13:40:29","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/6196\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T13:40:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:40:29","slug":"the-odd-floor-crossing-is-one-thing-but-on-this-scale-it-undermines-our-system-of-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/6196\/","title":{"rendered":"The odd floor-crossing is one thing, but on this scale it undermines our system of government"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives for a press conference in Ottawa on Tuesday.Sean Kilpatrick\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Seeking to explain just where the Liberals draw the line on accepting members of other parties into their midst, House Leader Steven MacKinnon said<\/a> the party would \u201ckeep a light on and a door open for all of those who want to support Liberal Party principles,\u201d which he described as \u201cimmutable.\u201d<\/p>\n

And of course, he\u2019s right. Liberal policies may come and go \u2013 see carbon pricing, immigration, defence spending, from a long list \u2013 but Liberal principles are as constant as the North Star. There\u2019s only one. It is this: whatever it takes. Whatever it takes to get and stay in power. What. Ever.<\/p>\n

We are now seeing that principle in action. The party has succeeded in luring not one, not two, but five opposition MPs to cross the floor, from two parties, in five months.<\/p>\n

Opinion: By-elections start Phase 2 of the Carney government<\/a><\/p>\n

The last of these, Marilyn Gladu, has established herself, in a decade in politics, as being not only well to the right of the Liberals but to the right of the Conservatives, at odds with the government on everything from abortion to vaccine mandates to, well, floor-crossing<\/a>. <\/p>\n

And that is why the Liberals now have a majority in the House of Commons. It wasn\u2019t the by-elections. They merely confirmed the Liberals in seats they already held. It was the tide of defections: enough, for the first time in Canadian history, to catapult a party from minority to majority status. With, we are told, more to come. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s troubling about this isn\u2019t what it tells us about the Liberals, or the motley collection of mutually hostile ideologues now sharing space on the government benches. (There are big tents, and then there\u2019s just a circus.) Neither is there anything objectionable, in principle, with an MP leaving one party for another, if he or she genuinely feels more aligned with the latter party than the one whose banner they were elected under not 12 months ago.<\/p>\n

And if these should happen to combine to deliver a majority to the governing party, what of it? It is not true that, as Conservative MPs protest, \u201cCanadians voted for a minority Parliament\u201d in the last election. <\/p>\n

Canadians voted, in 343 separate contests, for the candidate or party they wished to represent their constituency in Ottawa. There was no space on the ballot to indicate whether one party should have a majority or not. <\/p>\n

Still, this is getting ridiculous. A few more of these and we are edging into Italian territory. Floor-crossing is so endemic in the Italian parliament it even has a name: trasformismo. Recent parliaments have seen as many as a quarter<\/a> to a third<\/a> of the legislators switch parties, often in pursuit of office of some kind.<\/p>\n

Is that why all of these opposition MPs have separately and simultaneously decided to join the Liberal party? Were they offered some sort of quid pro quo, a perq, a committee assignment, even a cabinet post? Maybe, maybe not. Even if they are eventually given some reward, it\u2019s difficult to prove they were offered it in advance. But that\u2019s not the point: the public should not be put in the position of having to wonder if their MP is on the take.<\/p>\n

Liberals courting as many as eight more potential floor-crossers, sources say<\/a><\/p>\n

Worse still is the reason offered by Ms. Gladu, who told reporters that government ridings tended to get more \u201csupport<\/a>,\u201d meaning government spending. Again, whether that\u2019s true or not<\/a>, to offer that as justification for crossing from opposition to government \u2013 I mean, if that\u2019s your argument, why have an opposition at all?<\/p>\n

This sort of thinking is insidious. You hear too many journalists sympathetically clucking at the fate of the Conservative MP, \u201cstuck in opposition\u201d for three more years \u2013 as if the only point of being an MP was to be on the government side. <\/p>\n

Really? It\u2019s not enough to hold government to account, to expose wrongdoing by those in office, to demand ministers answer for mistakes by their departments, to critique government policies and offer alternatives? As opposed to government-side MPs, whose role, no matter who is in power, is to wave through whatever the prime minister proposes and cover up for government mistakes and malfeasance.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t always thus. The notion that MPs on the government benches, no less than those in opposition, were supposed to be watchdogs on the government, was once taken seriously in this country \u2013 so seriously, that whenever an MP was appointed to cabinet he was obliged to resign his seat and run in a by-election. After all, his job had changed: now he was part of the government. The least he could do was ask his constituents\u2019 permission.<\/p>\n

Seems like the least an MP crossing from opposition to government could do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives for a press conference in Ottawa on Tuesday.Sean…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6197,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[3679,3118,3680,111,3119],"class_list":{"0":"post-6196","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mark-carney","8":"tag-andrew-coyne","9":"tag-column","10":"tag-coyne","11":"tag-mark-carney","12":"tag-opinion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}