Floor Crossing Majority And Nonsensical Crises

On Legalities And Legitimacies

(Two things, before we get to today’s column. First, new episode of One Piece Away, mine and Liam MacKinnon’s Senators and NHL podcast, is out now on Spotify, Apple, and wherever you get your podcasts. Listen, or even just download - it would mean a lot.

More importantly, however, is a great professional honour - I wrote about Avi Lewis, the Canadian left, and the future for both for Macleans this week. Long time readers, and anybody who reads the first two paragraphs of this piece, will know how much Macleans means to me, and how reading it as a teenager made me fall in love with writing and journalism. It’s an immense honour to say I’ve been able to write for them, and I hope you check my piece out.)

The coalition crisis of 2008 - when I was the grand old age of 11 - is my first big Canadian political memory. I grew up in a progressive household and Harper was by no means a dream to us, but more importantly I grew up the son of two Montrealers driven out of the city by the language laws and separatism. So the prospect of a Federal government dependent solely on the Bloc - no matter that it would be perfectly legal - never felt legitimate to me.

Arguably the best piece from that time was Paul Wells’ The Electorate Replies: No Thanks, where he makes that same distinction - the coalition might be legal, but Canadians don’t find it legitimate for many, many, many reasons. It was a secondary test beyond legality that mattered, and it was the test that killed the coalition. Ignatieff had to walk back the coalition and vote for the 2009 budget because the Liberals would have gotten destroyed, maybe permanently, for doing it.

The differences between 2008 and now are many, but the basic situation - something has happened and there is a debate over legitimacy, but not legality, is here again. And I think it’s worth going through all the ways that this isn’t 2008, and why the floor crosser’s majority is being seen as both legal and legitimate.

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It’s worth pointing out that while this exact scenario doesn’t have an exact parallel, there are plenty of precedents of Parliaments having “core characteristics” altered through floor crossings in Canadian history. Belinda Stronach and David Emerson’s crossings both changed who possessed the balance of power, giving the NDP the ability to be a sufficient force to keep the government in power despite voters not giving them that power. (Yes, in 2004 the Libs and NDP had 154, exactly half of Parliament, but they needed Stronach’s vote because Milliken couldn’t vote unless it was a tie, amongst other things.) That changed the fundamental nature of Parliament - without Stronach the 2006 election is held in June 2005, and neither the RCMP investigation nor the Eaton Centre shooting happens in writ. In Emerson’s case, Harper having a third avenue to get votes passed reduced the Bloc and Liberals’ leverage in crunch budget votes and other confidence matters, and helped elevate the NDP because they were seen as a sufficiently viable alternative. If the NDP weren’t enough to get something passed, they’d have gotten less press and less attention.

John Horgan’s government with the Greens was severely aided by the BC Liberal speaker not resigning, which meant that instead of the NDP-Greens having a 43-43 floor to manage, they won every contentious vote 44-42. The Speaker eventually left the Liberals, and while they were never formally a floorcrosser, the Speaker’s extra salary ended up giving Horgan a workable majority instead of a stalemated Parliament where either nothing would have gotten done or he’d have had to nuke the traditional Speaker’s role as a neutral defender of the House.

And we shouldn’t forget the Cadman Affair, when Conservatives offered a dying Independent MP a life insurance policy of $1M to vote against the Martin government in the votes around the Stronach floor crossing. If we’d like to talk morals and ethics, the fact that the CPC have offered a financial bribe to a dying man should be remembered much more prominently than it is.

Outside of Canada, Westminster Parliaments have been “manipulated” plenty of times. Britain didn’t hold an election for a decade once, and despite being elected as Mayor of London 3 times Sadiq Khan has never served a term of the same length. (Covid delaying elections meant his first term was five years, but to keep to the schedule his second was only 3 years. His current term will be his first to go the statutory 4 years.) No serious person thinks that this means Britain - the cradle of Westminster, after all - isn’t a democracy. It’s also worth pointing out that nobody called the floor crossings that deprived the Tories of their working majority with the DUP in 2019 anti-democratic, or when Boris removed the Conservative whip from nearly two dozen pro-Remain MPs who voted against his Brexit deal.

Go to Australia and you find a clusterfuck of wild Parliaments. There’s the time the voters elected a majority Labor government in 1914, Labor was in the process of booting their PM out of the party over conscription, and then he took 23 MPs, formed a new party, and governed with the opposition Liberals. That is inarguably a greater violation of the “intent” of the voters than anything Carney’s done, but remember, there’s no precedent for what the Liberals are doing.

There’s the Dismissal, when a majority government in the House was being thwarted by an Opposition Upper House, and the government was dismissed so that the opposition could take power, pass a supply bill that they had been blocking the whole time before, and then call the election themselves. The Coalition were rewarded for taking power after the Dismissal with 8 years in office after that.

Another reason this is being seen as legitimate is because Conservatives are not actually making a pro-democracy case. They’re aping the language of democracy protection but they’re not being honest - if they were they’d be calling for an election right now. If you think this is an illegitimate government the only moral and correct position to take would be to want an election immediately. But Poilievre doesn’t say that because he doesn’t believe that. He wants to complain that the government is illegitimate while not stopping it from being in office, and Canadians aren’t buying it. You can’t declare a crisis, not want the obvious remedy to the crisis, and expect the country to agree it’s a crisis.

And third of all, the country doesn’t decide collectively what the shape of the Parliament will be. The country didn’t decide that the Liberals and NDP will have a floor majority but the Bloc and Conservatives will have a majority on committees. The collective outcomes of 343 races left us there, but that’s not the same thing as us deciding it. And I think any argument that rests on “we need a separatist party to be the only balance of power holders on committees for the health of the nation” will fall on deaf fucking ears amongst the ~94% of Canadians who didn’t vote for the Bloc.

What Conservatives decrying the end of democracy are admitting is that they don’t care about the opposition or the public or the media or any accountability when they hold majority government. They knew they govern in majority as if there’s no opposition, as the residents of Ontario see too fucking well with Doug Ford’s constant undermining of municipally elected officials, Charter rights of workers, and any number of other issues. Yes, Carney will be able to win votes, but majority government is not the creation of an elected dictatorship. It is still subject to the scrutiny of the press, the views of Canadians, and the polls.

If the Canadian public sours on Carney then the government will listen, because they want to serve in office for a long time. Carney wants to get on and do the job Canadians have given him, not maximize the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party. If all he cared about was Liberal fortunes, we’d have gone to an election by now, and there’d be 200 Liberals elected and the opposition would be even more seriously weakened.

And yes, Monday’s byelections matter here, because the Liberal vote was up in two of the three seats and flat in University-Rosedale, which, given the loss of Chrystia Freeland’s personal vote, might be more impressive than Doly Begum’s smashing result in Scarborough. The Conservatives, on the other hand? They’re down double digits everywhere. For all the claims the polls are undersampling Conservatives, the first tests of the polls have come up basically correct. Canadians don’t care about Gladu, don’t care about the floor crossings, and are getting the government they want. The voters didn’t give Carney and the Liberals a bigger win in 2025 because they were worried this would be a Trudeau-ite government with a different face. Seeing that it’s a genuinely different government with a different approach and temperament has moved people to Carney’s side. That he’d get elected in a heartbeat right now matters in a conversation about legitimacy.

At the end of the day, the government is neither the legal abomination that many want to pretend it is nor illegitimate. It is a product of the Parliament that we elected and the times we are in. You don’t have to like it, but don’t lie about it.