With four floor crossings in as many months, Prime Minister Mark Carney now ranks third on the list of Canadian Prime Ministers who have courted the most MPs from other parties between elections, beat out only by Liberal Jean Chrétien, who claimed eight, and Conservative John A. Macdonald, who claimed nine.
He also can’t claim first in terms of most dramatic floor crossing, a title that should likely go to PM Paul Martin who welcomed Belinda Stronach into the Liberal fold when she, in one fell swoop, abandoned both Stephen Harper and her Conservative boyfriend Peter Mackay, saving Liberals from a confidence vote in 2005.
Unique to Carney’s courtship, though, is that it’s looking like it will be essential to getting him his much desired majority, with the latest crossing from NDP MP for Nunavut Lori Idlout bringing him only two seats short. And with three federal byelections set for next month, two of which are in Liberal strongholds, a Carney majority is looking more or less inevitable at this point, though if won, fragile.
Or so we should hope. We are living in wartime. The economic threat from our once-ally south of our border has far from disappeared, and now seems like peanuts compared to the catastrophic war the U.S. and Israel are waging on Iran and Lebanon, so far without any clarity with regards to strategy or purpose. And it’s likely we’ll be drawn into this mess.
Canada’s Defence Minister David McGuinty won’t rule out the possibility that Canada may have some role to play in defending Middle East countries from Iran’s attacks, though he assured it would remain strictly defensive. Carney’s response to whether Canada would engage in a war the alleged purpose of which he seemed, “with regret”, to support? We haven’t been invited yet. But what happens when that invite shows up in the mail? Well folks, we must act in the world as it is, not the one we wish it were.
Carney’s pragmatism, his matter-of-factness, won Canadian hearts in the last election, and again in Davos. Finally, a competent, reasonable patriarch has arrived to protect us. Fair enough, given the previous guy we had in office.
But this pragmatism now seems to be the framework he’s using to double down on the status quo, pushing through a classically neoliberal agenda under the guise that it is simply what is needed at a time when the rules based order has gone out the window.
Some Conservative and NDP MPs seem to be speculating they may have more sway as a backbench Liberal than as a member of a party with more or less zero political direction or power.
While some might decry the recent floor crossings as anti-democratic – had voters wanted a Mark Carney majority, they would have given it to him last April – we could celebrate this evidence of a country that cares more about rising above partisanship to protect our national interests than bickering and sneering at each other in Parliament.
In this context, though, true opposition to and within the ruling party is needed more than ever.
And Liberal back benchers in a precariously built majority government may be just the ticket. We can only hope that the backbone that got them across the floor in the first place doesn’t crumple. Because we need people in Parliament who don’t simply accept the world we have, but are still committed to building a better one.