EDITORIAL: Floor-crossers enable Liberal power grab

Filling committees with Liberals buries any hope the Opposition can hold them to account.

Published Apr 22, 2026  •  Last updated 14 minutes ago  •  2 minute read

Liberal House leader Steve MacKinnon. Photo by Adrian Wyld /The Canadian Press

Now that Prime Minister Mark Carney has his coveted majority government, achieved through the opportunism of floor-crossers, we discover the real cost of those defections.

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Liberal House leader Steve MacKinnon announced this week that the Liberals would stack parliamentary committees with their MPs, thus removing a vital accountability safety valve. Traditionally, in a minority Parliament, seats on committees are allocated so that Opposition parties hold the balance of power.

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That has been thrown out the window.

“There is an undeniable, longstanding principle in Parliament: A party that has the majority of seats in the House also has a majority in committees,” MacKinnon crowed on X.

At a news conference, he said it will stop “silly, partisan games.”

Well, the only ones playing games are Liberals. And if MacKinnon thinks Opposition politicians holding government to account is a partisan game, he has picked the wrong career.

He announced that the government will beef up the number of members on various committees. Those extra spaces will be allocated to Liberals.

That buries any hope the Opposition can hold the Liberals to account. The ArriveCAN scandal, for example, was exposed largely due to intense scrutiny by a Commons committee that raised questions about how a relatively straightforward app snowballed into an estimated $60-million boondoggle.

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In Ontario, the extent of the scandals around Ornge air ambulance and four cancelled gas-powered generating plants only became public due to intense scrutiny by committees in the minority government of former premier Dalton McGuinty.

In the organic way that elections evolve, voters always get it right. They manage to reflect the mood and intent of the country. Last year, they intended to hold Carney to a minority.

Some of the turncoats who have switched allegiances to the Liberals claim they are doing so because that’s what their constituents want. That’s nonsense. We don’t base our democracy on the anecdotal comments a member of Parliament may or may not have heard from their hairdresser the previous week. We base it on electoral outcomes.

(Those who claim last week’s byelections gave Carney his majority are wrong. All three ridings were previously held by Liberals. The majority came from floor-crossing.)

MacKinnon’s latest move doesn’t enhance democracy; it does the opposite. It stifles accountability and turns committees from watchdogs into lapdogs.

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