Preston Manning: It is time for some Liberals to cross the floor

A person walks past the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 13, 2024. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

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The Prime Minister and federal Liberals are celebrating their victories in Monday’s byelections, which have given them a two-seat majority, 174 seats in our 343 seat House of Commons. But sober second thought suggests, “Not so fast, Mr. Carney.”  

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Suppose one consults an AI generated model of Canada’s House of Commons with each MP represented by a dot — red dots for Liberals, blue dots for Conservatives, and so forth. Click on a dot and the model, when suitably prompted, instantly produces mounds of data on that particular MP — their biography, their constituency and electoral record, their social media record, their speaking and voting record in the House of Commons, their reported strengths and weaknesses, and much more — all data useful in determining what factors might influence their present and future behaviour. 

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This database may not yet contain estimates of the IQ level of each MP. But it is probably safe to say that, while the Liberal backbenchers are not the brightest stars in the political firmament, presumably most of them can count. Suppose therefore that some of the more disgruntled members of the Liberal caucus — those who voted against Carney in the Liberal leadership race, those who oppose the government’s position on Israel, those who resent the Carney U-turn away from Net Zero to support a bitumen pipeline — suppose these malcontents figure out that if just six of them were to cross the floor to join the NDP, that alliance-of-expediency would hold balance-of-power influence in the Parliament not unlike the NDP contingent which propped up the incompetent Trudeau administration for 10 years. 

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Certainly those six Liberal floor crossers would then have far more influence in Parliament than they now have as lowly government backbenchers. And their act of floor crossing — reprehensible as it is from a democratic representation standpoint — could hardly be criticized by the government since it has already championed the practice itself.  

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If the skids from the Liberal to NDP caucus needed to be greased to facilitate the movement of disgruntled MPs from the one to the other, several of the unions which still support the NDP are quite capable of providing financial inducements (de facto bribes) to the would-be floor-crossers as well as assurances of a “soft landing” (a good job somewhere) if they are defeated in the next election. Reprehensible again as such practices are, neither the Liberal nor NDP members involved are likely to see any ethical objection to their use.  

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Conservatives will of course have mixed feelings about any such developments — reluctant on the one hand to see any interruption in the current slide of the federal NDP into political oblivion, but cognizant, on the other hand, of what a political boon it could be if a temporary resuscitation of the NDP were to take away even a modest number of votes and seats from the Carney Liberals in the next federal election.  

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Return to a minority Liberal government, held hostage on various issues by an unholy alliance of socialist leftovers and Liberal turncoats, would not augur well for the country. Hopefully it would hasten the day when the Canadian public finally realize the need for a thorough parliamentary House cleaning. In the meantime, Not So Fast, Mr. Carney; today’s celebrations may be short lived. 

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Preston Manning is a former leader of the Opposition.

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