Marilyn Gladu crossed the floor last week, becoming the fifth MP to switch parties since last year's election. That's a rate of conversion that would impress a televangelist. Before she crossed, she was one of the loudest voices for reform: just this January she publicly backed a petition demanding mandatory byelections for floor-crossers, saying her constituents “deserve a chance to have a redo” when their MP changes parties.
She was right in January. She hasn’t explained what changed.
But Gladu’s hypocrisy is almost beside the point. Floor crossing is doing something more corrosive than just embarrassing individual MPs. It feeds a story Canadians already half-believe that politicians are for sale and elections are provisional. Trust in elected officials was low before this parliament began. Episodes like this make it lower.
Prime Minister Carney came to politics from a world where board composition can be managed, where loyalty is purchased and rewarded, and where institutional legitimacy runs through markets, not polling stations. That background shows. Prime Minister Carney’s business background is making him forget that MPs aren’t board members to be shuffled, but the people’s representatives, elected to use their judgment and follow their conscience. Members of Parliament absolutely need the right to leave their parties - it’s the ultimate way to show you have no confidence in that party or its leader, but that shouldn’t turn Parliament into a free-for-all.
The risks aren’t abstract. When Markham MP Michael Ma crossed to the Liberals, he joined the Prime Minister on an official trip to China the following week. Whether that was reward or coincidence doesn’t matter. It looks like reward. That’s enough.
There’s a structural risk that isn’t getting enough attention either. If enough MPs from a sitting party break away as a group, they can formally constitute a new parliamentary caucus with the research budgets, procedural standing, and institutional resources that come with it. It’s happened before. When frustration with Stockwell Day’s leadership of the Canadian Alliance peaked in 2001, a bloc of members left to form the Democratic Representative Caucus, splitting a party already unkindly nicknamed “CCRAP” from within. A government that treats floor crossing as a recruitment tool is gambling that no one will flip that dynamic on them.
Pierre Poilievre’s answer is recalling legislation. It’s the wrong answer. If the Liberal approach to floor-crossing comes from the boardroom, well, the Conservative approach comes straight from the Republican Party, who have championed recall legislation for decades. Recall votes are expensive. They’re vulnerable to well-funded campaigns targeting MPs who made unpopular but principled votes. They don’t solve the floor-crossing problem, they introduce new ones. And at a moment when Mr. Poilievre is working to reassure Canadians that he isn’t reflexively aligned with American political culture, importing a mechanism from the Republican playbook is an odd choice.
He doesn’t need to look south. The solution is already here.
In 2006, Manitoba Premier Gary Doer amended his province’s Legislative Assembly Act to require that any MLA who left their party had to sit as an independent for the rest of their term. In 2014, as leader of the New Brunswick NDP, I championed An Act Respecting Floor Crossing, the first legislation of its kind in Canada which required any MLA who left the party under which they were elected to sit as an independent or resign and face a byelection. Doer’s law was eventually repealed. So was mine. Both were right.
Recall legislation is expensive, divisive, and unnecessary. Canada has a proud parliamentary tradition Mr. Poilievre should call on, rather than winking at his pro-US base. The Canadian Future Party wants to modernize Canadian institutions, not import traditions from elsewhere: our proposal is a simple, all-Canadian, fix.
The Canadian Future Party’s proposal is straightforward: any MP who leaves the party under which they were elected must either trigger a byelection or sit as an independent until voters weigh in at the next election. It protects the MP’s right of conscience. It respects what voters chose. And it doesn’t require anything from Washington.
Ms. Gladu said her constituents deserve a redo. She was right. Parliament deserves the law to make it stick.
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