The floor crossing by elected Conservative Michael Ma to join the Liberals includes an element that very few seem to consider worth reporting, including our esteemed host: this element is not unknown but describes foreign interference - namely China - able to control the balance of federal political power. But hey... nothing to see here.
Maybe that's enough to reconsider whether floor crossings should be a legitimate action from a so-called 'representative' of the people who elected him or her. Because if it is legit, then why bother running riding elections at all? Why not just vote for the Dear Leader?
In that very article, Cooper himself wrote: "There is no evidence Ma was under any external influence."
The Liberals are known to be working through a list of a handful of MPs. Ma's the second (and a half if you include Jeneroux) to cross the floor. Most floor crossings happen for entirely banal incentives. Like, was China behind d'Entremont's floor crossing too, or are we just jumping to conclusions because Ma is of Chinese descent and has support from the Chinese community?
I'm always open to the possibility that foreign interference is at play, but I don't need to reach all the way to China to explain why a no-name CPC backbencher crossed the floor. And Cooper doesn't provide any evidence to support that conclusion. In fact, it's not even clear to me what conclusion Cooper *is* suggesting we draw from that piece. JG
The point I raised is counter to Jen's assertion that crossing the floor is fine. Is it? None of the reasons she gave touched on the question of why foreign interference might play a role. But pulling the racist card on me for asking? Come on. Ongoing foreign interference well know to all intelligence and police and government and even the public in this riding is enough to raise the question. And the importance of this question is enough to point out why crossing the floor to the governing party by any candidate from such a riding is rather more important than simply ignoring all the threads by media and pretending there's nothing to see here. There is. But, of course, just questioning is enough to invite the age-old strawman defence so popular today and used by those who would much rather avoid answering it, that one is/might be/could be/worth considering a racist for asking. Pathetic. But even that disreputable fallacy doesn't alter why the question is important enough to consider (also from the article): "If Canada is serious about protecting democratic legitimacy, Parliament should adopt a simple rule: if a member of Parliament crosses the floor to join another party—especially if the move materially alters governing power—there should be a by-election. Not because voters “own” an MP. Because voters own Canada’s democracy.
Carney, if he wants to govern as a majority prime minister, should ask Canadians for a majority. He should not accept it—or engineer it—through a quiet accumulation of defectors, least of all at a moment when Ottawa has publicly confirmed that transnational repression tactics have already been deployed against candidates."
This intersects with my reaction to the idea that if only the Conservatives could run with a Very Serious Person as their leader they will have electoral success.
Erin O'Toole was and is a serious person. Affable. Moderate. Strong record of public service without being a career politician. Fat lot of good it did him. One of his more serious positions — telling the truth about China — bit him in the hindquarters good and hard. Other serious positions, like the idea that public servants who didn't get COVID vaccines could follow a different protocol like Treasury Board had suggested rather than being fired, or that confiscating "assault-style" rifles was a poor way to ensure public safety, gave the Liberals just the wedges they needed to win.
Conservatives only succeed federally when they create a winning CONTRAST with Liberals (which usually requires some particular weakness on the Liberal side at the same time). Poilievre's contrast evaporated; the Libs sucked the air out of the carbon tax contrast, and cost of living generally got squeezed out as an issue. If he still had a path to winning at all, it was to create a different sharp, nasty contrast that horrifies the commentariat enough to force itself into the center of public debate in the election, not to be almost as Liberal as Carney on a ballot question about which Liberal was Liberal enough to take on Trump through the power of his Liberal fortitude and righteousness.
Can Poilievre, or his replacement, find a new winning contrast for the next election? I don't know. But replacing him with a no-contrast Very Serious Joe Clark type and hoping the election falls into their laps would be the ultimate loser move.
That's the fundamental thing that the "we just need a serious Progressive Conservative candidate" old Tories get wrong. That's been tried already and it went even worse.
I think both parties are different in colour but without any meaningful distinction. Both do their best to carry out their preferred version of warfare on Canadians at the expense of the country's welfare. While we spend time and effort arguing about how many partisan angels/devils can fit on the head of pin, the real world effects of this power game plays out to everyone's loss. If a party came along that supported classical liberal values intolerant of group-based laws, privileges, policies, and practices (let's label all of it 'harm reduction' or 'what Canadians expect' or 'protecting rights') and returned to respecting equality citizenry in all these, then maybe this fast-sinking ship of state could be righted and rescued. But I don't see the moral courage or willingness required either from rank and file 'patriotic' Canadians (maligning and condemning every and all principles and practices and histories upon which Canada has flourished being synonymous with this new and improved version of moral patriotism) or its self-interested institutional leaders. We have no rudder and no direction so no wind is favourable. No party offers a solution to this.
The red press will vilify any Conservative leader.
As Trudeau showed, continued shitty Liberal government is the only thing that can overcome the incessant cheerleading from the red press. Luckily, Carney is carrying on the tradition and we boomers are dying off.
Nah . Carney has moved toward the center and PP is going further right to differentiate. Carney signs a pipeline MOU and PP puts up a twitter petition saying Carney is blocking pipelines ( as if they magically can happen fast ). That isn’t a serious person , it’s being a whiney child . It’s reasonable that a central thinking MP will find more common ground with Carney now and be put off by the way Pierre is doing things with his constant negativity and silly short form catch phrases with no substance behind them . Doesn’t have to be “ but China “! Maybe , just maybe , Carney has done enough to neutralize Pierre and he is the wrong man now .
I see we are back to holding Poilievre to the standards of a philosopher-king while one Liberal who behaved like the court jester got to rule for 9 years, while another just showed up for a few weeks, said "trust me", didn't publicly literally shit his pants, and got a resounding victory.
The floor crossing MP's are completely disgusting and obtaining a majority through backroom dealing is nothing short of a mad assault on Canadian democracy. I don't care if it's "technically allowed". It's abusing a vestige from another time which is typically used as a form of protest by legitimately aggrieved MP's, not to swing forms of government. You break society by doing shit like this, and the result is no different than stuffing ballot boxes. Why even show up? Why vote at all?
How can we possibly criticize the Americans about "democratic norms"?
Look I like Pierre, I joined the party to elect him leader, and I will support him 100% - that is until we have someone better in which case I want him gone and them in. But the reality is that he did not do a good job during the election. I kept waiting for him to bring out the big guns, "any day now, you'll see!" I would tell people complaining about the tired slogans, but that never happened. Politics is war by other means (or is it the other way round) , and if you lose the war it doesn't matter if your opponents are stupid, corrupt, and hypocritical - you lost, and that is the ultimate judgement.
I'm not saying he ran a perfect campaign, though it wasn't as bad as many say. I have similar complaints, and I'm probably about as attached to Poilievre as you are - good until there is someone better but that person isn't even on my radar right now (with caveat below). No attachment to the person, only the policies, their willingness to implement them, and yes the ability to win.
It's just that none of the other parties ran a particularly good campaign either, and Carney's ability to focus Canadians on essentially a fictional narrative of foreign annexation was a product of media capture as much as anything. Any other country would have voted for extreme change after the disaster of Trudeau's era, no matter what that candidate's campaign looked like. The fact that our media can fixate us on shit as trivial as "campaign style", petty gaffes, and stupid fucking slogans during an election when our standard of living has fallen by some measures 40% in the last 10 years is just laughable.
Canadians hold Conservatives to an absurdly high standard while Liberals get to play on easy mode. I don't know if it's possible for any leader to meet that standard in the present environment as they will always be presented in the worst possible light to a public that has spent their entire lives primed to see Liberals as the good guys and Conservatives as evil (even if they can't articulate why). I fully expect any "better" CPC leader to quickly get torn to pieces for whatever is "wrong" with them as well. Perfection just isn't possible. Not sure where that leaves the party or Canada.
It’s not a vestige from another time, it’s a legitimate part of Westminster parliamentary systems and always has been.
I myself am a lifetime LPC voter with a couple brief dalliances to Green and NDP when I was younger, and after seeing how far left Trudeau took the party, was about to spoil my ballot this time until they changed leaders. Even I still can’t believe how well it worked to change the leader.
The only thing you can conclude is that Canadians hate Poilievre, they just hated Trudeau more (a lot more).
Carney is rapidly changing the LPC back into its 1990s Chrétien centre-right incarnation. CPC needs to find some wedge issues and a new leader.
Liberal voters and the media would be having an absolute meltdown if a Conservative minority pulled this shit and you are being disingenuous if you think otherwise. It would be considered a "dangerous right-wing coup" - and the party would probably and rightly pay a huge price in the next election for doing it. But of course the Liberals won't be penalized because the G&M will drop high and mighty editorials about how this is just fine and don't you peasants know this is the Way Things Have Always Been Done.
Other countries change how government does things, and it's clear we are too childish to be trusted with floor crossings minus a by-election so we can and should make the change. It's one thing honouring a quirky tradition when it's only used when MP McGrumpyface crosses in a huff after a public disagreement with their party leader, putting X party 25 seats from a majority instead of 26. It's another entirely to use this as a lever of power to retroactively rig election outcomes. The possible Chinese interference angle makes this just that much more bonkers. Hey foreign adversaries, just bribe or blackmail a handful of MP's and you can get whatever government your heart desires!
Whining about the influence the Globe and Mail (seriously, a declining legacy newspaper swayed things?) has is, I’m sorry to say, loser energy. Like, Sean Connery in The Rock kinda quote.
Pick some issues that the Liberals are weak on under current leadership (aggressiveness of negotiations with FN over pipelines would be a good one) and a charismatic leader and go win.
Or, realize that if you care about policy, you’re basically getting 75% of the CPC platform under Carney anyway and become a Liberal. The party has winner energy these days.
G&M, CBC, CTV, Global News, hundreds of funded and boosted influencers, and what seem like rabid bot farms on every social media platform. Like it or not but they set the tone and agenda in the Liberals' favour. I find these outlets particularly insidious because they pretend to be impartial but in no way are. And why? Subsidies subsidies subsidies.
You can't handicap your opponents by secretly rigging the game and then call them losers for not winning anyway.
They would and they'd be just as wrong. Don't have to like floor crossing but if their positions were reversed Poilievre would be doing the same thing. Harper and Scheer both took in floor crossers. Poilievre would too and who knows he may in the future. No matter which side you're on politically you'll bitch when your team has someone cross to the other side but it doesn't matter. No party is going to change the rules on this.
The problem may have been that Jenni Byrne and PP think too much alike. Steve Outhouse is the new campaign manager. He did a great job of focusing Danielle Smith and quelling some of the more out there elements of the UCP. Hopefully he can do the same for PP.
The unspoken role of China in the floor crossing of Michael Ma disappointed me today. I have read about a visit of Ma to the Chinese ambassador three days before he crossed to become a Liberal. That must have been known to you, Jen. The Markham-Unionville riding was in turmoil in the election of ‘25. I am sure you followed that as well. What needs to be reported is the lack of legislation on foreign interference and the creation of a registry of foreign governments. Canada is interfered with because our laws lack teeth or don’t exist.
The Canadian democracy is under attack by tolerance of floor crossings in 2025. Those who cross might think more seriously if they were to be forced to run in a bi-election before changing their party banner.
The seriousness of this undermining of election integrity resides with you in the “unowned press”. I expect that CBC and the Globe will continue to tell this story as a loss for Pierre Poilievre and deflecting from the more sinister turn towards election interference.
I think this whole matter should be referred to the RCMP for foreign interference. Oh yeah, we have no laws in place.
If ever there were a time for Carney to show that he is not owned by China, this is it. There is a requirement to create a foreign interference registry. As has been pointed out, this is not an option for you to be a dilettante about Mr. Prime Minister, this is required and recent events are reminding Canadians why this is so.
If an MP is going to cross the floor, he(she) should have the courage to resign the seat and let the people in the riding decide if they want this person to represent them. Alas, greed for power and notoriety are the deciding factors not principles.
We let the green meanies take over … and mean they are,
They’d rather we freeze in the dark than develope our resources.
They’d rather we wait in hallways for treatment, or offer us MAID than actually do the things that will fund healthcare (not that funding is the issue, we spend more and get less than the rest of the OECD)
They’d rather our schools are over crowded than do the things that will pay for education
They’d rather let our children’s children pay for their excesses …
You get the picture … we were once proud of our resources
The green meanies took away our pride, and tried desperately to take away our jobs too.
Merging the topics of insider lobbying and no consequences for failure, Mark Wiseman of the Century Initiative and formerly Blackock is to be rewarded for his excellent work destroying our immigration system by becoming our US Ambassador. Skilled in the art of dancing in and out of the public and private sectors, he successfully lobbied for the removal of any screening or sane restrictions to allow the tsunami of indentured servants we had while also directing investments into rental real estate. Destroying our immigration system to inflate our real estate bubble while lowering the wage floor and further tanking productivity, a truly impressive quadfecta. This is Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Canadian Excellence.
Exactly right. And almost no one of consequence gives a shit, especially the 'media' of any kind. But the accuracy and insightfulness of your comment demonstrates just how broken this country is. Young people need to leave because it's not going to get magically better; it's going to get 'progressively' worse (how I wish that were only a pun).
Canada and the US have very different problems with respect to public service by private sector people.
In the US there is a genuine revolving door problem. People go into government for a stint, then go either into or back into the private sector to work for the people they were supposed to be regulating. IMO too much is made of the overt corruption here, it’s not that. I think most people who do so genuinely desire to do good work both in government and in the private sector. But incentives are powerful.
In Canada, people who go into government often can’t use that experience in the private sector. And this gives the public sector a real knowledge deficit, because the uncomfortable truth is that the people who best know how to regulate anything (whether it’s banking, oil, fishing or farming) are people who work in that field. But there’s a problem getting the best advice instead of the most self-serving. And there’s no magic solution to that, just muddling through.
In Canada though, this problem is worst for politicians. We - seriously - have trouble attracting top talent to politics. Serving in parliament for a few years is very rarely a way to advance your career. A lot of people who lose elections struggle to find good paying jobs. That’s bad - it makes it hard to get good people to run for office. It’s no coincidence that Carney is a guy who doesn’t need the job. Again, the media, speaking tour, book sales, etc. that US politicians can pursue is unappealing. But we have a real problem on the opposite side in Canada
Yes, critical reviews are only allowed of people who the official culture consider "problematic." So, numerous reviews savaging Jordan Peterson's self-help book. Is it any good? I have no idea. Maybe it is crap, but the savage reviews are entirely about their hatred for Jordan Peterson.
Since most MPs owe their seats to the party establishment and the latter are controlled by unaccountable elites, an MP crossing the floor is no different than a player being traded in hockey or baseball and the like. It shows that Parliament is mass entertainment just like professional sports (and covered in the same way by mass media), and I suspect the outcome of its deliberations are more
like the results of professional wrestling than the World Series or Stanley Cup.
So a process where anyone can run for office via primaries and elections are every two years seems to me superior to back room decisions by elites (Laurentian or Chinese or otherwise).
And to milk the sports analogy a bit further, the Canadian voters seem to be like the 1960s definition of the first two rows at a wrestling match - a combined IQ of 100 and 32 total teeth between them 😆😆😆
I think the US got it right with an elected multi-cameral presidential system built with the assumption that someone will try to become a dictator/king so better put in a ton of checks and balances.
We are screwed no matter what we do. MP's are useless trained seals when it comes to constraining government power, but also just independent enough to allow shenanigans like this to take place. Give them more independence and their seats will just be perpetually for sale. Give them less and the party leader rules supreme.
Replacing party leaders should probably require a show of hands though, rather than a 12-18 month shitshow like we have now.
I appreciate your comments about the unowned press, very few of them seem to be willing to step out of the box, this crew included. They will reap what they have sown and I hope they feel guilty because they are supposed to be our last line of defence.
Notice how little criticism of the imminent floor-crossing Carney coup appears in the G&M and TV news. "Oh well, they're allowed to do it, and that mean Poilievre probably is to blame anyway for being frowny and unacceptably far right and 'unelectable'(TM)." The collective feeling in media is a sigh of relief that their subsidies won't be threatened for at least another 3+ years. I throw my hands in the air in exasperation.
I’m glad Andrew brought up the role of courts in preventing failed experiments from being “rolled back”.
Does anyone recall when BC tried to forbid the use of drugs in public parks, only to have a court declare it unconstitutional? And then there was the bike-lanes decision in Ontario.
Charter jurisprudence is increasingly adding friction, turning public policy decisions into one-way doors. I suspect we're going to see much more of this.
“Floor Crossing: Politics becomes personal brand management.,Rather than public service. That is not statesmanship. It is opportunism dressed up as principle.” John Ivison. He also wrote what Winston Churchill said about crossing the floor: “ It’s one thing to be a rat,it’s another to re-rat!”
The floor crossing by elected Conservative Michael Ma to join the Liberals includes an element that very few seem to consider worth reporting, including our esteemed host: this element is not unknown but describes foreign interference - namely China - able to control the balance of federal political power. But hey... nothing to see here.
"A riding that has been repeatedly flagged—through intelligence briefings described by senior political actors, through public controversy involving foreign-bounty rhetoric, and through government-confirmed warnings about transnational repression tactics in adjacent diaspora ridings—has now produced a member of Parliament whose post-election decision helps move Canada to the brink of majority government without an election." (source: https://www.thebureau.news/p/too-close-for-comfort-carney-floor?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1444443&post_id=181416548&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=3s7a0&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email)
Maybe that's enough to reconsider whether floor crossings should be a legitimate action from a so-called 'representative' of the people who elected him or her. Because if it is legit, then why bother running riding elections at all? Why not just vote for the Dear Leader?
In that very article, Cooper himself wrote: "There is no evidence Ma was under any external influence."
The Liberals are known to be working through a list of a handful of MPs. Ma's the second (and a half if you include Jeneroux) to cross the floor. Most floor crossings happen for entirely banal incentives. Like, was China behind d'Entremont's floor crossing too, or are we just jumping to conclusions because Ma is of Chinese descent and has support from the Chinese community?
I'm always open to the possibility that foreign interference is at play, but I don't need to reach all the way to China to explain why a no-name CPC backbencher crossed the floor. And Cooper doesn't provide any evidence to support that conclusion. In fact, it's not even clear to me what conclusion Cooper *is* suggesting we draw from that piece. JG
The point I raised is counter to Jen's assertion that crossing the floor is fine. Is it? None of the reasons she gave touched on the question of why foreign interference might play a role. But pulling the racist card on me for asking? Come on. Ongoing foreign interference well know to all intelligence and police and government and even the public in this riding is enough to raise the question. And the importance of this question is enough to point out why crossing the floor to the governing party by any candidate from such a riding is rather more important than simply ignoring all the threads by media and pretending there's nothing to see here. There is. But, of course, just questioning is enough to invite the age-old strawman defence so popular today and used by those who would much rather avoid answering it, that one is/might be/could be/worth considering a racist for asking. Pathetic. But even that disreputable fallacy doesn't alter why the question is important enough to consider (also from the article): "If Canada is serious about protecting democratic legitimacy, Parliament should adopt a simple rule: if a member of Parliament crosses the floor to join another party—especially if the move materially alters governing power—there should be a by-election. Not because voters “own” an MP. Because voters own Canada’s democracy.
Carney, if he wants to govern as a majority prime minister, should ask Canadians for a majority. He should not accept it—or engineer it—through a quiet accumulation of defectors, least of all at a moment when Ottawa has publicly confirmed that transnational repression tactics have already been deployed against candidates."
Very well said.
A thousand thumbs up.
Bingo!👏👏👏
This intersects with my reaction to the idea that if only the Conservatives could run with a Very Serious Person as their leader they will have electoral success.
Erin O'Toole was and is a serious person. Affable. Moderate. Strong record of public service without being a career politician. Fat lot of good it did him. One of his more serious positions — telling the truth about China — bit him in the hindquarters good and hard. Other serious positions, like the idea that public servants who didn't get COVID vaccines could follow a different protocol like Treasury Board had suggested rather than being fired, or that confiscating "assault-style" rifles was a poor way to ensure public safety, gave the Liberals just the wedges they needed to win.
Conservatives only succeed federally when they create a winning CONTRAST with Liberals (which usually requires some particular weakness on the Liberal side at the same time). Poilievre's contrast evaporated; the Libs sucked the air out of the carbon tax contrast, and cost of living generally got squeezed out as an issue. If he still had a path to winning at all, it was to create a different sharp, nasty contrast that horrifies the commentariat enough to force itself into the center of public debate in the election, not to be almost as Liberal as Carney on a ballot question about which Liberal was Liberal enough to take on Trump through the power of his Liberal fortitude and righteousness.
Can Poilievre, or his replacement, find a new winning contrast for the next election? I don't know. But replacing him with a no-contrast Very Serious Joe Clark type and hoping the election falls into their laps would be the ultimate loser move.
That's the fundamental thing that the "we just need a serious Progressive Conservative candidate" old Tories get wrong. That's been tried already and it went even worse.
I think both parties are different in colour but without any meaningful distinction. Both do their best to carry out their preferred version of warfare on Canadians at the expense of the country's welfare. While we spend time and effort arguing about how many partisan angels/devils can fit on the head of pin, the real world effects of this power game plays out to everyone's loss. If a party came along that supported classical liberal values intolerant of group-based laws, privileges, policies, and practices (let's label all of it 'harm reduction' or 'what Canadians expect' or 'protecting rights') and returned to respecting equality citizenry in all these, then maybe this fast-sinking ship of state could be righted and rescued. But I don't see the moral courage or willingness required either from rank and file 'patriotic' Canadians (maligning and condemning every and all principles and practices and histories upon which Canada has flourished being synonymous with this new and improved version of moral patriotism) or its self-interested institutional leaders. We have no rudder and no direction so no wind is favourable. No party offers a solution to this.
The red press will vilify any Conservative leader.
As Trudeau showed, continued shitty Liberal government is the only thing that can overcome the incessant cheerleading from the red press. Luckily, Carney is carrying on the tradition and we boomers are dying off.
Erin O'Toole was unprincipled and thus spineless. Good thing the caucus tossed him out.
lol
Interference in plain sight
And neither party cares except in how it advances their own domestic power.
Time to learn Mandarin?
Nah . Carney has moved toward the center and PP is going further right to differentiate. Carney signs a pipeline MOU and PP puts up a twitter petition saying Carney is blocking pipelines ( as if they magically can happen fast ). That isn’t a serious person , it’s being a whiney child . It’s reasonable that a central thinking MP will find more common ground with Carney now and be put off by the way Pierre is doing things with his constant negativity and silly short form catch phrases with no substance behind them . Doesn’t have to be “ but China “! Maybe , just maybe , Carney has done enough to neutralize Pierre and he is the wrong man now .
I see we are back to holding Poilievre to the standards of a philosopher-king while one Liberal who behaved like the court jester got to rule for 9 years, while another just showed up for a few weeks, said "trust me", didn't publicly literally shit his pants, and got a resounding victory.
The floor crossing MP's are completely disgusting and obtaining a majority through backroom dealing is nothing short of a mad assault on Canadian democracy. I don't care if it's "technically allowed". It's abusing a vestige from another time which is typically used as a form of protest by legitimately aggrieved MP's, not to swing forms of government. You break society by doing shit like this, and the result is no different than stuffing ballot boxes. Why even show up? Why vote at all?
How can we possibly criticize the Americans about "democratic norms"?
Look I like Pierre, I joined the party to elect him leader, and I will support him 100% - that is until we have someone better in which case I want him gone and them in. But the reality is that he did not do a good job during the election. I kept waiting for him to bring out the big guns, "any day now, you'll see!" I would tell people complaining about the tired slogans, but that never happened. Politics is war by other means (or is it the other way round) , and if you lose the war it doesn't matter if your opponents are stupid, corrupt, and hypocritical - you lost, and that is the ultimate judgement.
I'm not saying he ran a perfect campaign, though it wasn't as bad as many say. I have similar complaints, and I'm probably about as attached to Poilievre as you are - good until there is someone better but that person isn't even on my radar right now (with caveat below). No attachment to the person, only the policies, their willingness to implement them, and yes the ability to win.
It's just that none of the other parties ran a particularly good campaign either, and Carney's ability to focus Canadians on essentially a fictional narrative of foreign annexation was a product of media capture as much as anything. Any other country would have voted for extreme change after the disaster of Trudeau's era, no matter what that candidate's campaign looked like. The fact that our media can fixate us on shit as trivial as "campaign style", petty gaffes, and stupid fucking slogans during an election when our standard of living has fallen by some measures 40% in the last 10 years is just laughable.
Canadians hold Conservatives to an absurdly high standard while Liberals get to play on easy mode. I don't know if it's possible for any leader to meet that standard in the present environment as they will always be presented in the worst possible light to a public that has spent their entire lives primed to see Liberals as the good guys and Conservatives as evil (even if they can't articulate why). I fully expect any "better" CPC leader to quickly get torn to pieces for whatever is "wrong" with them as well. Perfection just isn't possible. Not sure where that leaves the party or Canada.
It’s not a vestige from another time, it’s a legitimate part of Westminster parliamentary systems and always has been.
I myself am a lifetime LPC voter with a couple brief dalliances to Green and NDP when I was younger, and after seeing how far left Trudeau took the party, was about to spoil my ballot this time until they changed leaders. Even I still can’t believe how well it worked to change the leader.
The only thing you can conclude is that Canadians hate Poilievre, they just hated Trudeau more (a lot more).
Carney is rapidly changing the LPC back into its 1990s Chrétien centre-right incarnation. CPC needs to find some wedge issues and a new leader.
Liberal voters and the media would be having an absolute meltdown if a Conservative minority pulled this shit and you are being disingenuous if you think otherwise. It would be considered a "dangerous right-wing coup" - and the party would probably and rightly pay a huge price in the next election for doing it. But of course the Liberals won't be penalized because the G&M will drop high and mighty editorials about how this is just fine and don't you peasants know this is the Way Things Have Always Been Done.
Other countries change how government does things, and it's clear we are too childish to be trusted with floor crossings minus a by-election so we can and should make the change. It's one thing honouring a quirky tradition when it's only used when MP McGrumpyface crosses in a huff after a public disagreement with their party leader, putting X party 25 seats from a majority instead of 26. It's another entirely to use this as a lever of power to retroactively rig election outcomes. The possible Chinese interference angle makes this just that much more bonkers. Hey foreign adversaries, just bribe or blackmail a handful of MP's and you can get whatever government your heart desires!
Whining about the influence the Globe and Mail (seriously, a declining legacy newspaper swayed things?) has is, I’m sorry to say, loser energy. Like, Sean Connery in The Rock kinda quote.
Pick some issues that the Liberals are weak on under current leadership (aggressiveness of negotiations with FN over pipelines would be a good one) and a charismatic leader and go win.
Or, realize that if you care about policy, you’re basically getting 75% of the CPC platform under Carney anyway and become a Liberal. The party has winner energy these days.
G&M, CBC, CTV, Global News, hundreds of funded and boosted influencers, and what seem like rabid bot farms on every social media platform. Like it or not but they set the tone and agenda in the Liberals' favour. I find these outlets particularly insidious because they pretend to be impartial but in no way are. And why? Subsidies subsidies subsidies.
You can't handicap your opponents by secretly rigging the game and then call them losers for not winning anyway.
They would and they'd be just as wrong. Don't have to like floor crossing but if their positions were reversed Poilievre would be doing the same thing. Harper and Scheer both took in floor crossers. Poilievre would too and who knows he may in the future. No matter which side you're on politically you'll bitch when your team has someone cross to the other side but it doesn't matter. No party is going to change the rules on this.
The problem may have been that Jenni Byrne and PP think too much alike. Steve Outhouse is the new campaign manager. He did a great job of focusing Danielle Smith and quelling some of the more out there elements of the UCP. Hopefully he can do the same for PP.
The unspoken role of China in the floor crossing of Michael Ma disappointed me today. I have read about a visit of Ma to the Chinese ambassador three days before he crossed to become a Liberal. That must have been known to you, Jen. The Markham-Unionville riding was in turmoil in the election of ‘25. I am sure you followed that as well. What needs to be reported is the lack of legislation on foreign interference and the creation of a registry of foreign governments. Canada is interfered with because our laws lack teeth or don’t exist.
The Canadian democracy is under attack by tolerance of floor crossings in 2025. Those who cross might think more seriously if they were to be forced to run in a bi-election before changing their party banner.
The seriousness of this undermining of election integrity resides with you in the “unowned press”. I expect that CBC and the Globe will continue to tell this story as a loss for Pierre Poilievre and deflecting from the more sinister turn towards election interference.
I think this whole matter should be referred to the RCMP for foreign interference. Oh yeah, we have no laws in place.
The media have shown their stripes again on this story and still nobody notices.
A law was passed during the Trudeau era, but Carney has yet to set up the Foreign Interference Registry and name the responsible Commissioner, despite the legal requirement to do so. "Carney government accused of dragging its feet on foreign agent registry" (Globe and Mail, 10 December 2025) https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-carney-government-dragging-feet-foreign-agent-registry/
If ever there were a time for Carney to show that he is not owned by China, this is it. There is a requirement to create a foreign interference registry. As has been pointed out, this is not an option for you to be a dilettante about Mr. Prime Minister, this is required and recent events are reminding Canadians why this is so.
If an MP is going to cross the floor, he(she) should have the courage to resign the seat and let the people in the riding decide if they want this person to represent them. Alas, greed for power and notoriety are the deciding factors not principles.
We let the green meanies take over … and mean they are,
They’d rather we freeze in the dark than develope our resources.
They’d rather we wait in hallways for treatment, or offer us MAID than actually do the things that will fund healthcare (not that funding is the issue, we spend more and get less than the rest of the OECD)
They’d rather our schools are over crowded than do the things that will pay for education
They’d rather let our children’s children pay for their excesses …
You get the picture … we were once proud of our resources
The green meanies took away our pride, and tried desperately to take away our jobs too.
Jen, is “Trudeau Era” a stand in for:
Performative
Peak woke
Unserious
All of the above
It's funny how few defenders that era now has. There sure were a lot at the time.
It’s more that Jen used the phrase repeatedly and it clearly is meant to imply more than 2015-2024
Merging the topics of insider lobbying and no consequences for failure, Mark Wiseman of the Century Initiative and formerly Blackock is to be rewarded for his excellent work destroying our immigration system by becoming our US Ambassador. Skilled in the art of dancing in and out of the public and private sectors, he successfully lobbied for the removal of any screening or sane restrictions to allow the tsunami of indentured servants we had while also directing investments into rental real estate. Destroying our immigration system to inflate our real estate bubble while lowering the wage floor and further tanking productivity, a truly impressive quadfecta. This is Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Canadian Excellence.
Exactly right. And almost no one of consequence gives a shit, especially the 'media' of any kind. But the accuracy and insightfulness of your comment demonstrates just how broken this country is. Young people need to leave because it's not going to get magically better; it's going to get 'progressively' worse (how I wish that were only a pun).
Just listened to Andrew Potter podcast. A question for Jen why have a guest.
I was about to write the same. A monologue with occasional interjection from Mr. Potter.
Canada and the US have very different problems with respect to public service by private sector people.
In the US there is a genuine revolving door problem. People go into government for a stint, then go either into or back into the private sector to work for the people they were supposed to be regulating. IMO too much is made of the overt corruption here, it’s not that. I think most people who do so genuinely desire to do good work both in government and in the private sector. But incentives are powerful.
In Canada, people who go into government often can’t use that experience in the private sector. And this gives the public sector a real knowledge deficit, because the uncomfortable truth is that the people who best know how to regulate anything (whether it’s banking, oil, fishing or farming) are people who work in that field. But there’s a problem getting the best advice instead of the most self-serving. And there’s no magic solution to that, just muddling through.
In Canada though, this problem is worst for politicians. We - seriously - have trouble attracting top talent to politics. Serving in parliament for a few years is very rarely a way to advance your career. A lot of people who lose elections struggle to find good paying jobs. That’s bad - it makes it hard to get good people to run for office. It’s no coincidence that Carney is a guy who doesn’t need the job. Again, the media, speaking tour, book sales, etc. that US politicians can pursue is unappealing. But we have a real problem on the opposite side in Canada
Yes, critical reviews are only allowed of people who the official culture consider "problematic." So, numerous reviews savaging Jordan Peterson's self-help book. Is it any good? I have no idea. Maybe it is crap, but the savage reviews are entirely about their hatred for Jordan Peterson.
Since most MPs owe their seats to the party establishment and the latter are controlled by unaccountable elites, an MP crossing the floor is no different than a player being traded in hockey or baseball and the like. It shows that Parliament is mass entertainment just like professional sports (and covered in the same way by mass media), and I suspect the outcome of its deliberations are more
like the results of professional wrestling than the World Series or Stanley Cup.
So a process where anyone can run for office via primaries and elections are every two years seems to me superior to back room decisions by elites (Laurentian or Chinese or otherwise).
And to milk the sports analogy a bit further, the Canadian voters seem to be like the 1960s definition of the first two rows at a wrestling match - a combined IQ of 100 and 32 total teeth between them 😆😆😆
I think the US got it right with an elected multi-cameral presidential system built with the assumption that someone will try to become a dictator/king so better put in a ton of checks and balances.
We are screwed no matter what we do. MP's are useless trained seals when it comes to constraining government power, but also just independent enough to allow shenanigans like this to take place. Give them more independence and their seats will just be perpetually for sale. Give them less and the party leader rules supreme.
Replacing party leaders should probably require a show of hands though, rather than a 12-18 month shitshow like we have now.
Worst thing on CBC Radio now: "Because News" a comedy show that's deeply woke and deeply unfunny.
Hasn't been the same since Arthur Black died.
I appreciate your comments about the unowned press, very few of them seem to be willing to step out of the box, this crew included. They will reap what they have sown and I hope they feel guilty because they are supposed to be our last line of defence.
Notice how little criticism of the imminent floor-crossing Carney coup appears in the G&M and TV news. "Oh well, they're allowed to do it, and that mean Poilievre probably is to blame anyway for being frowny and unacceptably far right and 'unelectable'(TM)." The collective feeling in media is a sigh of relief that their subsidies won't be threatened for at least another 3+ years. I throw my hands in the air in exasperation.
I’m glad Andrew brought up the role of courts in preventing failed experiments from being “rolled back”.
Does anyone recall when BC tried to forbid the use of drugs in public parks, only to have a court declare it unconstitutional? And then there was the bike-lanes decision in Ontario.
Charter jurisprudence is increasingly adding friction, turning public policy decisions into one-way doors. I suspect we're going to see much more of this.
“These are my principles. If you don’t like them,I have others.” Groucho Marx
“Floor Crossing: Politics becomes personal brand management.,Rather than public service. That is not statesmanship. It is opportunism dressed up as principle.” John Ivison. He also wrote what Winston Churchill said about crossing the floor: “ It’s one thing to be a rat,it’s another to re-rat!”
Michael Ma… nobody. “Sit your ass down,fill this seat. Vote when we tell you to.