Carney’s manufactured majority is a constitutional betrayal

Floor crossing may be legal, but using it to engineer a majority crosses a line

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Canadians handed Prime Minister Mark Carney a minority government on April 28, 2025. The electorate rendered a precise verdict: “We trust you to govern, but not without close supervision.” A minority mandate is not a consolation prize. It is a direct electoral instruction.

Carney has cleverly figured out how to ignore the verdict. Five opposition MPs have crossed the floor to join his Liberals: Conservatives Chris d’Entremont, Michael Ma, Matt Jeneroux, and Marilyn Gladu, and NDP member Lori Idlout. Three recent byelections sealed the majority. His defenders will note, correctly, that floor crossing is a long-established feature of Westminster democracy. The system has always permitted it.

They are right. And it does not matter.

Because what Carney has done is fundamentally different from anything that justification can cover. He did not receive defectors. He recruited them, running a deliberate, organized, incentivized campaign to alter the composition of the House of Commons after the electorate had set it.

That distinction is not semantic. It is an abuse of executive power. One is a feature of Westminster democracy. The other is a subversion of what voters decided. In a parliamentary system, authority flows from voters to Parliament to government. It does not run in reverse.

When voters produce a minority Parliament, they have said this party may govern but may not govern alone. It means the government must negotiate, persuade, compromise. As Walter Bagehot argued in The English Constitution, the system works because Parliament can withdraw confidence. The moment a Prime Minister can subvert what voters give him and manufacture his own confidence through side deals, the system breaks. Carney has subverted what voters gave him.

The numbers tell the story plainly. The Conservatives received 41.3 per cent of the popular vote. The NDP received 6.3 per cent. Together, the parties from which five MPs were recruited represent 47.6 per cent of all Canadians who cast a ballot, more than the Liberals’ own 43.8 per cent. Constituents who voted explicitly against the Liberal government sent these MPs to Ottawa. Their votes are now being used to remove the constraint on government power they impose. Every person who cast one of those 47.6 per cent of ballots is now less represented in Parliament than they were on election night. Prime Minister Carney devalued them.

Liberal democracies are not only about choosing governments. They are equally about holding them to account. The minority condition was a real constraint built into the system. Carney demolished it.

“But it’s not illegal!” is the government’s first, last, and only defence, and it deserves the contempt it has earned. Canada’s Westminster system, where governments depend on the confidence of Parliament, was never designed to be governed solely by written law. Its most important rules are conventions, and they are not optional. Violating them may not break the law, but it breaks the system.

Canadians do not merely elect MPs to pass legislation. We elect them as custodians of our institutions. When an MP crosses the floor at the executive’s invitation to augment that executive’s power, they have not exercised their parliamentary freedom. They have traded it. In doing so, they have degraded the institution they swore to serve. The move undermines trust in our institutions.

This has sparked real anger in Western Canada. Albertans and Saskatchewan residents voted Conservative in high numbers again. They did everything democracy asks of its citizens.

Among the five floor-crossers is Matt Jeneroux of Edmonton Riverbend. He was elected by Albertans and now serves the government they voted to constrain. That is a betrayal of the mandate he was given.

Western Canadians have seen this before. They savoured that their choices had left Liberals as a minority. Now Carney’s manufactured majority reinforces the message that Laurentian power always has: opposition from the West is a logistical problem to be solved, not a legitimate democratic signal to be respected. The strength of a federation rests on every region believing its participation is genuine. When electoral outcomes can be engineered after the fact, that belief weakens.

At its core, the issue returns to the election result itself. The minority verdict of an election is not a hurdle to be skirted. It is not a simple constitutional technicality. It is a limit on power. Carney removed it.

His answer should trouble every Canadian who believes the House of Commons exists to supervise the executive, not to be assembled by it.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).