It took two more floor-crossings and a clean sweep of all three of last night’s by-elections, but Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government has finally crossed the 173-seat threshold to secure a narrow but working majority in the House of Commons. So, what happens next?

A quick check of the parliamentary website confirms that the party standings have already been updated to include the three newly elected — and, in one case, re-elected —  MPs, but it will likely be a few days before Danielle Martin, Doly Begum and Tatiana Auguste can claim (or reclaim) their designated seats in the chamber, as the results have to be validated, certified and sent to the speaker before they can present themselves at the Bar of the House of Commons.

Until then, the numbers remain unchanged, although adding longtime Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu to the Liberal lineup last week gave Team Carney a combined total of 171, which, fortunately for the Liberals, is just enough to survive a last-minute confidence vote without forcing House Speaker Francis Scarpeleggia to break the tie.

In fact, he was obliged to do just that — for the first, and, in the wake of the byelections along with Gladu’s defection, very possibly the last time — on the final sitting day before the two-week Easter recess, when, citing the longstanding precedent to vote to continue debate, he voted against an opposition-backed committee report calling for an independent inquiry into IT procurement policies, “in order to allow the House to preserve the possibility that the matter might somehow be before the House again in the future, to be decided by a majority of members,” as he noted at the time.

In theory, the new majority math gives the prime minister and his team with a much more predictable — or, at least, less unpredictable — parliamentary arena. No longer will his government be at constant risk of losing power.

And yet, the reality is that at no point since the last election has that actually been a clear and present danger. Even when the opposition parties had the numbers to trigger a snap election, they showed no interest in doing so, instead allowing votes on matters traditionally considered to be questions of confidence questions — the budget, the speech from the Throne and even the estimates — to be deemed adopted on division, without a recorded vote.

Even when operating from a minority position, the Liberals were able to get their most high-priority legislation to the finish line, although not as quickly as might have been the case in an actual majority setting, and not without striking one-off side deals with opposition parties when necessary, as was the case with Justice Minister Sean Fraser’s bid to expand the existing hate crimes laws, which, as chronicled in iPolitics passim, ultimately required the support of the Bloc Québécois to make it through a weeks-long Conservative-driven filibuster at the justice committee.

Unlike the House of Commons, votes at committee are rarely if ever considered to be questions of confidence, which means opposition parties can use their combined clout to command a majority at the table with virtually no risk of triggering an election.

(There is, as always, a bit of a grey area here, as a minority government could let it be known that it would consider losing a specific vote at committee to be an implicit show of non-confidence, but that’s a high-stakes game of chicken that few minority prime ministers have been willing to play.)

Which brings us to what is widely expected to be the biggest chance that the new majority math is about to make to the parliamentary dynamics: With that two-vote buffer, the Liberals can now credibly make the case that the current committee configuration, which divvies up 10 seats between the three recognized parties, with five each allocated to the government and the opposition, is no longer an accurate reflection of the overall party standings in the House of Commons. In this case, adding one seat to each committee, and allocating it to the government, would work.

As per longstanding tradition, committee makeup is established via sessional order at the start of a new parliament, and is meant to approximate the relative share of the vote for each recognized party, which is usually adopted unanimously within the first few weeks of the opening session, and is in force for the duration of that parliament.

There’s no obvious precedent for a scenario in which a government is initially installed as a minority, but manages to cobble together a majority midway through its term, but there’s also no rule that would prevent the House of Commons from passing an updated sessional order to give the government a matching majority at the committee table as well — which, as it happens, is exactly what the Liberals have been hinting that they’re going to do now that they have the votes to make those changes without at least one other party on side.

From his comments to reporters in the wake of the byelections, there was no mistaking the prime minister’s displeasure with the current state of House committees, which, he contended, seemed to spend more time on “performative” than “substantive” debate.

“I say this as someone who’s testified to committees in front of the Canadian parliament, in front of the U.K. parliament for decades,” he noted. 

“There’s a difference between real testimony, real substance, getting to issues, debating aspects of law, advancing … the job of parliamentarians, and showboating. We’re going to have less of that. We’re going to have more substance. I think all parliamentarians in the end, we’ll appreciate that, even if it’s a change for some of them.” 

From a procedural perspective, the simplest approach would probably be to introduce the proposed new sessional order as an item of government business — which, while both debateable and amendable, would be subject to closure, circumventing any move by the opposition parties to launch a coordinated bid to run down the clock to stop it from going to a vote that the government would be all but guaranteed to win.

Actually setting up those new committees could take time, however — at least a few days, most likely, for the whips to submit revised membership lists, and likely at least a week after that to hold the first round of organizational meetings.

With just eight sitting weeks left on the clock until the summer recess and a handful of bills either before committee or in the queue for review, it might make more sense to hold off until MPs return to the precinct in the fall. it could even be paired with a brief prorogation, which automatically wipes the slate as far as committee membership even without a new order.