Running for office is supposed to be hard. Earning a majority is supposed to be harder. Mark Carney has apparently found a shortcut.

Friday marked the one-year anniversary of Carney’s swearing-in as Canada’s 24th prime minister. It is worth pausing on what that year has produced. In the spring of 2025, Carney called a snap election and came up short: 169 seats, three shy of a majority. Voters looked at his platform and decided a minority government was the appropriate level of trust. The electorate spoke clearly. Carney has spent the twelve months since working to overrule them.

Four opposition MPs have now crossed the floor to join the Liberal caucus. First came three Conservatives: Nova Scotia’s Chris d’Entremont in November, Toronto’s Michael Ma in December, and Edmonton’s Matt Jeneroux in February. Then, on March 11, Nunavut NDP MP Lori Idlout followed suit, giving the Liberals 170 seats. Two by-elections in Toronto on April 13, filling vacancies left by Bill Blair and Chrystia Freeland, are expected to deliver the final two seats needed for a majority. A third by-election in Terrebonne, ordered by the Supreme Court, could expand that margin even further.

If this strikes you as an unusual way to build a majority government, that’s because it is. By the time those by-elections are done, Carney will have assembled a majority not from 172 voters choosing Liberal on a ballot, but from a patchwork of defectors, departures, and judicial do-overs. No prime minister in modern Canadian history has manufactured a majority so brazenly without facing the electorate.

The public recognizes the perversion of democracy at play, even if Ottawa’s political class feigns ignorance. Polls from Ipsos and Angus Reid show a striking consensus: 62 per cent of Canadians believe MPs should be barred from switching parties after an election, 69 per cent say floor-crossings must trigger a by-election, 74 per cent oppose the status quo system where crossers serve under new colours. These are not narrow, partisan margins. This is a near-unanimous public indictment of a practice that offends Canada’s basic sense of democratic fair play.

Consider Idlout’s case specifically. She won her Nunavut seat by 41 votes in 2025, running under the NDP banner. Last August, she publicly declared herself “disgusted” by the Carney government’s response to Nunavut.

Days before her defection, she appeared at an NDP leadership event. Then she crossed. Her statement cited “threats against our sovereignty” and “pressures on the well-being of people throughout the North.” Perhaps. But voters in Nunavut chose an NDP member of Parliament. They did not choose a Liberal. The distinction matters, or democracy doesn’t.

Meanwhile, the prime minister who engineered this parliamentary acquisition has spent a remarkable amount of his first year outside the country. A breakdown published by The Hub documented 26 international trips and 68 days abroad since taking office. That is 20 percent of his time as prime minister spent somewhere other than Canada. By comparison, Justin Trudeau was abroad 34 days in his first year. Stephen Harper managed 54. Carney has doubled Trudeau and lapped Harper.

The globetrotting has produced memoranda of understanding, agreements-in-principle, and photo opportunities with world leaders. It has produced a single signed, but as yet unratified agreement with Indonesia. The Globe and Mail reported that despite all the summitry, “few trade initiatives have emerged” and “the handful of announcements have been skimpy.”

This is the tension at the heart of the Carney project. Abroad, he is all ambition and motion, jetting from Delhi to Sydney to Tokyo to Oslo, collecting handshakes that make for good B-roll. At home, his path to power runs through backrooms rather than ballot boxes. The prime minister who promised to restore Canadian confidence has instead demonstrated a profound lack of confidence in Canadian voters. He will not ask them for the majority he wants.

He will simply take it.

Pierre Poilievre called it right when he said Carney is “using backroom deals to seize a costly majority that voters rejected.” That is not a partisan talking point. It is a factual description of what has occurred. A minority government is being converted into a majority through a mechanism that three-quarters of the country opposes.

The fix is straightforward. Parliament should pass legislation requiring any MP who crosses the floor to face a by-election within 90 days. The NDP proposed it. The Conservatives have called for it. Public opinion overwhelmingly supports it. The only party that opposes the idea is the one benefiting from the current arrangement. That tells you everything you need to know.

One year in, Carney has built something genuinely impressive: the most meticulously engineered parliamentary majority in Canadian history. The trouble is that engineering a majority and earning one are not the same thing. Canadians understand the difference, even if their prime minister does not.

Richard Ciano is chief strategist at Yorkville Strategies, a public opinion research firm. He has previously served as president of the Ontario PC Party and national vice president of the Conservative Party of Canada. 

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