Murphy’s Logic: Floor-crossing rules need to change

Steve Murphy shares his thoughts on the Liberal government’s new majority.

And suddenly … Canada has a majority government.

OK, it wasn’t exactly sudden. It took the combination of five floor-crossings and three federal byelections, over a period of several months to give Prime Minister Mark Carney effective control of Parliament.

There’s been no shortage of grumbling, mostly from those who don’t support the Liberals, that this isn’t how the system is supposed to work. That it’s somehow anti-democratic for Mark Carney to cobble together the majority he was denied – by a thread – in last year’s general election.

But that’s not the case.

Under the current rules, this is exactly how Parliament is supposed to work, and the way it’s worked for centuries. The person and party that command the confidence of the House governs as they see it.

Mark Carney engineered a majority in this case but, bear in mind, a government elected with a narrow majority in a general election could lose control of Parliament in exactly the same fashion -- one floor-crossing, one byelection at a time.

But it may well be time to change the rules, as they pertain to floor-crossings.

It’s one thing for voters to knowingly tip the balance of power in a byelection, but something again for individual MPs to choose to reshape the government for their own reasons – which may, or may not, represent the wishes of the people they represent. Their voters should be consulted.

If it’s too cumbersome and costly to have a byelection every time a member crosses the floor, we could require all floor-crossers to resign and reoffer, as soon as a vacancy triggers a byelection in any other riding.

Such a rule would have resulted in seven byelections this week, the results of which might well have produced an outcome other than what we have now. Or maybe not. But at least tens of thousands of voters, not a handful of politicians, would have made the decision.