Ontario MP Marilyn Gladu is welcomed into the Liberal caucus by Prime Minister Mark Carney.
The Canadian Press
“The whole point of being an MP is to represent your constituents,” a Conservative MP told a local Ontario newspaper back in January, when she backed a call for automatic by-elections following an MP’s defection.
“So if they’re voting you in under one platform,” she continued, “for you to switch for whatever reasons, just seems to me to not be representing what you’re supposed to be there to represent.”
That politician was Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong MP Marilyn Gladu, who, on Wednesday, crossed the floor from the Conservatives to join the Liberal government.
Ms. Gladu professed rather unconvincingly that her move represents the true will of her constituents – “Sarnia Lambton was always a bellwether riding,” she wrote in a statement, not mentioning that she won the seat as a Conservative one year ago with more than 53 per cent of the vote – adding that she has heard from constituents who want “serious leadership.” As of yet, Ms. Gladu has not reiterated her call for an automatic by-election following her own defection.
Opinion: Floor-crossings are part of a Canadian tradition – and fair play in our politics
There are few things as inglorious in politics as crossing the floor to an opposing party. It’s often personally humiliating, professionally humbling, and objectively shameless. In January, Ms. Gladu responded to a Conservative caucus member who disclosed he had rejected an offer to join the Liberals by writing, “Thank you for being true to the voters who elected you.” In February, she accused the Liberals of destroying Canada’s immigration system, and insisted Prime Minister Mark Carney fire his Immigration Minister. In March, she posted on X that “violating our Charter Rights has become normal” to the Liberal government. Ms. Gladu now needs to eat those words, chunk by chunk, as the constituents who voted for her as a Conservative MP scowl in her general direction.
But Ms. Gladu isn’t the only one reputationally wounded by this particular floor-crossing. Obviously her acquisition is great get for the governing Liberals, and it brings Mr. Carney that much closer to his coveted majority. It also reflects well on the Prime Minister personally, as someone who is able to attract as unlikely a floor-crosser as Ms. Gladu, who has served her riding since 2015.
But it says something else entirely about the Liberal Party as an entity: about what it stands for, what its principles are, where its ideological outlook lies on the political spectrum.
Ms. Gladu is hardly a red Tory – one who could ostensibly find a home in a more right-of-centre Liberal Party. In fact, she is about as blue-blooded as one can get.
Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu crosses floor to Liberals
Ms. Gladu cheered on truckers who occupied downtown Ottawa during the self-described freedom convoy in 2022. She sponsored a private member’s bill in 2023 to designate December as “Christian Heritage Month” in Canada. She spread misinformation about the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic. She voted against a bill criminalizing conversion therapy for LGBTQ individuals. She even attempted to run to lead the Conservative Party in 2020.
The governing Liberals will obviously accept whichever warm body comes its way on its slow march to a majority. But accepting someone like Ms. Gladu into its caucus perpetuates the Liberals’ reputation as a party without foundational principles: as one where the desire to govern is, in fact, its primary ideological driver. That explains how the Liberals can oscillate so wildly on major issues – on carbon taxes, on immigration, on resource extraction and development – and how it can accept someone like Ms. Gladu on one end of the political spectrum, and someone like former NDP MP Lori Idlout on the other.
Liberals will explain this by insisting they are one big, broad tent that accepts people of diverse political orientations. But actual tents have stakes in the ground that generally don’t move, and political parties generally don’t completely reverse themselves on central policy and ideological positions overnight. What the Liberal Party actually is, in fact, is a bedsheet, tenuously tied to a flagpole, flapping in whichever direction the wind happens to be blowing. People get caught up in that bedsheet because it’s big, and broad, and because the gusting air makes it exceptionally powerful. And people want to be part of the powerful, winning team.
None of this really matters in the grand scheme of things; Mr. Carney will likely get his majority, Ms. Gladu’s hypocrisy will soon be memory-holed until the next election, and that bright red bedsheet on the beach will keep whipping back and forth, depending on the weather. But the Liberal Party made the mistake in the not-too-recent-past of being a party almost entirely defined and steered by one man, rather than a set collection of principles. It looks like it is headed down that same path again.