Three by-elections, a floor-crosser and the week we learned that anyone can come and anyone can go

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This was supposed to be a column about the trio of by-elections in a few days that would have delivered the Liberals to the balmy climes of MajorityLand – if everything went exactly right for them, that is.

But then, Marilyn Gladu decided to make Wednesday the most exciting day of the week. The Sarnia, Ont. MP was elected four times under the Conservative banner by stout margins, and she hails quite decidedly from that party’s right flank. She was on no one’s list of oh, let’s say the 134 Tories most likely to defect.

Which means Terrebonne, the only by-election that was a question mark, goes from must-win to icing on an already-towering cake for Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Before Ms. Gladu joined them, the Liberals needed all three of those seats to have a controlling majority in the House of Commons that would not have required the Speaker to prop things up. Two of the ridings are Liberal strongholds in Toronto, but Terrebonne – almost uniformly francophone, staunchly Bloc Quebecois and won for the Liberals by a single vote last spring, since nullified by the Supreme Court of Canada – was going to be a fight.

Carney says Liberal values are unchanged after socially conservative MP Marilyn Gladu joins party

The Liberal Party happens to be gathering in Montreal this weekend for their policy convention, making it easy to keep funnelling all of their bold-faced names into the riding, even if Terrebonne – about 30 kilometres northwest of the city – has become a bonus question. And who knows? Given the rate at which people are having epiphanies that the best way to serve their constituents and their own deepest convictions is on the government benches, maybe they’ll have a new caucus member as a door prize at the convention.

Ms. Gladu, as the newest Liberal – for the moment, anyway – is the walking embodiment of the twinned bizarre facts animating Canadian politics right now. Absolutely everyone can find a home in Mark Carney’s Liberal government, it seems, and anyone at all might see fit to bolt from Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.

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Mind you, every time another one of his MPs walks out, Mr. Poilievre sneers cheap shots at their retreating back, offering a live staged reading of his one-man show, Why Many People Do Not Find Me Likable or Inspiring.

“We need a global leader with a plan to make a more resilient Canada, a stronger Canada, a more self-reliant Canada for this critical moment. And that man is our Prime Minister, Mark Carney,” Ms. Gladu said on Wednesday, as she stood grinning beside him in his office.

She is known on a personal level as a very collegial MP, but still, to call this a sudden or surprising conversion is weapons-grade understatement.

Religious freedom has been the animating force of Ms. Gladu’s political career. She ran for the Tory leadership in 2020, opposed a bill to ban conversion therapy, supported the trucker convoy and opposed vaccine mandates, while questioning the seriousness of COVID-19.

She has also introduced two successful private members’ bills, one to create a national framework for palliative care and another to protect employee pensions when a company goes belly-up.

Opinion: A Liberal Party in a triumphal mood finds it easier to accept conflicting values

And her constituents will not be indifferent to her change of teams. In last April’s federal election, she beat her Liberal challenger by 15 percentage points, and that was a comparatively narrow win for her, due to the NDP’s collapse. The two elections before that, Ms. Gladu more than doubled both of her left-leaning opponents’ share of the vote.

On Wednesday, Steven Guilbeault – who quit cabinet over the energy agreement with Alberta – was laughing about a social media meme showing the mom from That ’70s Show emptying a bottle of booze into a blender, under the caption “Steven Guilbeault seeing Marilyn Gladu walk into the caucus meeting.”

But by Friday, the Liberals gathered in Montreal had gotten the memo – Mr. Guilbeault included – and they were all cooing about a big, soft, squishy red tent that welcomes all, and about how certain they are that Ms. Gladu shares their values and priorities.

So, one way or another, it looks like Mr. Carney is going to end up with a majority, albeit one assembled in slow motion. I asked Steven Chaplin, senior legal counsel for the House of Commons from 2002 to 2017, what it will mean when it all comes together. Before we spoke, he tried to find another example of this happening, for a precedent to illuminate things, but he came up empty.

The most direct mechanical issue is the composition of committees, where the Conservatives and Bloc currently hold the majority and can largely control things. Real work gets done in committees, Mr. Chaplin said, and they have a direct effect on legislation moving along, so this is about more than obfuscation or filibuster.

Altering the composition of committees would take a change to the standing orders that govern the 45th Parliament, he said, and the most logical way for the government to do that here would be to bring a motion in the House. If the Liberals tip over into a majority after Tuesday, as seems all but certain, they’ll have the sheer numbers to push that through, along with anything else they like.

“If it’s not important enough to say this is a matter of confidence over which the government will fall, basically the opposition to a certain extent has greater ability to control what’s going on,” Mr. Chaplin says of the minority situation. “But once you have the votes, it’s Rob Walsh the former law clerk who said it: It’s pure arithmetic. If the government wants something to happen, or somebody is trying to unreasonably slow things down, the government will just say: ‘This debate will end next Tuesday at 4 o’clock.’”

But then, Mr. Chaplin pointed out something glaringly obvious that simply hadn’t occurred to me: the 343 members of the House of Commons are never frozen in place, and with margins this thin, you never know what could happen next.

“You’re kind of living on that bizarre knife edge,” he said. “What happens if you have three or four by-elections and then suddenly they lose, are we going to find ourselves having this conversation backwards?”

MajorityLand isn’t a one-way ticket.