Coming off three byelection wins and a handful of floor-crossers, Prime Minister Carney is now armed with a newly minted majority government. The benefits of going from a minority to a majority for the government are quite clear. As the PM noted in a press conference earlier this week, a majority government will make for a much more substantive and better-functioning Parliament, leading to the quicker passage of legislation.
Passing legislation has certainly been an issue for this government: less than half of all proposed government bills have become law at this point. With a majority, the Liberals can now reconstitute the makeup of parliamentary committees, ensuring quicker passage of government bills and putting an end to Conservative filibustering that, at times, has descended into absurd tangents on the virtues of puppies.
Being able to ram through legislation isn’t the only substantive benefit of having a majority. There are also others, such as the stability to deal with a very unstable US president and a foreseeable runway for PM Carney to implement his ambitious agenda.
But the benefits of a majority government won’t only be felt by the Liberals. In fact, despite the obvious losses of floor crossings, the majority may be something of a blessing in disguise for the Liberals’ opponents. Both the Poilievre-led Conservatives and the Lewis-led NDP now get the gift of much-needed time for both parties and leaders to get their own houses in order.
For the Conservatives, if they are in fact set on marching to electoral battle under the leadership of Poilievre again, they will need the time to figure out how they should be criticizing the Carney Liberals in a manner that is actually effective while also offering a vision of their own.
Clearly, whatever the heck they’ve been doing for the last year — retreating to tired tactics including “just like Justin,” “sneaky Mark Carney,” and most recently, criticizing the economic credentials and work experience of the Harvard- and Oxford-educated PM who helmed not just one but two central banks — is not working.
And frankly, it’s becoming hard to watch the Conservatives flail about as they are, not unlike watching a turtle struggle on its back shell trying to get its footing.
Further, given Poilievre’s numerous pivots over the past few years, the Conservative party also needs the time to re-re-re-reset Poilievre to a version of himself that is still authentic to who he is — without being fully authentic to who he has been for the last 22 years in Parliament. Poilievre shouldn’t completely soften his attack dog instincts — in a lot of ways, it’s what his supporters like most about him. But he’s got to be able to criticize the government on substance and without doing so in nonsensical three-word slogans or name-calling.
For their part, the NDP will need the time a majority government provides to quite literally rebuild the party from the ground up considering they were reduced to non-party status in the last election and are, by far, in the worst financial shape of the three main parties. With newly elected leader Avi Lewis at the helm, time can also only be helpful as he seeks to further assert himself in the federal political sphere.
Without a seat in the House of Commons, Lewis won’t be able to rely on the social media clip generation factory also known as Question Period. Instead, he’ll need the time to build up his name recognition and introduce himself to Canadians. As an unabashed leftist who has refused to couch himself in centrist language, Lewis could also use the benefit of time to position himself as the progressive alternative, as the right-of-centre Carney government marches on with an agenda that doesn’t coincide with what many progressive Canadians would like to see from their government.
The majority also changes the dynamic between the three parties. Both the NDP and the Conservatives are now unburdened by the shackles of a minority Parliament and no longer have to support the government under the duress of a potential election. Given how muted both the NDP and CPC have been with respect to some of the more problematic bills the Liberals have tabled — and in some cases passed — one can expect the opposition to be much more vociferous in their criticism. That is ultimately bad news for the Liberals.
Bill C-22, The Lawful Access Act, might be the first test case as there are reasons for both the NDP and the CPC to strongly oppose the bill. Among other things, the Lawful Access Act allows the Public Safety Minister to demand any email provider, messaging app, cloud service or social media platform to introduce a backdoor surveillance capability for law enforcement through breaking encryption.
The government’s talking point on this is that they’re only going after criminals, so regular, law-abiding Canadians needn’t worry. The glaringly obvious problem with that line is that once you break encryption and introduce a backdoor surveillance capability, it doesn’t only somehow exist for law enforcement. That built-in backdoor exists for everyone, including hostile state actors and criminal hacker networks who wish to exploit it. The NDP’s talking points about law enforcement overreach and hostile state actors spying on dissidents within various diaspora communities practically write themselves.
It’s also worth noting that when the UK tried to introduce similar measures last year, it became a huge sticking point with the US. It turns out a critical mass of House and Senate Republicans didn’t like the idea of mandating a backdoor surveillance capability. The UK ended up dropping its pursuit of encryption breaking after pressure from Trump officials like Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance.
With our trade issues still left unresolved with the US, and with Trump officials looking for any weakness on the Canadian side to exploit to their advantage, moving forward with an encryption breaking bill that we know will annoy the Americans seems like an uncharacteristic and blatant misstep from the Carney government on the US trade file, especially since the Digital Services Tax was ostensibly killed for the very same reasons. It’s a clear opening that the Conservatives can target.
The Conservative base will also eat up all of the dystopian surveillance measures contained in the bill, like mandatory metadata retention — meaning Canadian telco and internet service providers would have to retain some information pertaining to every single one of their users for an entire year, irrespective of whether a person is suspected of anything untoward — giving even more reason for the Conservatives to launch a full-scale opposition to it.
But it isn’t only those outside the Liberal party who may benefit from this new state of affairs; a majority government also has the potential to embolden the Liberal MPs who disagree with the government on a myriad of issues.
A caucus with a majority is not as incentivized to keep their complaints limited to Liberal group chats and to the walls of the caucus and cabinet rooms. After all, it’s a lot easier to speak your mind when you know the opposition can’t potentially use it as a wedge to try and bring down the government.
Liberal MPs who have been uncharacteristically muted on a variety of topics recently — Netanyahu’s recent actions in Lebanon, backsliding on the environment and Indigenous reconciliation, the cutting of foreign aid just to name a few — will surely once again find their principles with the safety a majority government provides.
A majority government is obviously good news for the PM and the government. Mark Carney promised an ambitious agenda, and this increases the chances he’ll be able to implement it. But it also doubles as good news for the opposition and dissenting Liberal MPs, who now have the runway to mount a real fight. And what seems like only upside now might turn out to be bad news for Carney and the government in the long run. One of the truest adages in politics is that the longer a government is in power, the more vulnerable they are to attacks from the outside and dissent from within.
But that’s a later, down the road problem. For now, the PM and the Liberal team can bask in the new-found warmth of their 174-seat count.