Front Burner - Mark Carney locks Liberal majority

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

With last night’s byelection wins, Prime Minister Mark Carney is now leading a majority government. But after five floor crossers joined the Liberals, spanning from the NDP to the social conservative wing of the Conservative party, there are questions around what exactly that government stands for.Aaron Wherry is a senior writer with CBC’s parliamentary bureau. He’s here to talk about how a majority will change things for the Liberals, and what Carney’s big tent looks like.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody, it's Jamie. With last night's by-elections, Karnie has finally inched his way to a majority government. But after five floor crossers joined the Liberals, spanning from the NDP to the social conservative wing of the Conservative Party, there are questions around what exactly that government stands for. And even people within the Liberal Party have been questioning the decision to bring the latest MP, Marilyn Glad You, into the fold. So today I am going to talk to CBC's senior parliamentary writer Aaron Wary about what Mark Carney's big tent looks like

and how a majority will change things for the liberals. Erin, hello. Hey. Good to have you. We are recording Monday night. It's around 10, 15, Eastern and two of the three ridings. have been called now by the CBC, and they've been called for the Liberals. So that pushes them one over a majority to 173.

The Liberals winning seats in Toronto's University, Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest, both long-considered safe seats for the party. Terban still hasn't been called in Quebec. Any surprises so far? No, not at all. The two Toronto area running Scarborough Southwest and University of Rosdale were, you know, pretty much safe liberal seats. It would have been a real shock if they hadn't won it.

And Therbont is, you know, as expected, given the result we saw last year, is going to be close and will be probably several more hours yet before it's decided. Tell me a little bit about these new MPs that we know are now coming to Parliament. So Dolly Begham and Danielle Martin. Yeah, Daniel Martin's a very prominent doctor, a media commentator on health care issues. As of tonight, Mark Carney and our entire incredible liberal team have earned an even more powerful mandate to continue building a better Canada. Has been fairly prominent, you know, over the last several years. You can kind of imagine someone like her having a fairly prominent role in the liberal government going forward.

Maybe not a cabinet minister right away, but conceivably at some point. Dolly Begham is an interesting candidate in Scarborough Southwest. She was the former deputy leader of the Ontario NDP. Not exactly a floor crosser because she's, you know, changing political levels, but another kind of wrinkle to the big tent that Mark Carney is putting together. Tonight we celebrate something so powerful, not just this incredible campaign, but a community coming together, putting aside their differences to choose hope.

compassion and progress. Tonight, we celebrate a new beginning. So, as we've discussed, this result is not really a surprise, especially after news last week that Marilyn Gladju became the fifth MP to cross the floor. It is a great pleasure to welcome Marilyn Glad you to, and we'll do it officially. This is a handshake in English. Officially to the government caucus. And I want to talk about Gladys.

do a little bit more with you here. She has been a conservative MP since 2015 and is generally seen as part of the socially conservative wing of the party. We had a conversation yesterday that touched on what that means for the conservative. Spoiler alert, her departure is bad for them. But talk to me a bit about what you think it means for the liberals, beyond getting them to that majority to attract someone considered very right on the political spectrum on at least social issues. Yeah, I don't know that Marilyn Gladu would have been the last conservative MP I would have ever imagined crossing over to the liberals, but she would have been closer to the bottom than the front. Gladys opposed legalizing cannabis. The doubling of traffic deaths and liberals

don't care. Voted against banning conversion therapy, was forced to apologize for questioning the seriousness of COVID-19 and the need for vaccine mandates. Gladu also said during her leadership a bid, she'd allow private member bills to restrict abortion. At the same time, you know, she's also been celebrated for being able to work across the aisle and has been, you know, considered one of the more collegial MPs in the House of Commons. If you were in Montreal this weekend like I was for the liberal convention and you talk to liberals there, I don't know that any of them were, you know, drawing a line in the sand and saying, I can't be in a party with Marilyn Gladu, but they were definitely sort of furrowing.

their brow and wondering, you know, does this make sense? I'm not quite sure about this. Not quite sure where this is going. They introduced her to the convention. The one night, there was applause. It didn't, to my ear, sound super enthusiastic. Bonsoir, Moriale, bonsoir,

dear liberal. Unlike the previous floor crossers, you could say, well, you know, yes, they were conservatives, but they, you know, ran in ridings where the liberals finished a close second or, you know, maybe they were more on the progressive conservative side themselves. This move kind of defies those previous ideas. This isn't a riding that it looks like the liberals would be likely to win. And she, I don't think Marilyn Gladie, who has ever really been considered a progressive conservative. Getting to this majority, it came because of this very unique coalition.

right, that they've been able to put together, including Dolly Begham now. You said she's previously a provincial member of Parliament for the Ontario NDP and Lori Idlot who came from the NDP as well. Avi Lewis, the new leader of the NDP, has said that Carney's political tent is the whole spectrum. And on yesterday's show, Toronto Star Ottawa Bureau Chief Tona McCharles talked about how some are seeing this draw to the Liberal Party as a kind of anti-Trump coalition. And I just wonder what you think of describing it that way.

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting idea. And so we need a serious leader who can address the uncertainty that has arrived due to the unjustified American tariffs. We need a global leader with a plan to make a more resilient Canada, a stronger Canada, more self-reliant Canada, for this critical moment. First, we should take a step back and realize that, you know, if you go back to the 1990s in the early 2000s, it was not at all uncommon for there to be social conservatives within the Liberal Party. There were a number of MPs who had socially conservative views. This came up on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, and it really wasn't until Justin Trudeau became leader and said, this liberal party is going to be pro-choice resolutely,

that the party really kind of drew a line on that. So I think to a certain extent you can look at it and say, well, this is the Liberal Party getting back to the way it was pre-Justin Trudeau. But I think this idea of an anti-Trump coalition, I think, is an interesting way of looking at it insofar as it kind of speaks to, I think, this really unique moment and this really unique majority that Mark Carney has put together. We really haven't had a situation like this where a party came close to winning a majority. and then was able to piece it together largely through floor crossings and not just, you know, some floor crossings, but floor crossings from two different parties. And if there is something that unites all of these people together in addition to, you know, whatever kind of big tent, the Liberal Party is capable of being, it may be this idea of implementing this agenda in the

face of the threat posed by Donald Trump. Sources in the Liberal Party told some of our colleagues that the parties and talks with nine other MPs about crossing the floor. I know a lot of political types have been saying in recent days that if they were going to cross, it would come after these by-elections. Why? Why wait? So first of all, I guess I should say, I don't know that the liberals have a bunch of floor crossers sitting in their in their back pocket that they're waiting to play in the next few days. That said, I think there is some logic to, if there were people who are ready across the floor, maybe you wait, because tonight they can say, well, we got to a majority, we got to 172, we got to 173 because of these by-elections, not directly because of the

floor crossers. And look, you know, there's an obvious rejoinder to that, which is these are safe liberal seats that they were going to have anyway, and really the difference between the result they have now and the result they had 12 months ago is those floor crossers. But I think just for symbolic reasons for one night, you want to be able to say, look, the voters have given us this majority. We haven't just used floor crossers to get there. Now that they passed into this majority territory, what would, like, if not nine, even just a couple more MPs mean for them? Yeah, I think it matters because as much as they have obviously gone to a majority, 173, you're going to hear the word narrow a lot. lot over the next few days. And it really is because we know from, you know, previous parliaments

that there are always resignations, there are always people deciding to move on to different jobs, MPs get into trouble, you know, things happen essentially. And if you are at 173, then you really can't afford to lose one or two MPs at a time. And, you know, we already know Nate Erskins-Smith, the current liberal MP for Beaches East York, is planning to run provincially. So there's a resignation you can sort of count on. They really, probably to be comfortable, would want at least a couple more seats because then they can afford to lose a couple people, you know, over the next few years. What's the last book you read that you absolutely loved?

If you're anything like me, you could probably talk about it for hours. You might be wondering what went into the story or why the author made the choices they did. And on my podcast bookends, I can help you find those answers. Every week, I sit down with authors to get the inside scoop behind your favorite books, like how Louise Penny got through five years of writer's block, or how R.F. Kwong feels about Taylor Swift. Check out bookends with Mateo Roach wherever you get your podcasts. We talked on yesterday's show about Pierre Polly of's future.

There are reports, of course, that on top of the floorcasters and defectors, 40 MPs are concerned about losing their seats. And if you were even talking about trying to force him out right now, we now have these results. And there is a conservative caucus meeting on Wednesday. The fact that Carney has a majority government must feel very real right now, right, to conservatives. And what have you heard about how consequential this caucus meeting on Wednesday could be? I mean, I think it's hard to know exactly where the concertive caucus is going to go now. The Star did have that story that said, you know, 40 conservative MPs are worried about their seats. I think that's very plausible.

I mean, if you just look at the seat projections based on where the polls are right now, the conservators would lose, you know, about 48 MPs. It's hard to know how exactly they're going to react to this, especially because if you go back a few months, every time there was a new floor crossing, people would kind of speculate that, oh, this is going to be the tipping point for Pierre Polyev. And yet we haven't really seen a concerted push against him from within caucus.

There's no sort of alternative leader stepping forward. And so I'm a bit hesitant to say, oh, you know, this could be, could be the end. I do think he and the conservers are now looking at another three years in opposition. Even if that doesn't sort of psychologically affect them right now, that's three years that he has to kind of hang in there. And it's hard to know exactly how that's going to work out. You know, that's a long time to be sitting in opposition. And it just adds to the amount of time he's going to have to kind of hold on. I mean, you can sort of look at this the other way and say, well, Pierre Pollyup doesn't want an election right now. And so to a certain extent, this serves

him in giving, you know, taking the threat of an election off the table and potentially giving him time to, you know, burnish his own image or time more importantly for Mark Carney to accumulate political baggage for some of the shine to come off of Mark Carney. But the flip side of that, I think, would be what if another year from now the polls are what they are, do conservative MPs at that point decide, well, we need to make a change. Do conservative MPs look at these three years and say, okay, now we've got time to make a change at a new leader? It's really hard to know how this is all going to kind of play out within that caucus. Yeah, are they thinking we got to do it now? Maybe even as an attempt to try and stop more people from crossing,

potentially. You know, I've certainly been seeing a couple of conservatives kind of publicly pledging their support for Polyev and for the party, for example, Brad Redicops, Saskatchewan MP posted today, I will never cross the floor and betray the 52.48% of voters who place their trusted me and Pierre Polyev leadership. I just like, do you see those messages as evidence that there is a lot of support inside the Conservative Party for its leader? I mean, I think you can sort of take it one of two ways. You can look at it and say, well, these MPs are standing by Pierre Pollyev. They're publicly pledging their support for him. They're, you know, adding to the idea that these other MPs have sort of betrayed their constituents,

which is this argument the conservatives are trying to make. I mean, I think the flip side of that is, you're maybe not in a great place when your MPs have to publicly pledge their support for you. It's a bit reminiscent of what Justin Trudeau went through and all of the sort of public back and forth over that. and it didn't end well for Justin Trudeau. I think there's a real challenge in front of Pierre Polly of to sort of get through this. Speaking of Trudeau, like I couldn't help but notice tonight that the riding that ultimately gave Carney the majority was University of Rosedale, which was Christopher Rilin's old writing. Like it's just, it's just an interesting narrative considering that Friland essentially kind of set all of this in motion. Okay, let's talk about the liberals a little bit more.

This is their first majority since 2019, but also just the third majority in the last 20 years, right? It's actually a pretty big deal. Yeah. I think the last few decades really in Canadian federal politics have shown that getting to a majority is going to be hard now. and the minority governments are really going to be the norm. So to have gotten to this spot for Mark Carney is a really pretty remarkable achievement. I don't think it's all easy going from here on in. I don't know that he can not necessarily rest on his laurels,

but you really can't understate or really can't overstate what an accomplishment this is for him. What practical difference is this going to make for the way that they govern? All sorts of ways. You know, once you have a majority in the House of Commons, you do have tools at your disposal to move legislation forward. You can, you know, use some single time allocation to cap debate if the opposition was refusing to let things move forward. The ability to get legislation through the House is suddenly much improved. You know, and then there's just the basics. You know you're going to survive a conference vote.

You can start to plan for, you know, maybe being in office for three years. the difference between, you know, 171 seats and 173 seats is really big. Is there any legislation or any part of their agenda that you think might go forward now that they don't have to worry about courting opposition members for votes? I mean, there are bits and pieces on, you know, lawful access on, I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, when it comes to online harms, whether they have a slightly easier time, obviously, getting legislation through. As much as they don't have to worry about the opposition anymore, I don't know that they would be well advised to say, we know we no longer need to even bother

listening to what the people on the other side or what our critics are saying. We can, we can just plow forward. Because I think to a certain extent, Mark Carney's image and his popularity has been built on being pragmatic and not being superpartisan. And we've seen this government move legislation forward where there has been blowback and there have been people saying you're going too far, you need to dial it back. And they've had to dial it back in some cases

because of opposition. Just because they don't have to worry about the opposition anymore, they would probably still be well advised to listen to some of those complaints. When did they had to do that? Well, you've seen it a few times. like, you know, the major projects office legislation, there were concerns that it was going too far. There was some legislation on a lawful access that they had to dial back about.

There was some legislation on some regulatory changes they wanted to make, you know, to make it easier for innovators that they've had to dial back. And I think there's some risk here. We've talked about this in the past that the concerns are going to be primed now to look at the liberals. point to any evidence they can of them sort of running rough shot over parliament, of them moving too fast or ignoring opposition. And I think the liberals, to some extent, still have to be mindful of that. I remember you were on the show a while back and we were talking through some of the risks of a majority. And one of the risks that you mentioned, too, is that backbench liberal MPs could find themselves holding an immense amount of power. And have you seen any indication that the Carney government

is aware of those risks? I think we're still waiting to see how that sort of manifests itself. You know, if you go back to, for instance, the outbreak of hostilities in Iran, the American attacks on Iran, the pushback against that really came from a liberal backbencher named Will Greaves,

who came out and criticized Mark Carney's initial statement. You know, going back even further, there was some mass, machinations around a liberal climate caucus sort of taking shape. You've seen Stephen Giebo criticized the liberal climate record. We haven't yet really see it kind of come to a head and really force the government's hand on things. But I do think the Carney government has to be mindful of it. And I guess if you were looking for signs that he is mindful of it, you know, you might look at his convention speech on the weekend where he spent a lot of time talking about

former liberal prime ministers and liberal values and praising liberal values and celebrating liberal values. Where women always have the right to choose. Where can be their entire selves and all have a chance to thrive? And it really felt like a speech in the wake of Marilyn Gladys' arrival that was really about trying to convince liberals that Mark Carney was a liberal and reassure them of that. So I think that may be some hint that the Kearney liberals know they need to be mindful of that, whether or not the liberal backbench is going to try to use its power going forward.

I think that that remains to be seen. You know, that convention, what would you say came out of that in terms of their vision and priorities for the year ahead? I think it's hard to know, particularly on the idea of whether a majority is going to change them somehow. You know, there wasn't, and I guess you have to understand it, there wasn't going to be, he wasn't going to give a speech on the weekend that said pretty soon I will have my majority and here's what I will do with it. It was really a statement about what they've already been doing and kind of reinforcing Mark Carney's idea of needing to move fast and make change. and do things in response to, you know, the rupture that he believes has occurred. And so, you know, you could listen to that speech and say, well, he's really just going to kind of carry on doing what he's been doing. But I think inevitably, there's going to be some temptation

to use the majority that he has. And I think to a certain extent, you know, Mark Carney wasn't elected on a sort of itemized list of 300 things he was going to do over four years. He was sort of elected over a general idea that he was the right guy to respond to Donald Trump. And I think that creates a bit more sort of openness to maybe do things that he didn't talk about in the platform. And so I think that'll be interesting to see whether as he kind of fills out his agenda, what it looks like and whether, you know, now that he has a majority, it gets maybe even more aggressive. Right.

I mean, like, as we've been talking about, this is also the reason why people think he's got the majority now because he's been able to make this coalition on that same question, right? On how to deal with our neighbors to the South. I guess I just wonder, like, and it just doesn't really seem like it's going to happen anytime soon, but like what happens to this coalition if things calm down with Trump? Yeah. I mean, I guess the first question would be, will things calm down?

Yeah. And the second part of that is, yeah, I do think there is a question of how this all holds together. Like, yes, okay, there is a unifying idea that they're all there to respond to the threat posed by Donald Trump in the United States political situation writ large. But there are inevitably going to be things they don't all agree on. So how does Mark Carney hold them together? How does he, you know, keep caucus happy, you know, on just a human level dealing with them? How does he, you know, deal with disagreements within caucus? You know, one of the things that I think has kind of distinguished or seems to be distinguishing the Carney government from the Trudeau government is that the Trudeau government kind of operated on this basis of trying to minimize potential problems ahead of time. Lots of consultation, lots of thinking, lots of talking to, you know, stakeholders and then acting. And the current government seems to operate more on acting and then cleaning up any messes after that. So I don't know how that sort of model, whether that model will work if he's trying to hold all of these people together.

You know, he might have to sort of go back to kind of, you know, consulting ahead of time and making sure he's got all 172 or 173 other liberal MPs behind them. I know we've done this a couple times throughout the year, but just to like take a moment and kind of marvel, marvel at where we are right now. I remember it was like, what, almost a year ago now that we had that election and we were like recording this pod really late.

The liberals had a strong minority then. And we went back and we were looking at our headline from that night about a year ago. it was Carney wins a country divided. And I think that is what we saw that night. It was, of course, this extraordinary comeback for the liberals, but also basically a two-horse race that split the country into two between the conservatives and the liberals. Polling now shows that if there was an election now, the liberals could get, what, 200 seats? Erin, is that the latest polling? Yeah, awesome. Yeah. So if last year, what we were looking at was a

country in many ways divided. How would you describe this moment that we're in right now? I think it's Carney's moment. The idea that the country is divided has fallen away a bit, although I think there's still something to that. I think there are still people who are, yes, concerned about Donald Trump, but are as much, if not more, concerned about the cost of housing and inflation and the price of groceries. But I think, there is much more public goodwill now, clearly, behind Mark Carney. You know, you can see that in his own personal approval numbers. You can see that in the approval for the government.

You can see it in the floor crossings from, you know, both the conservatives and the new Democrats. You know, this isn't quite a national unity government, but it has stitched together a fair bit of unity behind it. And I think now, you know, even more so because he has a majority, because the liberals have a majority, the question is how well Mark Carney rises to the moment and how well he fulfills the promise of being the guy to respond to this moment. Because I think he's obviously done well on the international stage and

reassuring Canadians in that sense. I think it remains to be seen how he's doing or how he well he will do on housing and cost of living issues. And I think those are still their biggest vulnerabilities. But it's been an incredible 16 months for him. And now he has three years to try to make good on it. I would be remiss to say, I know you're saying that this is Carney's moment. But I mean, Trudeau did get to spend the weekend in Coachella with girlfriend wearing a backwards hat and drinking from a red solo cup. So I just feel like I should

ask the question, really, whose moment is it right now? Yeah, really, you know, look, 16 months ago, liberals were doomed. Justin Trudeau was getting booted out. Now Mark Carney has a liberal majority. Justin Trudeau's getting to hang out at Coachella. It's a win-win, I think, for both sides. It's hard to say who's having a better, who had a better weekend. Mark Carney, are just a and Trudeau, but I think they're probably both pretty happy with. I agree. Aaron, thank you. Thanks, time. All right, that is all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.