BEXTE: A Warning to the Next Conservative Thinking of Crossing the Floor

Juno News co-founder Keean Bexte offers his advice to any additional Conservative MPs who might be thinking about crossing the floor to the Liberals

Source: Creative Commons - Flickr/Wikimedia

Mark Carney does not have a one seat majority.

Not yet.

But Ottawa is already acting as though one more floor crossing is inevitable, as though it would be stabilizing, as though it would crown Carney as unassailable. That assumption is wrong. And it should give pause to any Conservative MP currently flirting with the idea of defecting.

If you cross the floor and hand Carney a one seat majority, you are not his greatest asset.

You are his hostage.

A government that survives by a single vote is not strong. It is deeply vulnerable. And the people with the most leverage in that environment are not the newcomers who just arrived. They are the vestiges of the Trudeau era who never left.

Steven Guilbeault. Karina Gould. Others who believe this party was theirs before Carney arrived and should be theirs again.

To their credit, for these radicals, power is meaningless if it isn’t driving their ideological agenda. For them, the shine of a cabinet role has lost its luster, especially when that comes with spitting on years of “Real Change.”

They do not need a leadership race. They do not need a coup. They need one moment. One confidence vote. One strategic absence. One well timed act of conscience. One person standing up at the right time.

That is all it takes for the government to fall.

And guess which three traitors will be left holding the bag?

Anyone who thinks the danger to Carney comes from the opposition is missing the point. If Carney ends up with 172 seats, the threat is entirely internal. Every MP knows it. Every faction understands the math. Every grievance becomes leverage.

And this cuts both ways.

If Carney secures a majority, he also loses his shield. No more blaming Pierre Poilievre. No more blaming the Parliamentary Budget Officer. No more blaming obstruction. No more blaming instability. The buck stops with him.

That is not a trivial shift. It means every failure belongs to him. Every broken promise. Every delayed project. Every half measure. And he will be explaining those failures with a caucus that is already more fractured than the Conservatives, floor crossers included.

The media currently treats Pierre Poilievre as though he is barely holding together a shadow government. That framing is nonsense. A shadow government is not real. It has no power. It cannot bring down the House.

Carney’s caucus can.

That is the only thing that matters.

And then there is reality. MPs are human. People get sick. People resign. People miss flights. People are sent on diplomatic missions. Someone could unexpectedly die, sadly. These are not hypotheticals. They are inevitabilities over the life of a Parliament.

Margaret Thatcher started her long tenure thanks to one deathly ill Labour MP.

In a one seat majority, any of those moments can become catastrophic.

At that point, 172 people would each possess the power to topple a federal government. And when it finally happens, Carney will be left standing in front of Canadians explaining how little he got done with all that supposed power.

So to the next Conservative being courted quietly in a hallway or over dinner at convention, understand what you are being asked to become.

Not a stabilizer.

Not a builder.

Not a kingmaker.

A hostage.

And history shows how those stories usually end.