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Colby Cosh: Despite CPC defections, a Liberal majority is still far from secure

They're going to need a lot more than treacherous Matt Jeneroux

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You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, as the old baseball saying goes, so let’s pause and catch up with the chaos on the fringes of the House of Commons. The chamber contains seats for 343 bums, meaning that a party needs 172 members to have a technical majority. The Liberals stood at 169 when the votes in the 2025 were finally counted, or so it seemed. In November Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, raising their total to 170 (which, with a few opposition MPs abstaining, was enough to pass the budget a few weeks later). Markham-Unionville’s Michael Ma followed d’Entremont across the aisle on Dec. 11, making the count 171.

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That put the Liberals within reach of their majority dream, and while Liberals Chrystia Freeland and Bill Blair left the Commons to pursue new destinies early in the new year, the party is thought to be secure in both the necessary by-elections. Last week, however, the Supreme Court overturned the result of the 2025 election in Quebec’s Terrebonne riding, which the Liberals had apparently won by a single vote; a Quebec Superior Court judge had previously upheld the result despite some mislabelled mail-in ballots. This vacates the Terrebonne seat immediately. And today the prime minister announced that another Conservative floor-crosser, Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux, will be received into the Liberal fold.

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Jeneroux’s naked treachery, plus replacements for Freeland and Blair, would (after the necessary by-elections happen) put the Liberals back at 171 seats. A win in Terrebonne, which is obviously not guaranteed, would give them 172 — but the Speaker of the House is one of those 172, and in the case of a tied vote on the floor, he is required to use his “casting vote” impartially, according to established principles of neutrality. Our colleague Christopher Nardi, sensing with uncanny prescience that the integer 172 might soon become politically important, reported and wrote a New Year’s Eve treatise on what happens in a chronically tied House.

This involves a little bit of parliamentary esoterica that the poor devil in the Speaker’s chair (the Hon. Francis Scarpaleggia) may have to master, and Speakers have interpretive wiggle room in some edge cases. But the bottom line is that the Speaker cannot break a tie to change the “status quo” and make new law. (He always votes for further debate on a measure when possible, but if it’s a pass/fail scenario, he is expected to abstain and vote the equivalent of “nay.”) Most especially, the Liberals would certainly be unable to change the standing orders in order to secure majority representation on individual Commons committees, which would give them near-total control of the Parliamentary agenda.

Of course, all of this math might be obsolete by the time this column is published. Another Conservative traitor might be in the pipeline, but if the Liberals can win Terrebonne, they don’t necessarily have to get their 173rd MP from les Bleus; a New Democrat fleeing the sinking orange ship would do nicely.

Then there’s the wrinkle that current Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith intends to run for a vacant provincial parliament seat in Scarborough-Southwest. He seeks to replace NDP MPP Doly Begum, who has been chosen as the federal Liberal nominee to replace Bill Blair in the Commons seat for, er, Scarborough-Southwest. I ASSURE YOU THIS ALL MAKES SENSE SOMEHOW. If Erskine-Smith wins the provincial by-election, whose precise timing is up to Premier Doug Ford, he would then resign from the Commons and throw another Liberal seat into limbo. We’ll all update our scorecards when the time comes.

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