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John Ivison: A Liberal majority might finally stop kowtowing to Quebec

No longer will Carney be hostage to the pernicious influence of Quebec nationalists on minority rights and hate speech

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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s imminent majority government is a good thing for the country, according to a 43 per cent plurality of Canadians in a new Angus Reid Institute poll who prefer increased stability (versus 39 per cent who said it flouts the 2025 election result.)

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The decision by the NDP MP for Nunavut, Lori Idlout, to cross the floor and join the Liberals on Tuesday will likely give the governing party a majority, if, as expected, they win upcoming byelections in two safe Toronto seats. They would have some breathing room if they can add another seat in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne, which is set for a rerun between Tatiana Auguste and Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné on April 13, after the Supreme Court overturned Auguste’s single-vote victory last year.

John Ivison: A Liberal majority might finally stop kowtowing to Quebec Back to video

There remains deep disquiet at the practice of floor-crossing. The same Angus Reid poll suggested only one in four Canadians think the defecting MP should be allowed to serve out their term with their new party, while most of the rest believe the MP should step down or sit as an Independent.

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Yet, for all that, it is unlikely that Canadians will be reaching for their torches and pitchforks at the prospect of three more years of a Carney government.

The NDP has lost an MP, reducing it to six members — and it may soon lose another one if Alexandre Boulerice resigns his Montreal seat to run provincially. The party is in danger of being outnumbered by the interpreters that it sits alongside, cheek by jowl, at the far end of the House of Commons.  It will soon have a new leader and, unless it is the comparatively sensible Alberta MP Heather McPherson, it seems to me it is doomed as a force in Canadian politics.

The Conservative caucus is said to be restless, after the release of polls that suggest the Liberals have a 15-point lead and could win up to 12 seats in Alberta. But one Tory MP suggested some in caucus are relieved at the stay of execution a majority would provide that would give party leader Pierre Poilievre time to improve his approval ratings. He said there is a defeatist attitude among some who feel the party will lose no matter what they do. “Does that turn into a leadership challenge? If Pierre’s numbers don’t show improvement, I think it may,” the MP said.

In the meantime, the Conservatives must hope that the Carney government will over time surrender the trust it has built by neglect, overreach or rising prices.

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More broadly, there is an additional benefit to Canadians of a razor-thin Liberal majority: the end of the pernicious influence of the Bloc Québécois.

In Canada, voters are free to elect anyone they like, even people who want to break up the country, no matter how unwelcome that is to others.

Fine, that is our system. But it is quite another thing for those same people to dictate government policy.

We have already seen the outsized influence of the Bloc on Bill C-9, the hate-speech legislation currently mired in the justice committee.

The government brought it forward to augment existing laws against public incitement to hatred and the wilful promotion of hatred, both of which require that charges are laid with the consent of the attorney general, which always complicates prosecutions.

The new legislation was aimed at antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate that have left people feeling unsafe in their communities. It would make it a crime to intimidate and obstruct people from accessing places of worship, schools and community centres; make hate-motivated crimes a specific offence; and make it a crime to wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group by displaying terrorist or hate symbols such as a Hamas or Hezbollah flag.

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All good and admirable goals. But the Liberals needed the Bloc’s support to pass the bill.

The Criminal Code currently exempts individuals from charges of wilful promotion of hate if the offending speech is based in good faith on the interpretation of a religious text. But the Bloc support for the legislation was conditional that the religious exemption be removed, in accordance with the widespread sovereigntist view in Quebec about the separation of religion and the state.

The Conservatives pointed out that the religious defence has never been used to acquit a defendant accused of public incitement of hatred and said that the Bloc amendment impinged on free speech.

But the Liberals made a Faustian bargain to get the bill through the House.

A Spark Advocacy poll this week suggested nearly half of Bloc voters approve of the Liberal government’s performance. Small wonder, given its willingness to bend to the Bloc’s demands.

The implications of the government caving to the sovereigntists will become more apparent in the coming days when the Supreme Court of Canada hears arguments for and against Quebec’s laicity law — the former Bill 21 — on March 23rd.

The Quebec government’s argument that the legislation is simply a separation of church and state, and does not discriminate in particular against Muslim women, disintegrated on contact with reality.

In late 2021, Fatemeh Anvari, a Grade 3 teacher, was told she could no longer teach in her Chelsea, Que. classroom because she wore a hijab.

The Quebec Superior Court and the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled the law breached freedom of expression and minority religious rights but upheld it anyway because Premier François Legault’s CAQ government baked in the notwithstanding clause (Section 33 of the Charter) to protect the legislation from constitutional legal challenges.

The Supreme Court will now rule on issues of provincial autonomy versus federal rights and the impact on minority rights, and will, crucially, define the limits of the notwithstanding clause.

Embarrassingly, Ottawa did not intervene on whether the law is discriminatory against religious minorities.

Why not? Who knows? But having a minority government that relied on the Bloc for support was likely not immaterial.

What the attorney general of Canada has argued is that Section 33 provides a power that is “necessarily temporary in application” and cannot result in a permanent impairment of a right or freedom.

The AG made clear that the federal government takes “no position on any basis whatsoever on the constitutional validity” of the laicity law.

It is solely concerned with the binding nature of Section 33. If it is used temporarily, then rights and freedoms must be later reinstated, “just as a lightbulb should shine as brightly as it did before being temporarily turned off.”

What is, or should be, clear to everyone, is that Quebec’s law does not benignly separate religion and the state. Rather, it is an authorization for state intervention in religion.

The Liberal government’s popularity might be dented in Quebec by stating that inconvenient truth, but at least its political survival is no longer at risk if it does so.

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