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FIRST READING: What the floor-crossers got in return

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FIRST READING: What the floor-crossers got in return Back to video

Nunavut MP Lori Idlout has now become the fourth opposition member to join the Liberals in just the last five months, joining three Conservative MPs.

While there have been more than 100 MP floor-crossings since Canada’s 1867 founding, the circumstances have never looked quite like this. In any prior instance where multiple MPs shifted party loyalties in a short period of time, it was almost always because of a seismic political issue such as First World War conscription or Quebec separatism.

But in this case, all four floor-crossers gave vague reasons for the move, if they even tried to explain it at all. Idlout’s statement, issued by the Liberal Party, explained her switch as endorsing “strong and ambitious government that makes decisions with Nunavut — not only about Nunavut.”

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Unmentioned is that the four also saw personal benefits for their defection to the government benches. A cursory summary is below.

Thus far, there are no tangible goodies to d’Entremont’s surprise November floor-crossing. He hasn’t received a position in cabinet, a pay raise or any special titles. What he did seem to secure, however, was his job.

When rumours first began to leak out that the Liberals were actively seeking floor-crossers among the Conservatives, one commonality emerged among the MPs being solicited: They all represented tightly contested ridings that were now polling for the Liberals.

This was particularly true of d’Entremont’s Acadie-Annapolis riding in Nova Scotia. He won it for the Conservatives by just 536 votes in 2025. And given a surge in Liberal popularity across the Maritimes in interim months, it now seemed likely to swap back to the Liberals; which it had done as recently as 2015.

D’Entremont’s former Conservative colleagues would allege quite directly that the defection had been done purely to remain as the MP for Acadie-Annapolis.

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After the floor-crossing, Conservative MP Rick Perkins would allege that d’Entremont had told him the weekend prior, “If an election is held now, I will lose my seat. I might as well not run.”

“There is nothing in his floor crossing about principles. It was about keeping his job,” Perkins wrote in a Facebook post.

Ma also represents a tightly contested riding. Markham-Unionville had gone Liberal as recently as 2021, and he won in 2025 with just 50.65 per cent of the vote as compared to 47.05 per cent for his Liberal opponent.

But it only took a few days after the floor-crossing before Ma was conspicuously added to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s delegation headed to the People’s Republic of China and Qatar.

As noted by National Post’s Chris Nardi at the time, Ma was the only member of the delegation who wasn’t a minister or a parliamentary secretary. His highest applicable rank was that he was vice-chair of the Canada-China Legislative Committee, a group comprising 11 other MPs and senators who didn’t similarly receive a seat on the plane.

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PMO spokesperson Audrey Champoux explained Ma’s last-minute inclusion on the grounds that he had “considerable experience building relationship between people, businesses and communities, across the Indo-Pacific region.”

It’s difficult to claim that Jeneroux is protecting his MP job by crossing the floor, as his Edmonton Riverbend riding represents an area of Alberta that hasn’t had a Liberal MP since the 1920s.

And before his floor crossing, Jeneroux hadn’t even been showing up to work, and had publicly stated his intention to resign in order to spend more time with family. He skipped whole weeks worth of House of Commons sittings between November and January, only to suddenly start regularly casting votes again as soon as he was a Liberal.

But like Ma, the most immediate boost to Jeneroux’s political career is that he got to tag along on one of Carney’s many foreign visits. Within two weeks of his defection, he was declared a “special adviser on economic and security partnerships” and given a seat on CanForceOne to join Carney’s trip through India, Australia and Japan.

As the MP for Nunavut, there are a couple of factors that would make Idlout uniquely susceptible to entreaties from the government side of the aisle.

In addition to being one of the smallest federal ridings (with only about 21,000 eligible electors), Nunavut also has rock-bottom voter turnout (36 and 34 per cent for the last two elections, respectively).

As such, elections routinely turn on only a few hundred votes, with candidates more likely to win on name recognition than their party. Largely for this reason, it is the only riding in Canada that has jumped pretty regularly between Liberal, NDP and Conservative MPs.

Nunavut is also uniquely dependent on federal subsidies. For the current fiscal year, Nunavut is set to receive $2.4 billion in federal transfers. That works out to about $67,000 per Nunavut resident, per year.

As such, it’s a riding that is particularly inclined to reward MPs who can be seen to be at the controls of how these monies are earmarked. And Idlout wouldn’t be the first Nunavut MP who crossed the floor for the singular reason of sitting in the governing caucus.

Peter Ittinuar did it in 1979, crossing from the NDP to the then Liberal government of prime minister Pierre Trudeau. As Ittinuar told APTN on Wednesday in response to the Idlout crossing, “It’s easier to get to the powers that be, the people who actually develop policy and pass them through Parliament when you are on the government side.” He also called it a matter of “efficiency.”

“I’m very honoured to be welcoming Lori Idlout to our caucus,” Carney said on Wednesday. “We’ve had conversations about what we can do, both large and small, in Nunavut. Large projects but also helping everyone get ahead.”

Idlout is also the owner of NVision, an Indigenous sensitivity training contractor that has received $450,000 in federal contracts since her 2021 election as an MP.

The LGBT advocacy group Egale Canada has come up in this newsletter before as one of several Canadian non-profit organizations that is mostly funded by the Liberal government, and has disproportionately worked to endorse Liberal government positions, particularly when it comes to the codification of gender identity.

So it’s somewhat unexpected that a former Egale Canada board president has just left the group, declaring her intention to instead fight the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Jacki Lewis told the National Post that the Muslim Brotherhood “is one of the greatest threats to Western democracy and our way of life, which includes the rights of the 2SLGBTQI community.” Lewis said that Egale Canada’s focus “lies elsewhere.”

Although it’s a rare civic function in Canada these days that isn’t threatened or blockaded by anti-Israel groups, the effect has been particularly noticeable at LGBT events, including those featuring Egale. In just the last two years, pride events in Montreal, Winnipeg, Toronto, Victoria and Ottawa have been cancelled or blockaded by anti-Israel groups.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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