Parliamentary Floor Crossings: a Good Career Move?

It’s easy to be cynical about all the Parliamentary horse trading going on. And especially the efforts behind convincing MPs to abandon the party that nominated them to run in the first place. The practice may be perfectly legal, but it feels like a betrayal of trust.

After all, as I’ve written, the reality of the Canadian political system means that no one really votes for individual representatives. Most of us have never even met our local candidates. And, once elected, MPs only rarely vote against party lines.

So I thought I’d take a look at the complete record of party defections among MPs in Ottawa over the past 50 years. The data itself came from a request from an AI model. To be honest, I just copied the output without bothering to fact check its details. But it certainly looks accurate. Feel free to view the data for yourself here.

So here are some fun facts drawn from my (unconfirmed) data. Of the 39 floor crossings occurring in Parliament since 1977, just five happened before 2000, with the other 33 coming in this century. So there’s a clear upward trend here.

Over the past half century, the Liberals were at the losing end of such deals 12 times. But if you combine outbound crossings from the Progressive Conservative, Conservative (CPC), and Canadian Alliance parties, they would add up to 14. The NDP and Bloc lost five members each and Green lost just one.

20 of the defections - more than half - led to “floor crossings” that didn’t necessarily involve crossing an actual floor. Instead, they moved to sit as independents. Six of those 20 eventually joined either the Liberals or one flavour or another of Conservative parties. And one - that would be Lucien Bouchard - went on to form the Bloc.

So overall, is defecting a good career move? Well, 12 crossers never ran again. For two of those, it was because they lost the next riding nomination. But most of the 12 had switched to sit as independents, which would not normally be associated with a backroom payoff or future electoral success.

Only three out of those 12 - John Bryden (2004), David Emerson (2006), and Eve Adams (2015) - crossed to either the Liberals or Conservatives. As far as I can tell, none of them enjoyed any political patronage positions in the years following their lone mandates with their adopted parties.

Of the remaining 25 crossers who faced their voters again, 14 lost the elections that followed their defections. Six of those losers were running as Liberals, one as a Conservative, and one for the People’s Party.

Just 11 party switchers (28 percent of all crossers) won their next elections: seven as Liberals, two as independents, one as a Conservative, and one running for the Bloc.

The ultimate fate awaiting Chris d’Entremont and Michael Ma - Canada’s most recent floor crossers - will be known soon enough. But based on the historical record, the odds are that they’ll soon be looking for some other form of gainful employment.

Political representation is a serious matter. Based on some of my other writing in the topic - linked just below - it’s something that feels pretty fragile in Canada right now. Perhaps parties would be well advised to avoid making things worse.

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