Floor Crossing Is Part Of Democracy
Nova Scotia MP Chris D’Entremont’s floor crossing last week has put the Conservatives into a bit of a tizzy. When the roles were reversed, they were positively gleeful. Unfortunately for them, floor-crossing is a strength, not a weakness, of Canada’s democracy.
One of the most famous floor crossers in the Westminster system, which Canada uses, was Winston Churchill. He crossed twice in his 64-year parliamentary career, in 1904 and again in 1924, which did not prevent him from becoming the British Prime Minister in 1940.
He is far from the only Member of Parliament to have changed sides. Over the past few years, there have been several floor crossers every-which-way. Wikipedia’s list of floor crossers at all levels and directions in Canadian history is pages long.
Scott Brison joined the Liberals when the Progressive Conservatives were absorbed into the Reform Party under its Conservative Party brand. Freshly re-elected Liberal MP David Emerson crossed to those Conservatives when Stephen Harper won the 2006 election and was awarded a cabinet post, followed a few months later by Wajid Khan. NDP MP Lise St-Denis joined the Liberals in 2012, Conservative MP Eve Adams joined the Liberals in 2015, and Green MP Jenica Atwin joined the Liberals in 2021. In fact, CTV says there have been over 300 floor-crossers since confederation.
When Leona Alleslev crossed the floor from the Liberals to the Conservatives on the first day back from summer recess on September 17th, 2018, it came as a bit of a shock to those of us who had worked with her. The Prime Minister at the time, Justin Trudeau, made it clear to his caucus that, while we were of course disappointed and would offer up the best possible Liberal candidate in her riding in the subsequent election, it was completely within her right to do what she did, and that our system allows for floor crossing.
Liberals who had considered her a friend no longer considered her a friend, with one reporting that she had crossed Alleslev in an elevator who had offered to “hug it out,” which was awkwardly declined. For Alleslev, though, it was deeply philosophical. She did not feel comfortable with the Liberals and she did feel comfortable with the Conservatives. I suspected that she was not comfortable being in government, regardless of party; being in opposition and having the ability to oppose everything is, after all, far easier.
Then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer named her deputy leader of his party and she subsequently won re-election in 2019, winning the endorsement of her constituents for her move, though she lost the following election.
While Trudeau wished Alleslev well both in public and in private when she left his caucus, that same Andrew Scheer attacked D’Entremont’s decision to cross the floor without any form of grace whatsoever. A video contrasting the two is circulating facebook but unfortunately cannot be embedded here.
As much as it causes one party to cheer and another to jeer when someone crosses the floor, the very ability to cross is at the core of the function of our democracy.
We elect representatives from our ridings to take our local interests to the national level, work with others, advance our causes and solve our problems. We usually elect members of a party who follow a platform or a series of campaign promises made by a central organisation we know as the national party, and expect the candidate to generally follow that platform in office.
If the representative we send arrives in Ottawa and discovers that their leader is not the person they believed them to be, that their platform is not being followed by their party, or that their local interests are being ignored by their colleagues, the tools they have to react are limited. They can choose from three unsavoury options. They can keep their mouths shut in public, limiting their opposition to the privacy of caucus meetings; they can vote against their party line; or they can quit their party caucus altogether and possibly join another.
In all the above examples and in hundreds of others, members for different reasons chose that third option. I can assure you that no matter which party they crossed from and to, they lost a lot of sleep over the decision, weighed the personal relationships, their perceived and real debts to their communities, donors, and volunteers, and the impact on their careers — which are not always negative, as David Emerson might tell you — against their moral compasses, and walked across that rubicon with their eyes wide open.
Floor crossing is another example of why the primacy of parties over that of representatives is both a fallacy and a problem. We elect representatives not to serve as trained seals, clapping mindlessly at the variable intelligence of their leaders, but to exercise their judgement on our behalf, and we must trust them to do so, even if that means crossing the floor.
If they do not do it well, their next election is never all that far away.
