In the National Post, Tristin Hopper considers what the Parliamentary floor-crossers got in exchange for their loyalty:
Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
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”.
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.
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.
