Carney's Manufactured Majority and Canada's Democracy Problem | Blendr Report EP162
Mark Carney now holds a manufactured majority built on floor crossings and low-turnout by-elections. Here's what comes next.
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Mark Carney has his majority. Not through a general election or a mandate from the Canadian public. Through five floor crossings and three by-election wins in ridings the Liberals already held. That's the foundation this government now stands on.
Let’s start with the numbers. The two Toronto by-elections saw voter turnout between 31 and 33 percent. In University-Rosedale, the Liberal candidate took roughly 65 percent of that vote. Run the math and you land around one in five eligible voters in the riding. That’s your mandate. The Terrebonne result carried similar weight — a Supreme Court-ordered rerun of a riding the Liberals originally won by a single vote after Elections Canada misprinted addresses on mail-in ballots.
Then there are the floor crossings. Angus Reid polling shows 75 percent of Canadians believe some form of democratic accountability — whether a by-election, recall, or automatic trigger — should follow any floor crossing. A supermajority of the country opposes the mechanism that delivered this government its power. And yet here we are.
What makes this worse is what comes next. With a majority in the House and a Senate where over 90 percent of members were appointed through the Trudeau administration, there is no remaining check on legislative power. Bills that had been sitting in limbo are now headed straight through the pipeline: the Online Harms Act with its retroactive fines and life imprisonment provisions, the Strong Borders Act expanding warrantless surveillance, the Cybersecurity Act granting power to disconnect internet access, the Combating Hate Act redefining hate speech to include religious text, and the Lawful Access Act mandating backdoor infrastructure and blanket metadata retention.
Andrew Lobaczewski wrote in Political Ponerology about how totalitarian systems don’t need everyone on board. They just need to push out principled opposition and let the rest follow the herd. That pattern is playing out in real time across Canadian institutions. When 99.6 percent of MPs vote along party lines and most of them can’t even describe their own job — as the Samara Centre’s Tragedy in the Commons report revealed — you don’t have representative democracy.
The takeaway here is straightforward: competent, capable people need to build lives outside the reach of this machinery. That’s not defeatism. That’s the only rational response when the system no longer answers to the people it claims to represent.
If you’re interested in hearing the rationale behind this perspective, Listen to The Blendr Report EP162 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.
