Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Travis Leicher, Doctoral Student, Politlical Studies, Queen’s University, Ontario
Marilyn Gladu is the most recent MP to cross the floor to the Liberals, the fifth to do so since Mark Carney became prime minister a year ago.
As the Liberal government inches closer to a majority, its legitimacy is being called into question since it would not be based on voter preference.
While floor crossing is permissible within a Parliamentary system and has historical precedent, both public opinion and voter behaviour suggest it’s unpopular among Canadians. Why?
One common response is that floor crossing is undemocratic, which explains frequent calls for by-elections. But this charge isn’t necessarily warranted — it depends on context, including whether voters were primarily choosing a party or an individual candidate when they voted in the previous federal election.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre recently posted on X: “The people in her [Gladu’s] community voted for our Conservative vision of a Canada … not for the costly Liberal government she has now joined.”
But this rhetoric rests on an unresolved empirical question: did voters in Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong vote for the Conservative Party or for Gladu? It’s unclear. Political science research suggests that party loyalty doesn’t fully determine how people vote.
Interpretations and expectations
In the absence of local data on voters’ motivations, it’s more useful to consider two questions about the role of representation. First, what does it mean for someone to “represent” a constituency? Second, how should elected officials behave once in office?
In The Concept of Representation (1967), American political theorist Hannah Pitkin introduced a now-classic way of thinking about representation: descriptive, symbolic, formal and substantive.
Setting aside the first two, formal representation is about the rules that give politicians their authority and hold them accountable — like elections — while substantive representation asks a simpler question: Do they actually act in the interests of the people they represent?
From a formalistic perspective, any action a politician takes counts as representation as long as it falls within their authorized powers. In contrast, the substantive view holds that a representative is required to act as the voters themselves would act in the same situation.
Elections rest on an implicit expectation of substantive representation: representative democracy only works if elected officials make their constituents’ interests present through what they do. Without that, there’s no real reason to prefer one candidate over another and no clear basis for holding them accountable.
Still, there has been an ongoing debate about the expectation that representatives act as “trustees” or “delegates” once in office. The delegate model holds that representatives simply convey the preferences of their constituents, while the trustee model gives representatives the latitude to use their own judgement in pursuing constituents’ interests.
Taking initiative or betraying trust?
If representatives are meant to advance their constituents’ interests, is floor-crossing a necessary freedom to respond to changing circumstances rather than to adhere rigidly to a party platform? Or does it amount to a betrayal of the mandate voters expressed at the ballot box?
In November 2011, Parliament debated a private member’s bill tabled by NDP MP Mathieu Ravignat to amend the Parliament of Canada Act and require floor-crossers to resign, thereby triggering by-elections. Ravignat said the bill would “ensure that politicians are held accountable for the choice made by their constituents.”
But Conservative MP Michelle Rempel warned the bill “would seriously undermine the independence of members of this House … [and] would also impede members of Parliament in representing the interests of their constituents, which is one of the fundamental duties under our Constitution.”
This argument draws on the trustee versus delegate debate, which ultimately centres on how much independence representatives should exercise.
Because a pure delegate model sharply limits representatives’ discretion, critics of the trustee model often settle on some blended approach.
For example, the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, argued in his essay “Federalist No. 10” that representation should respond to public views. This delegate-style thinking reflected a flexible responsiveness intended as a safeguard against the tyranny of the majority that can arise when public interests are treated as uniform and easily determined.
British philosopher and politician Edmund Burke endorsed a pure trustee view, arguing in one famous speech: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
This view appeals to those who see political leadership as requiring a high degree of competence: representatives are elected to exercise informed judgment in the interests of their constituents, even when that judgment runs counter to public opinion.
Is floor crossing undemocratic?
The extent to which someone believes representatives should have independence influences whether they regard floor-crossing as a threat to democracy. But instead of catastrophizing about the danger floor-crossing poses to our democracy, Canadians should instead focus on how the electoral system shapes whether their expectations and understandings of representation are actually feasible in practice.
In doing so, they might accept floor-crossing but take issue with certain systemic features like party discipline, which makes floor-crossing one of the few available acts of defiance when a representative feels their party’s platform no longer serves their constituency.
Alternatively, Canadians may object to floor-crossing on the grounds that, given the many pre-existing barriers to representative independence, it further weakens the remaining role of party policy commitments as the main mechanism through which voters can anticipate and secure the policies that matter to them.
Travis Leicher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. Another MP jumps to Carney’s Liberals, igniting concerns about the health of Canada’s democracy – https://theconversation.com/another-mp-jumps-to-carneys-liberals-igniting-concerns-about-the-health-of-canadas-democracy-280342