A day later, the Ma floor-crossing is being dissected with more questions about what this means for Poilievre’s leadership of the Conservative party now that he’s lost two MPs to floor-crossings and one to a very suspicious resignation. We have learned that Tim Hodgson played a part in Ma’s decision, and that their wives are friends (and it is worth noting they are from neighbouring ridings). And now you have Conservatives telling the National Post of all places that they expect another couple of defections because Poilievre is so unable to read the room in his own caucus. Oh, and there’s also a whole side note about how Ma was apparently the “secret Santa” for Jamil Jivani and Jivani didn’t get his gift.
Listen, let's not rule out that drawing Jamil Jivani's name in Secret Santa might have been what actually prompted the floor crossing.
— Emmett Macfarlane 🇨🇦 (@emmettmacfarlane.com) 2025-12-12T23:52:46.988Z
Government House Leader Steve MacKinnon proclaimed that he knows more disgruntled Conservatives and hinted that there yet may be another floor-crossing, and this has everyone wringing their hands about “backroom deals,” and saying dumb things like “Canadians didn’t elect a majority,” and that cobbling one together is somehow illegitimate. Poilievre himself is making this particular argument. But that’s not how elections work. We elect 338 individual MPs. Not parties. Canadians can’t select “majority” or “minority” on their ballots. In fact, parties have become political shorthand for how MPs sort themselves into configurations to achieve confidence in the Chamber, but at its core, we elect individual MPs, and they get to make their own decision including who they sit with, and on how to determine how a government is given confidence, and yes, that can include so-called “backroom deals” and floor-crossings, and if voters don’t like it, they can punish them in the next election. That’s how parliamentary democracy works.
If there is another defection or two, and it puts the Liberals into a majority, the most dramatic effect will not be just the fact that every confidence vote isn’t going to rely on Andrew Scheer and Scott Reid hiding behind the curtains to count abstentions, but rather that it will force the committees to be rebalanced, at which point the Conservatives and Bloc will no longer be able to team up to obstruct all business, as they have been doing. That will be a material change for the ability of this Parliament to get things done, and maybe finally break the dysfunction and deadlock that has plagued it since 2019.
Ukraine Dispatch
Russia attacked two Ukrainian ports, damaging three Turkish vessels, one of them carrying food supplies. Russia also attacked energy facilities in Odesa region. Ukraine, meanwhile, hit two Russian oil rigs in the Caspian Sea, the Yaroslavl oil refinery, and two Russian vessels carrying military equipment. President Zelenskyy visited Kupiansk, as Ukrainian forces are encircling the Russians in the area, weeks after Russia claimed to have captured it.