By Don Newman

January 17, 2026

Before the House of Commons holiday break, it seemed as though it was just a matter of time before Mark Carney’s Liberals would slip into a majority in the House of Commons.

Now, as MPs prepare to return to their seats on January 26th, as Pierre Poilievre braces for the hurdle of his end-of-January leadership review in Calgary, and as the NDP prepare to elect a new leader in Winnipeg at the end of March, Carney’s calculus may take on more urgency.

If Carney can’t solve his minority math by recruiting more floor-crossers, the election aversion that all parties shared at the time of the budget votes in November could give way to spring fever by April.

Since Parliament resumed last September, two Conservatives — Nova Scotia Conservative MP Chris d’Entremont and Michael Ma, the member of Parliament for Markham-Unionville near Toronto — deserted their party caucus to join the Liberals, raising the government to just one member short of a majority in the House of Commons.

At the time of Ma’s yuletide switch, rumours were rife that more Conservative members were eager to leave their caucus and leader Pierre Poilievre to join Carney’s Liberals and their ambitious economic agenda to transform Canada into a dynamic and more self-reliant middle power with the most vigorous economy of the G-7 countries.

While Donald Trump has been waging both a tariff war and a war of words with Canada — including his statement this week that the U.S. “doesn’t need Canada” — Carney has been diversifying both the country’s economic relations and our attention.

The latest example is the agreement with China announced Friday during his trip to Beijing, resetting relations with that country and allowing access to the Canadian market for a limited number of Chinese electric vehicles in return for China dropping punitive tariffs on Canadian canola sales and access for other agricultural products and seafoods.

But unless at least two more Conservatives in the House of Commons decide they want to become Liberals, his entire agenda could collapse. The Liberals now need two additions to their team because former Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned from Parliament after being named an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The two seats are not just important for confidence votes in the House that could trigger an election — although that is very important. Just as important is that membership on House of Commons committees is decided by the number of seats each party has in the Commons.

That means the minority Liberal government not only can’t control of committee agendas, it can be outvoted by a combination of the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois. Without changes to the numbers in the Commons and the subsequent adjustment of committee members the chances of the Liberals pushing anything controversial into law are remote.

But there is an even greater threat to the Carney government. The Conservatives are expected to confirm Poilievre in the review later this month. Party regulars who like his slashing, attacking style will give him a comfortable vote of confidence, even though he blew a 20-point lead in the polls, lost the last election, lost his own seat in the process and had to migrate to a safe Conservative riding in Alberta to get back into the House of Commons.

If Carney can’t solve his minority math by recruiting more floor-crossers, the election aversion that all parties shared at the time of the budget votes in November could give way to spring fever by April.

All of that will be forgiven. Then, buoyed by a public opinion polling bump he could personally get from his leadership confirmation and other polls that show the Liberals and Conservatives in a virtual tie in voting intention, Poilievre will be tempted to try again for a Conservative election win.

The Bloc Québécois is virtually certain to support a confidence motion as long as it doesn’t call for Canadian unity. But the New Democrats will have to add their seven votes to bring down the government. In November, the NDP held out some of their MPs from voting to ensure the government would not fall. But all of that could change with their new leader.

There are five candidates to replace Jagmeet Singh, who resigned as leader following the party’s disastrous showing in the last election. NDP leadership races usually come down to a contest between the candidate of the party establishment and the candidate of the NDP’s more radical wing.

This time, the only New Democrat in the race with a seat in the House of Commons, Heather McPherson, is the establishment candidate. Avi Lewis represents the radical wing. There is some irony in that.

His father, Stephen, was Ontario NDP leader and  Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, and his grandfather, David Lewis, won the 1971 NDP leadership race as the establishment candidate, defeating James Laxer of the more radical Waffle Group.

The collapse of the NDP vote last spring was attributed mainly to non-Conservative voters wanting  to make sure that Carney, not Poilievre, would be the prime minister dealing with Trump. But the NDP also paid a price for its 2022 Supply and Confidence Agreement with the Liberals, which kept the increasingly unpopular Justin Trudeau in power for three years.

The new NDP Leader will no longer have the excuse that the party can’t fight an election without someone permanent in place. A reinvigorated, post-review Poilievre may be feeling his best chance is this spring.

The recent polls seemed to give some hope to that idea. The Conservative and Liberal Parties are in a virtual national tie, though Carney maintains a significant lead in personal approval. The NDP could aim to win enough seats to regain party status in the House of Commons.

Either way, opposition parties get itchy, and continually refusing to defeat a minority government when there is the opportunity has a corrosive effect on the parties that let that opportunity go by. The best example of that is the Liberal Party between 2006 and 2012, which let multiple chances to defeat Steven Harper’s minority government vanish until, when an election came, they fell to third place in the Commons.

Current polling at aggregator 338Canada shows the way the vote splits regionally the Liberals would still win the most seats. But their minority would be shrunk to 153 seats. The Conservatives would win 145. With fewer seats than they now have on committees, the Carney government agenda would be further hampered in Parliament and the chance to “build big and build better” would be lost.

That is why the Commons numbers game is important. A liberal majority obtained by floor crossers is not the most elegant or even democratic way to obtain a majority. But it is not illegal. And some would say it is essential.

Policy Columnist Don Newman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a lifetime member and a past president of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery.