By Daniel Béland

February 15, 2026

The Supreme Court of Canada’s February 13th decision to nullify last April’s “single vote election win” in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne has increased the number of anticipated federal byelections to three — a number of exceptional importance based on the minority status of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government in the House of Commons.

The departure of University-Rosedale MP Chrystia Freeland for the Rhodes Trust at Oxford and a role advising Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Scarborough Southwest MP Bill Blair’s appointment as High Commissioner to the U.K., have left open two Liberal seats in Toronto.

Yet, because these are both considered safe Liberal ridings in which the incumbent won by more than 30 percentage points (nearly 40 in the case of Freeland) in the last general election, their byelections are unlikely to change the composition of the House of Commons.

And the most popular debate question in Ottawa pubs these days is whether Mark Carney will keep playing minority math or call a spring election.

Carney is now four seats short of the 172 required for a majority. Which means that, to be able to implement his agenda, he needs to assemble a majority from more floor-crossers, reach an accommodation with an opposition keen on avoiding a general election, or throw the dice and call one.

But the Supreme Court decision nullifying the Terrebonne results has complicated Carney’s calculus because Terrebonne (which means “good earth” in English, FYI), is anything but safe ground for the Liberals.

The riding is as old as Confederation and, in its different iterations, was held by the Bloc Québécois (BQ) between 1993 and 2025, with the exception of the 2011-2015 period, when it was controlled by the New Democratic Pary (NDP) as a result of the late Jack Layton’s Orange Wave, and for part of 2018, when then MP Michel Boudrias sat as an independent for a few months before rejoining the BQ caucus.

In the 2021 federal election, Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné ran for the BQ after the party prevented Boudrias from running again, and she won easily with 41 percent of the vote — more than 11 points ahead of Liberal candidate Éric Forget.

The most popular debate question in Ottawa pubs these days is whether Mark Carney will keep playing minority math or call a spring election.

Last year, Sinclair-Desgagné faced a new Liberal opponent: Tatiana Auguste, a young Haitian-born former political attaché to Bourassa Liberal MP Emmanuel Dubourg (2013-2025). Polls ahead of last April’s general election suggested a tight race between Sinclair-Desgagné and Auguste, something BQ supporters found surprising, considering the recent electoral history of riding.

As in other parts of the province, a combination of the Trump Effect and the overall popularity of Mark Carney’s Liberals in Quebec helped them catch up with the BQ in this heavily francophone, Montreal-area riding.

Last spring, Terrebonne witnessed an electoral drama: initially, Elections Cananda declared that Auguste had won before the count swung to Sinclair-Desgagné after the validation of the votes. On May 10, after a judicial recount, Auguste won the riding by only one vote.

Then, the news that the mail-in ballot of a Bloc Québécois supporter was never counted helped Sinclair-Desgagné challenge the decision of Elections Canada to uphold Auguste’s victory all the way to the Supreme Court, and the rest is history.

We do not know yet when exactly the Terrebonne byelection — or the two others — will take place but it will have to happen within 180 days “after the Chief Electoral Officer receives the warrant from the Speaker,” unless a general election is called before that.

And, according to Philippe J. Fournier’s 338Canada website, the current odds of winning that riding for the Liberals are only 34 percent, compared to 66 percent for the BQ. At the same time, the Liberals are in a much better position now than a few months ago — the party has surged in the polls in Quebec since Carney’s famous Davos speech.

Clearly, amid an ongoing trade war and more general uncertainty and anxiety arising from Donald Trump’s second presidency, many things could happen between now and the Terrebonne byelection. While recent Quebec-wide polling should give hope to the Liberals, the BQ and its leader Yves-François Blanchet are likely to do everything they can to win in a riding they think belongs to them.

A BQ win would have clear negative consequences for the Carney Liberals in a minority Parliament much less predictable than the previous one, in which the supply-and-confidence agreement between the Liberals and the NDP fostered greater stability.

For now, variables that would be invested with far lower stakes at other moments in Canadian politics possess disproportionate weight, especially to a prime minister faced with a choice architecture filled with calculated risks.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.