Why the Liberals may pay a price for the party's increasingly big tent
OTTAWA — Political parties, particularly those that are close enough to smell power, are quick to describe themselves as “big tents.”
With the addition this week of Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu, the Liberal party’s new tent — to riff off a crack going around some Parliament Hill circles — is now big enough to drive a truckers’ convoy through.
While Gladu was the fourth Conservative MP to cross the floor and join Mark Carney’s government in recent months, the Tory caucus wasn’t the Liberals’ only source of growth. Gladu’s defection came less than a month after the NDP’s Lori Idlout made her own journey across the floor to join the government.
Carney’s side also added a trio of new MPs this week by sweeping three byelections being held to replace two departing Toronto legislators and one in the riding of Terrebonne, north of Montreal. One of the new Liberal MPs is Doly Begum, former deputy leader of the Ontario NDP.
The additions have given the Liberals a majority of two in the House of Commons, which will make it easier for them to advance the government’s agenda and pass legislation without worrying too much about an election coming any time soon. But the new MPs, particularly Gladu and perhaps Idlout and Begum from outside the Liberals’ normal ideological range, also raise a fresh question: Is there such a thing as a political party’s tent becoming too big?
Specifically, are there potential problems when a party stretches itself so far ideologically than it becomes less of a big tent, more like a political pavilion?
What’s wrong with a big tent?
Some opponents and analysts predict the Liberals will pay a price down the road for their poaching and ideological flexibility.
Fred DeLorey, a Conservative strategist and the party’s former national campaign director, said the Liberals crossed a line when they invited Gladu into their caucus because her core beliefs are simply incompatible with those of the Liberal party. “She’s a transplant the host body may violently reject,” he wrote in a Substack post
While adding MPs or party supporters is a core goal of any political party or movement, many analysts say parties that become so vast or whose values are ill-defined face risk.
Those risks include a watering down of the party’s identity or brand to the point that voters don’t know what the party actually stands for, greater difficulty and efficiency in landing on policy positions, increased odds of internal conflict, and added vulnerability to challengers — from within the party or outside — who are clearer about what they stand for.
Carney may be able to manage his new, expanded coalition, DeLorey wrote, but “he’s also creating an environment where the internal contradictions are so vast they could devour him if he isn’t careful.”
DeLorey added that Gladu is so far away from the Liberal centre that she would have been right at the bottom of his list if he were to have ranked the Tory caucus members according to most likely to bolt to the Liberals. Not because of her attributes, he says, but “because I never thought in a million years the Liberals would ever accept her.”
Carney, for his part, has suggested that MPs in the Liberal caucus will need to support Liberal policies and values, not the other way around.
But the critics of the Liberals’ ideological flexibility, like the poaching targets, are also on the left.
Avi Lewis, the New Democatic Party’s new leader, said Liberals’ ideological malleability has reached a new level, particularly with the addition of Gladu, who he says has taken positions from the “furthest reaches” of the social conservative wing of the Tory party.
“If Marilyn Gladu is a Liberal, what does being a Liberal mean?” asked Lewis. “At what point does a tent get so big that the fabric is stretched beyond recognition?”
Lewis has also said out in recent days that the Liberals’ attempts to secure a majority through floor-crossings are undemocratic and disrespectful to voters. If an MP wants to cross the floor, Lewis said, he or she should resign and face voters in a byelection.
The Liberals’ big-tent flexibility has never been more stark. Beyond the poaching MPs from the left and right, the party is still benefitting from making a dramatic shift early last year in its leadership, from the uber-progressive Trudeau to Carney, widely seen as a business-oriented Liberal.
With the exception of former environment minister Steven Guilbeault, who resigned from cabinet late last year after Carney struck a deal with Alberta to support a new pipeline, none of the more than 100 Liberal MPs in the current caucus who were also part of the Trudeau government seemed to have expressed any reservations over the massive agenda shift.
Liberal flexibility
The Liberals’ ability to shapeshift with the times is the source of much dispute, and sometimes derision, around Parliament Hill. Partisan Liberals view it as a strength, giving the party the breadth and agility to respond to the issues of the day and Canadians’ changing needs.
Party officials tend to believe they’re attracting new supporters because they’re doing a good job and reflecting Canadians’ views. They also argue that Liberals, one of the democratic world’s most electorally successful political parties over the last century or so, are pragmatic and less beholden to any ideological position, unlike their rivals on the left and right.
Carney himself is also a prime example — perhaps even the personification — of this flexibility.
After years of rumours, he finally entered politics last year by winning the helm of a progressive government that was down in the polls by more than 20 points. After he claimed leadership, the party’s new face was a former banker who had never been elected to office.
After the Liberals won the election in April, Carney wasted no time in cancelling a number of progressive policies from the Trudeau era, while switching the agenda to one focussed on increasing trade, competitiveness and infrastructure in the shadow of the Trump tariffs.
Within striking distance of a majority government, meanwhile, Carney hung a big, clear sign on his party’s front door: Opposition MPs welcome!
But the willingness to expand the tent didn’t stop there.
Just four years before becoming prime minister, Carney wrote a book that emphasized how markets sometimes fail, notably when it comes to the environment. After gaining power, one of his first moves was to cancel the consumer carbon tax, a signature piece of legislation from Justin Trudeau’s green emphasis.
The Carney mantra was clear: Big, flexible tents are better.
The Liberals’ opponents, however, tend to roll their eyes at such claims about the advantages of flexibility, saying there’s only one thing that binds Liberals together: the pursuit of power.
Sanjay Jeram, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, said the Liberals’ flexible and big tent is nothing new. The history of the Liberals, and the federal Progressive Conservatives prior to 1993, he said, shows “a remarkable capacity to shift, expand and contract its ideological core in pursuit of the electoral centre.”
Will the Liberals pay a price?
But at the end of the day, how likely is it that the Liberals will pay a price for their flexibility?
Analysts say there’s risk in watering down any brand, whether it’s that of a political party, a company, or a product that is supposed to represent something.
Lori Turnbull, a political scientist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said it’s more difficult to maintain the cohesiveness of a big-tent political party. The Mulroney government (1984-93) was a prime example of this challenge, Turnbull said, because the Conservative party had expanded its tent by luring in a wider range of supporters, including even Quebec sovereigntists.
For a variety of reasons, including regional differences and the variance of views with the government’s caucus, that alliance blew up, leading to the formations of both the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois. “He could not keep that coalition together,” said Turnbull.
In the case of today’s Liberals, there are very few public signs so far, beyond the Guilbeault resignation, of discontent. But that could change as it becomes clearer which Liberal backbenchers are unlikely to get promotions and if progressive Liberals who may have entered politics to champion such causes as child care or the environment start to question what they’re doing in their own caucus.
“There could be a tent that’s too big,” said Turnbull.
André Lecours, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa, said the risk to the Liberals will be minimized if the government continues to focus largely on issues such as economic restructuring that are unlikely to expose rifts within their big tent.
Jeram said the stretching of the Liberal tent represents minimal risk, as long as the party doesn’t show evidence that their policies or views are becoming more radical in a way that might reflect the newcomers’ influence.
But the Liberals’ bigger tent may also create opportunities for opposition parties to try to shift discussions to policy areas, such as climate change or perhaps vaccines, that could expose divisions with the Liberal ranks.
Jeram said the Liberals should be on safe ground for a while, as long as the separatist movements in Quebec and Alberta don’t gain too strong a foothold.
If there’s a big down side to the Liberals’ poaching, it doesn’t seem to have shown itself yet.
The Liberals and Carney himself are riding high in the polls, less than 18 months after the Conservatives held a lead of more than 20 points and seemed poised to cruise into power.
In his first year in office, Carney focused largely on a centre-right agenda that emphasized infrastructure, expanding trade, tax cuts and defence spending. He also cut the emphasis on climate change policies, leading to the cabinet resignation of Guilbeault, feminism and symbolic progressive gestures.
“Taken together, it is difficult to imagine a more favourable party system configuration for sustained Liberal dominance under Carney,” said Jeram.
Those events have left the Liberal prime minister and his team in a position to increase the size of his party’s tent – through both byelections and luring floor crossers.
Shifting positions
And internal shifts among the Liberals’ opponents, meanwhile, may also be playing a role in providing the Liberals some cover from the risks of their tent growing too big.
Analysts say the Liberals can probably make the bigger tent work, at least for now, because the centre of Canada’s political spectrum is less crowded than usual.
All signs seem to be that the NDP has taken a clear step or two to the left with the election of Lewis, showing little interest in trying to take advantage of the centre-left that appears to be an underserved market.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, remain further to the right under Poilievre than the party’s traditional core.
While it’s unlikely that many MPs would be tempted to cross the floor to an opposition party from the government side, analysts say it’s possible that the opposition parties could try to show a little ideological flexibility of their own if they want to expand the size of their own tents.
Possible, but not particularly likely.
While the Lewis-led NDP may be less likely now to lure disaffected centre-left progressives, their focus seems to be more focussed on attracting new voters to their base.
The Conservatives’ Poilievre, meanwhile, has made a concerted effort his entire career to establish his brand as an authentic, true-blue conservative. Tacking to the centre wouldn’t seem to be his thing.
Carney and the Liberals, meanwhile, are riding high in the polls, fuelled in part by their unapologetic efforts to do what is necessary to expand the size of their party’s tent.
The big question is whether the big-tent government will be able to use its new majority to execute a plan to make the country stronger – or will the expansion of its political tent create problems.
The Conservatives’ DeLorey said the Liberals are creating a “Frankenstein” party, a reference to Mary Shelley’s nameless monster who was inelegantly stitched together from various body parts.
The challenge for the Liberal majority, stitched together with the help of various byelections and floor crossers, is whether they’ll be able to stay cohesive.
Or, like Frankenstein’s monster, who begins the novel with a welcome attitude towards new people, will the Liberals turn hostile once exposed to challenges?
National Post
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