Gladu could make it
What we can learn from a match made in Carneyland
By now, interested readers will be able to find all sorts of reminders that, before she crossed the figurative floor to the Liberals on Wednesday, Marilyn Gladu had a reputation in Ottawa as an eccentric at best, and a loose cannon at worst. Her Wikipedia entry features expressions like “hydroxychloroquine” and “conversion therapy.”
Scanning reactions to the Sarnia MP’s defection, I see the obvious and expected — Carney fans embracing this bit of derring-do, Poilievre Conservatives discovering they never really liked Gladu. But there is also some novelty. There are unhappy Liberals who believe Gladu has no place among them. And I was surprised to find some remarkably sanguine Conservatives, or at least Conservatives who aren’t entirely sure Gladu and Mark Carney deserve all the blame. A selection:
I’m not big on writing about Stupid Human Tricks: Parliament Edition, because it often leads to overheated repartee on the comment board. Politics is a team sport, and changing teams constitutes a brazen challenge to loyalty, which is a supreme value in politics and one that journalists, in particular, are trained to undervalue. But it’s Liberal convention weekend, so I might as well talk about what everyone else is talking about.
First, I should warn readers that his post will contain neither a defence of floor-crossing between elections, nor a fit of outrage about it. I don’t particularly like floor-crossing but it keeps happening. This interview I published in October with a political scientist who co-edited a whole book on floor crossing has since become required reading. I mean, I keep thanking my higher power that I picked that pull quote for the headline:
And now, story time.
I know a former Liberal MP who first socialized with Justin Trudeau at an earlier, unhappier Liberal convention, in 2012 or even earlier. Trudeau would have been a Liberal MP at the time but not a public candidate for the party’s leadership, which in those days would have been considered an increasingly unappealing goal at any rate.
Anyway, this guy shows up at a reception at Trudeau’s invitation, and Trudeau is there with a circle of close friends, McGill guys, Brébeuf guys, Whistler guys, whatever. Trudeau spots him, wraps an arm around him, and says to the boys, “Everyone! This is M___. He’s with us. He’s OK. He’s one of us.” Weirdly insistently, the way my acquaintance tells it.
I attach no nefarious significance to this. I wrote a short book about Trudeau’s life as Trudeau has lived it. If you’re a figure of intense public scrutiny from the cradle, it seems reasonable to me that you’d grow up with a keen sense of when you need to wear a persona and when you can relax. You hope the perimeter of that comfort zone will be as wide as possible, but for damned sure, you keep an eye on where the perimeter is.
Trudeau experimented with a floor-crossing early in his tenure as Liberal leader — he experimented with a lot of things, amirite — but it didn’t help much, and people said bad things about him, and he lost his taste for the practice. Increasingly, as the Trudeau years went on, the Liberal party was a values test. In 2019, after an amazingly polarized federal election, I complained about this:
I think this has to do with changes in the way today’s Liberal party develops talent. Its heavyweights, John Turner, Paul Martin, used to come from law or big business. In those lines of work, it never pays to be too picky about whom you do business with. Recently, it’s much more common to see Liberal-leaning talent rise through a succession of clubs and temporary “leadership” programs—parliamentary page programs, Young Global Leaders, the Banff Forum. They’re intensely selective by nature, they encourage resumé-polishing, they measure success in terms of enthusiasm and ability to network instead of any measurable real-world effect or result
Mark Carney is different. He’s a Mandarin who comes late to a party of Lifers. This is hard to accept for many Liberals, who want to view him as the latest chapter in a story of eternal values correctness; and for many Conservatives, who need to believe the claim that he was a trusted close advisor to Trudeau for a decade.
My working metaphor for the Carney government is that in early 2025 Canada was placed under trusteeship by the OECD. Productivity and investment failed to meet targets for too many consecutive quarters, so the rich-country club sent a fellow in a tailored suit from London to run things for a while. Carney’s available. Send Carney. Handy choice! He played ice hockey as a lad, and he remembers Mike Myers from Saturday Night Live, so he has some familiarity with the local customs.
Significantly, he doesn’t really have a tight circle of groupthink pals. He wasn’t here. Tim Hodgson and Evan Solomon got cabinet jobs, Scott Gilmore’s in the PMO, but after them there actually aren’t a lot of other numbers in Carney’s Contacts app that don’t begin with (212) or (+44). He’d have been an oddball in the Harper government, where Harper spent at least a few weeks thinking Carney would make a good finance minister. And if we’re being honest, Carney’s a bit of an oddball in his own government too.
No big deal, he can work with anyone, or at least no better with the current person than he would with the next. But all this stuff about how the locals get so worked up over the local rituals? That’s really not his problem. Hey Mark, are you coming to karaoke on Thursday? I know it’s trivia night at the other pub, but… you know… around here, on Thursday nights, we do karaoke.
The new fellow blinks. “Actually, I think I’m going to stay home and watch The Pitt.”
Awkward pause. OK, sure, Mark. Maybe next week?
The new fellow blinks.
This is, after all, the way OECD country reports read. If you’re looking at a country’s overall prosperity, you emphasize ends over process and you simply ignore personality. Pretty much the inverse of the average partisan’s value set. OECD country reports hope “authorities” will boost investment and adopt a more agile talent strategy. They don’t say, “And keep away from Marilyn Gladu!,” because nobody at the OECD has heard of her.
Gladu, incidentally, actually doesn’t live in a hut with a box of votive candles and a 3-foot painting of Jesus from Hotel-Motel Art Fair. I forget who wrote this profile of her for a magazine a decade ago, it wasn’t me, but she comes across as quite interesting and agreeable, as she usually also does in person. The headline on the article calls her “pragmatic.” The article notes that she “consistently works across party lines,” boy howdy. It notes that she opposed Conservative doctrine on the long-form census and supported the Liberals’ fitful and intermittent support for science research.
If you didn’t know who this sentence was about, I doubt you’d think this person was wildly incompatible with Carneyism. “Gladu worked for Dow Chemical as a professional engineer for 21 years (she is the first female engineer to be elected to the House of Commons), travelling across the globe to oversee more than 250 chemical plants.”
And yes, sure, she also retweeted a fake photoshopped photo of Chrystia Freeland wearing a strap-on dildo in a Pride parade before deleting the tweet, which is something that actually happened, but who among us gets it right every time.
Carney and I don’t often chat, but I suspect he was bemused by all the fretting over Gladu’s sudden-onset flexibility. Isn’t she the absolute wrong kind of person? One plausible answer: The people of Sarnia have decided otherwise, four times in a row. Just as they elected Roger Gallaway four times in a row starting in 1993, and incidentally I can’t think of many issues Gallaway and Gladu would have disagreed on. The party changed in between, and now it’s changed again.
One more thing. Just about the most complete survey of Carney’s political thinking in the months before he contested the Liberal leadership comes from a long interview he gave at the social-conservative Cardus think tank with Father Raymond J. DeSouza, a Catholic priest and National Post columnist. Father Raymond is a longstanding admirer of Carney. More recently, Carney’s winter vacation ended with a concert at the Sistine Chapel about angelic visitations before he flew home to deliver noteworthy remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast.
If you’re a social conservative in 2026, which national party leader feels like your guy? I do understand this question will cause discomfort across party lines.
Two additional notes:
One simple partial motivation for Gladu crossing the floor is in her letter to constituents. She says Sarnia's been a bellwether riding for decades -- Liberal under Liberal governments, Conservative under Conservatives. Until her. That makes her the first Sarnia MP in her lifetime (or at least mine -- the trend goes back to at least the mid-1960s) who has never sat in a governing caucus. Maybe she just felt like she was missing out. Everything is more complex than one reason, but that seems to me like the sort of thing that would sit in somebody's head.
Also: Marilyn Gladu spoke at my father's memorial service, several years ago, at my request. She'd actually never met him, and I doubt he voted for her, but Dad had a certain profile in the community so I asked the mayor and MP to contribute some words.
When Canada didn't face existential threats before the second Trump term, prioritizing values over pragmatic politics was an understandable position. Today, the governing party needs to maximize its majority to show strength at home and in foreign capitals. Perhaps this is just rationalizing by a Liberal partisan, but the differing approaches of PMs Trudeau and Carney both seem reasonable in their own times.