The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge
Moore Butts -- Why Does A Majority Make Such A Difference?
14 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: Why is a majority government significant for the Liberals?
Are you ready for Moore Butts, their latest conversation? That's coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Gerald Butts, James Moore, and our regular, well, every second Tuesday conversation with these two esteemed gentlemen. And it's been another interesting week.
And Jerry's been in Montreal, still in Montreal, actually, as we record this after the convention by the Liberals as they keep moving towards their majority position. In fact, you could argue they already have it now, but it may be later. enhanced by the Monday night by-elections. We're recording this before those, but I think we all assume we know where those by-elections are headed towards.
James is in his regular haunt on the West Coast in Vancouver. Do you actually say Vancouver or are you outside of Vancouver?
Chapter 2: What changes occur when a government shifts from minority to majority?
When I'm in Canada, I say Port Moody. When I'm outside of Canada, I say Vancouver.
Okay. Here's the question for this week. You know, we either are or we aren't in a majority position for the Liberal government. Most likely we are, as Tuesday sets. But having said that, what real difference is there between a majority and a minority? James, why don't you start?
It's actually pretty huge. It's tectonic.
Chapter 3: How do expectations shift for a majority government?
It's not, you know, from the outside, people say, oh, well, they have a majority now. Well, that's interesting. The government can do whatever it wants. The truth is, a switch gets flipped, a light switch comes on, and it's a massive cultural shift in a government. because the expectations around you go through the roof.
And so I think for Prime Minister Carney and for liberals who think that now that they have a majority government, that everything is smooth sailing, it just, the dynamic is very different. Provinces become, the expectations get much higher. Big city mayors' expectations get higher.
The base of your party, which might have been a little bit more sanguine and prepared to put some water in their wine and compromise, say, well, if they had a majority, they might. No, they now expect you to deliver something significant to a part of the reason why that they're a member of the party.
The Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, when they're at the peak of their powers, are both brokerage parties and they're made of constituent parts. And those constituent parts expect deliverables. They expect either, you know, conservatives that want lower taxes or tougher crime or something related to families or whatever. whatever the code of the day is.
And liberals have their version of that, either expanded social services or something specific on official languages or go a little further on gun control or whatever it is. And those constituent parts just say, especially in the current context with Prime Minister Carney, they say you've got
You know, you're 10 points up in the national polls, you're 15 points up in Ontario, you're 20 points up in preferred prime minister. You now have a clear majority in the House. You have no provinces fighting you. You have no reason to not deliver.
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Chapter 4: What historical context is important for understanding majority governments?
So so where's my thing? And everybody's going to start looking for their thing. The fangs and the teeth, the media get a little bit sharper.
Even independent media, you know, conservative media, they get they get a little bit more aggressive and they start hunting down cabinet ministers in airports and at home and in community events because the official opposition has sort of they've lost seats in parliament and they've lost momentum. So we need to do our part to stand up for the conservative cause.
And they're going to get a little bit more aggressive. Everything actually gets harder. The only thing that gets easier is. committees and your ability to pass stuff through the house. But everything else takes on a different shape and a different perspective. So you buy yourself more time.
Fundraising gets harder because you don't have to sort of scare the base with the dynamic that we have an election in 90 days. We have a confidence vote coming up. Look out. So you have to find different ways in order to appeal to get your
50 dollar checks and 20 dollar donations and 100 dollar donations so you have to reimagine that a little bit you also have to make sure that your caucus doesn't say oh we're not going to have an election until 2029 we're good no no stay on your toes keep leaning in keep showing up keep being aggressive so i think actually everything gets a lot harder and the expectations get a lot harder so when you get a majority congratulations but i hope you're the switch is flipped in your brain in terms of how you're going to approach government because it gets harder
Did the switch flip in your brain like in 2011? the conservatives of which you obviously were a member of that cabinet, achieved their majority after a number of minorities. Were you ready for it? Did you see all that coming when you became a majority government?
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Chapter 5: How does public perception influence government dynamics?
I'd like to say yes, but you hear the energy in my voice is because I learned through some of the searing experience. But for us, the origin story goes back further, right? It goes back actually to 1993. It wasn't 2004 when Stephen Harper won a minority, not a majority.
but 1993 yes the progressive conservatives crashed down but i was on the reform party side of the family i first came into politics as a volunteer for the reform party in 1993 as a 16 year old and so for us it was 52 seats and then in 97 it was 60 seats and then it was 66 seats in 2000 and it was kind of this you know let's go like adding a dozen seats and like keep moving keep moving and then 100 seats in 2000 124 into into in 2024
And, uh, and sorry, a hundred and whatever seats in 2024, 124 seats in 26. So it was like, come on, come on. And it was by then it was like five elections. So then it was 2008. We want a minority. We hope to get a majority felt, you know, the bottom fell out in Quebec on culture files, 2011, we get a majority. Okay. here we go.
So, but the, the big shift for us was we would, you know, we would do it if we were in government, we would do it. Then you get in government and say, well, we would do it if we had a majority, we would do it if we had a majority, then you get into a majority that it's finally, okay, here we go. And then the expectations were there.
So we, by then some of the big cultural files for the conservative movement, particularly the long gun registry and other things, um, we, we had to move on like in the first quarter of that government, if we didn't, then all of our credibility would go with the base.
Yeah.
All right, Jerry, your party witnessed the opposite, right? It went from majority in 2015 to a minority in 2019.
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Chapter 6: What role does media play in shaping government accountability?
Now you could argue that's because you weren't there anymore. Well, you could argue that. But what about the reverse? You obviously see the difference in the reverse.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know. Listening to James describe this situation, I feel like I should call my friends and say, call off the by-elections. It doesn't sound like any fun at all. So I do agree with what James said, though. I think that the pressure that mounts, you just have no excuses, right? So people get less patient with their demands. You've always got mouths to feed in government, right?
whether it be traditional constituencies, the issues that a party will prosecute over time that James was talking about. Every party has their version of that issue, of those issues. But on the upside, and I think it is a really important upside, and I think in a strange way, they're about to generate what the public wants, frankly, because I think that the public wants...
Prime Minister Carney to have the stability and the planning horizon that you get with a majority government but nobody wants an election and I think that that's true of the Prime Minister as well without speaking for him that's just my own instinct watching his body language and I think in a strange way and people have made this point about our parliamentary system many times over the years the system itself is conspiring to give the public what it
And I know a lot of people will disagree with that and we'll get some hate mail for it. But when my reading of the polls and how consistent they've been in support of the prime minister, and let's be honest, this is support for Mark Carney and his government. It is not support for the traditional version of the liberal party. It is support for Mark Carney.
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Chapter 7: How is AI impacting job security and the economy?
I think they're going to get what they want. So if you're in the prime minister's shoes... you have the most, suddenly you have the most valuable resource in politics and in life, and that is time. So instead of worrying about whether you need a scenario to go to the polls this spring and another one next fall and then one the following spring and basically every six months,
usually unpredictably something generates an election anyway. Now he gets to take a step back and say, okay, I've got three years. What do I want to accomplish in those three years? And for all of the reasons James described, that will heighten the pressure on him. But I think there's no substitute for having that kind of time. And look, as someone who has been deeply involved with him and
And in this whole enterprise for certainly the first half of last year, it's impossible to describe, guys, the velocity at which this thing was traveling in terms of normal politics. And I think as a consequence, he just hasn't had a chance to take a breath. I mean, he, I think, enjoys moving at this speed. The system does not enjoy moving at this speed. And it's been...
on its rails for a while. And I think getting a chance to take a step back, point out to his team, make whatever adjustments he needs to make to his agenda and describe clearly what he wants to accomplish most importantly to the public over the next three to six months is, And then drive the system hard toward achieving those things.
He'll get what you usually get as a leader going into a campaign before a campaign, but that he circumstances robbed him of the benefit of having that preparatory time. And now almost miraculously, he's probably going to get it while prime minister.
By default, our system is wired culturally and structurally towards majority governments, right?
Six of the last eight elections have yielded minority parlance, but culturally, frankly, whether it's through the French Catholic tradition in deference to church leadership or on the English side, through the Westminster model, et cetera, and the way in which things have been approached, and also in provinces, almost every province in this country,
um is is a binary choice and therefore almost every provincial election yields a majority government of one color or the other and they're and they're all unicameral in and in their in their approach to things i mean quebec has had a different tradition but but basically all unicameral and and so and so people are wired that if i vote a certain way that's what i'm going to get and they're in control and they drive the car for a couple years and then i'll judge them and see what the alternative is
And federally, it's been starting to stop. In 2011, in 2008, Stephen Harper tried. In 2011, Stephen Harper succeeded. And really having to explicitly say to Canadians, because of the global recession and coming out of it, we will have a focused federal government that will, a steady, stable majority government that will focus on the economy.
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Chapter 8: What challenges does the government face in regulating AI?
The circumstances have to be aligned. You have to get that mandate. And Donald Trump and the way in which Mark Carney has approached it and culturally has aligned and approached things, Canadians seem to be prepared to say, please have that stability on this side so that we can deal with these crises.
Yeah.
Gerry, you were at the convention over the weekend, and there was at one point the Prime Minister in his speech talked about a parliament of a degree of unity, that people ought to pull together from all sides on this, given the situation the country's facing and the different difficulties and the changing world nature. How far away is that from a government of national unity?
That's a good question. I think that I'm glad you picked up on that, Peter, and I hope other people did, because I think that this has been like all successful strategies. I think Mark Cardenas is relatively simple and it's we need a bigger tent, both within the liberal
Party and within the Parliament of Canada so that we can get through the crisis that the United States has visited upon us together. That's a strategy, right? And the people who are in the weeds picking on what one floor crosser or another may have said on their social media six months ago or
can the Liberal Party sustain a rightward tilt here or a more centrist positioning there or whatever your pet issue is, are missing the point. And I think he has very deep conviction that he needs to fashion a broader coalition to keep the country together through this challenge we're facing on an indeterminate amount of time.
So I think what he's trying to do is to fashion a national unity government under the aegis of the Liberal Party of Canada, which, you know, if you listen to his speech yesterday, it was very much about the country. It wasn't it was a speech to liberals about what he's trying to do with the party and why. And sorry, sorry, James, go ahead.
He also benefits from from another cultural shift that's happened in our politics. And we've talked about it before, but it's worth reanimating here. Right. Which is we have a parliamentary system, but we have presidential style politics. Yeah.
So our system, you know, how many seats and which ridings and polls and, you know, the pizza parliament versus... Like, all that's true, but in part because of the diminishment of media capacity, in part because of the shrinking attention span, frankly, of the public and the scrolling and, like, all of that. When campaigns come around, the cameras are pointed at one person.
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