Carney seals a majority and remakes Canada’s Liberal Party.

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada speaks during the Liberal Party’s convention in Montreal, April 11, 2026. The results of three special elections on April 13 have given Carney a majority in the Canadian Parliament; he will now be able to more easily pass budgets and other measures to advance his ultimate goal of making Canada more independent from the United States. (Ian Austen/The New York Times)

By MATINA STEVIS-GRIDNEFF

It’s Mark Carney’s Canada now.

One year, almost to the day, since the stunning electoral win that made him prime minister but still left him a few parliamentary seats short of an outright majority, Carney earlier this week completed his plan to clinch control.

In so doing, he secured his dominance at home, shielding his government from the vagaries of a minority government.

He will now be able to more easily pass budgets and other crucial bills to advance his ultimate goal of making Canada more independent from the United States. His majority will insulate him from parliamentary challenges, even if some of his big plans, such as trade talks with the United States, do not go fully as planned.

If Carney can keep his majority together, he will not even need to hold an election before late 2029.

How he got here was not pretty.

The Liberals won all three special elections Monday. In the months before, Carney had lured five opposition lawmakers — four Conservatives and one from the leftist New Democrats — to “cross the floor” (or, in American terms, “cross the aisle”) and join his party.

Some hold positions far from traditional Liberal policies and had been critical of Carney before flipping sides, sparking complaints that the defections amounted to cynical, self-interested betrayals of voters’ preferences.

Still, even if it has been messy, Carney has now completed the remaking of the Liberal Party as his own. He has moved it rightward to the political center and turned it into a “big tent” that includes a motley crew of progressives, environmentalists, social conservatives, former bankers like himself, and others.

Carney’s methodical majority-building now leaves him unmatched in domestic power and recasts Canadian politics by usurping space on the right from Conservatives and freeing up space on the left for the small New Democratic Party.

The end result perfectly encapsulates Carney’s Canadian pragmatism to do what is needed to accomplish what is necessary: help Canada grow and thrive with less dependence on the United States.

“People are quite happy with this purple version of a Liberal Party,” said Shachi Kurl, president at the Angus Reid Institute, a nonpartisan political research group. “It’s pragmatism, a business-minded ‘let’s get on with it.’”

Making of a majority

To fully appreciate Carney’s achievement, it is important to recount how we got here.

Carney last year inherited a broken Liberal Party from his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, who had been in power for 10 years and had shaped the party around his progressive politics. At that point, the Conservatives dominated polls.

But within a few weeks, President Donald Trump’s menacing rhetoric toward Canada and Carney’s decision to enter politics and replace Trudeau after an international career in finance and monetary policy upended the political dynamics.

Propelled by intense worry and anger about Trump’s tariffs and sovereignty threats, voters helped Carney erase the Conservative Party’s lead to win a general election. (Canadians elect local representatives; the party with the most parliamentary seats forms a government, which can be a minority government. Its leader becomes prime minister.)

But the Liberals landed a handful of seats shy of an outright majority in the House of Commons, leaving Carney’s minority government vulnerable to votes of no confidence and forcing it to seek support from opposition representatives to pass important legislation.

Over the past eight months, Carney and his colleagues quietly recruited five opposition parliamentarians to their ranks.

Each deal was different, but broadly speaking, he offered the Conservative and New Democratic lawmakers resources; better support for their constituents; and, in some cases, titles.

Two of the former Conservative members were invited to join Carney on high-profile overseas visits, allowing them to feel more valued and visible at a time when the Conservatives were weakened by concerns over leadership and an overall lack of direction.

The coup de grâce came Monday when the Liberals won all three special elections and secured a safe majority in the House of Commons.

Floor crossings are not only permitted in Canadian politics; they happen with some frequency. The five Carney has attracted is not even a record: Jean Chrétien, another pragmatic Liberal prime minister, lured as many as nine opposition politicians from several parties to his ranks between 1995 and 2003.

But the concentration of floor crossings within just a few months, that helped turn a minority government into a majority one, is extremely rare in Canada’s history.

The business at hand

At his party’s convention this weekend, Carney couched his triumph in we-live-in-extraordinary-times terms, casting his projected new majority as a kind of national unity government.

“This is not the time for politics as usual, for petty differences or for political point scoring,” he told party faithful in Montreal. “Members of this House are choosing to join us because they understand the stakes; they know that a house divided cannot build, but a nation united is unstoppable.”

Carney’s government is starting negotiations with the United States to decide the future of a vital free-trade agreement between the two nations and Mexico. Failure to deliver on a favorable deal for Canada will be a big hit to him, but no longer necessarily fatal to his government.

And beyond the trade talks, Carney has set in motion an ambitious agenda to wean Canada off an increasingly erratic United States.

He wants to spend taxpayers’ money to build major infrastructure. He has been scouring the globe seeking new trade partners, including with governments that are not democratic. He has boosted Canada’s military spending even as its health care system struggles, and he is evangelizing drilling and digging to bring more Canadian oil, gas and minerals to market.

For now, Carney seems unstoppable.

“Look at what he has been able to do; ‘remarkable’ is just not the correct word,” Kurl said. “He took a party that was a bus with no brakes headed for a brick wall and somehow managed to not only pull it from the brink of oblivion but then, within a year, get it into a majority position.”

She added, “It comes down to, do you want to be on the winning team, or do you want to be on the losing team?”