Canadian Media Risks Complicity in Floor-Crossing "Conspiracy" : Op-Ed

OTTAWA – J.J. McCullough — one of the most-read Canadian voices on politics — posted a thought this week that I’ve also been hammering in reporting and podcasting this year.

“I do not think the Liberal Party should be engaged in an ongoing backroom conspiracy to undo the stated partisan preferences of voters, or indeed elected politicians themselves,” he wrote, on Mark Carney’s unprecedented scheme of inducements to secure a majority government. “And I think the press should start reporting on this as an organized conspiracy, not fun Ottawa drama.”

McCullough was referring to reports on Conservative MP Kelly DeRidder, who went public with the campaign of promises and inducements she’d been approached with to join Carney’s government. She’s one of the few Conservatives who have gone on the record with the details of this odious campaign.

Terry Newman of the National Post has followed up, and reported that DeRidder “received a call that consisted of a mix of intimidation, flattery and a hint of career advancement.”

I did an op-ed for The Bureau last year noting Brian Lilley’s excellent reporting that showed how numerous Conservatives were being approached, and Lilley has since exposed how promises including the dangling of a judicial appointment can be part of these schemes. That allegation, if true, raises questions of corruption and possibly even criminality, to my mind. But the silence from most of the national media in response is, itself, the growing story.

The Bureau has reported extensively on the mechanics of Mark Carney’s floor-crossing gambit — how a sitting prime minister, freshly handed a mandate by voters, has systematically poached opposition members to engineer a de facto majority that no Canadian actually voted for.

Now we know just how far the Carney government intends to press its advantage. Last Monday night, just five minutes after a late-night House vote that handed Liberals control of parliamentary committees — including the Ethics Committee — the newly empowered majority moved to suppress a document production order directly related to Carney’s conflicts of interest. John Brassard, the former chair of the Ethics Committee, did not mince words. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” he posted on X. “North Korea, Russia, China level stuff here.”

As Conservative MP Stephanie Kusie noted this week, the newest Liberal member appointed to the Public Accounts Committee — one of Parliament’s most essential oversight bodies — is Michael Ma, the floor-crossing MP for Markham–Unionville. The same Michael Ma who, just weeks ago, used his position on a different committee to subject Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, one of Canada’s foremost experts on Chinese state risk, to an aggressive and widely condemned interrogation — one that appeared to question the very existence of forced labor in China. The Bureau has reported at length on Ma’s extensive ties to “community leaders” in Greater Toronto that have been tied, in the Jamestown Foundation’s landmark Chinese influence report, to Beijing’s United Front Work Department.

Ma, Chinese-language reports show, was himself listed as an official leader for a group that was designated one of 575 groups in Canada with documented links to the United Front Work Department, which is Xi Jinping’s arm of political influence into Western democracies.

Meanwhile, Carney’s government is doubling down on the architecture that makes media silence so convenient.

As Michael Geist reported this week, the Spring Economic Update contains a proposal to massively expand the Labour Journalism Tax Credit to include television and radio news — potentially directing tens of millions of additional dollars to Bell, Rogers, Corus, and other broadcasters who already depend on government goodwill for their financial survival. The government paid out roughly $71 million to support over 3,000 journalists in 2024. That number could double.

A prime minister who is systematically dismantling parliamentary oversight, suppressing document production on his own conflicts of interest, and rewarding a floor-crosser with a seat on the Public Accounts Committee, is simultaneously expanding the subsidy regime that keeps much of the national press afloat.

The Ottawa press gallery has been, at best, incurious. That incuriousness has consequences. When an organized effort to consolidate political power goes unreported as such — when it is processed as “Ottawa drama,” as McCullough puts it, rather than as the structural assault on accountability that it is — the media is not neutral. It is complicit.

The question Canadians should be asking is not whether Mark Carney is acting in the public interest. The question is whether anyone in a position to hold him accountable still has the independence — financial, institutional, and moral — to try.