Another Floor-Crossing Underscores Unrepresentative Nature of
Cartel Parties and Cartel Party Government
Advocate of Supranational Narrow Private Interests and Extremist Opponent of Sanity and Conscience Joins Liberals
Marilyn Gladu, four-term Conservative Member of Parliament for Sarnia-Lampton-Bkejwanong crossed the floor to the Liberals on April 8, leaving the Carney Liberals one seat short of a majority. Gladu was first elected to Parliament in 2015. She is the fifth defector and fourth Conservative MP to defect since late 2025. The announcement has been met with outrage on social media, especially from her constituents who emphasize that their votes have been rendered meaningless.
The
Liberals now have 171 seats, one short of a majority. Political pundits
consider both Toronto ridings, Scarborough Southwest and
University-Rosedale, where by-elections will be held on April 13, to be
safe Liberal seats and if the Liberals win these as expected they would
have a majority plus
one in the House of Commons.
On January 11, Gladu publicly supported House of Commons petition e-7025 which called for "the House of Commons to amend the Parliament of Canada Act to require that any Member of Parliament who crosses the floor to join another registered political party must vacate their seat and trigger a by-election in their riding, while permitting them to sit as an independent without such a requirement." The petition is open for signatures until April 17 and currently has 66,483 signatures.
Gladu said at that time, "Really, the whole point of being an MP is to represent your constituents. So, if they're voting you in under one platform, for you to switch for whatever reasons, just seems to me to not be representing what you're supposed to be there to represent."
"Exactly," her constituents have responded, and many are calling for Gladu to resign so a by-election can be called. They are pointing out that their vote has no meaning, and condemning both Prime Minister Mark Carney and Gladu for this cynical manoeuvre.
Not four months later, Gladu now claims she is joining the Liberals because that is what her constituents want. Even the president of the local Conservative Board of Directors was not informed in advance of Gladu's decision.
It is also a fact that Gladu has been a very vocal critic of the Liberals in Parliament. In a statement representative of her views on the Liberals, speaking in the House of Commons on February 6, Gladu said: "Madam Speaker, Canada has lost over 5,000 automotive jobs and 32 paper mills have shut down. In my riding, three facilities are shutting down. As well, 51,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the year since the Prime Minister took charge. He said he was going to 'build, baby, build' but the only thing he has built is the highest unemployment rate for youth we have seen in a generation.
"Will the Prime Minister do what he promised, build at a scale we have not seen in generations and work with Conservatives to restore Canada's sovereignty in the face of American threats?"
As recently as mid-March, Gladu was repeating the stock Conservative criticisms that Carney hadn't built anything since he was elected, that he had failed to get a deal on tariffs, that "murderers are walking the streets" and the Liberals are "soft on crime," that Carney wasn't acting fast enough to meet NATO targets on military spending, and so on.
Now we are to believe she has suddenly had an epiphany. "The past year has been like no other that Canada has ever faced, and I've heard clearly from constituents that you want serious leadership and a real plan to build a stronger and more independent Canadian economy," Gladu wrote in a letter to her constituents. "Today, there is both the opportunity – and the responsibility – to build our country's strength and success with a more constructive, collaborative approach."
Gladu, said to be a "social conservative," is in fact well-known as a vociferous extremist opponent of sanity and human conscience. In her home riding, she has been denounced for her enthusiasm for ethnic cleansing of Palestine and virulent opposition to Palestinian rights. The Sarnia Journal reported on July 25, 2025 that "Past remarks by Gladu have raised longstanding concern among human rights advocates. In a 2019 recorded meeting, Gladu said that "Palestine does not have any documented rights." She described Palestinians as "squatting on [Israeli] land."
As
a member of the Conservative Official Opposition, Gladu was critic for
civil liberties, gaining notoriety during the COVID-19 pandemic for
promoting unproven treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and for her
opposition to containment measures. She called for the military to be
brought in to
break up rail blockades standing with the Wet'suwet'en land defenders.
She was also known for voting against legislation for a ban on the use
of the broadly discredited and inhumane "conversion therapy." More
recently, she has taken exaggerated stands against Liberal legislation,
such as claiming
that Liberals supporting Bill C-9, the Combating Hate Act,
"think I should be in prison for quoting scriptures." Her Facebook
posts condemning the Liberals are rapidly being taken down but the
Hansard record can't be fixed, such as her recent opposition to the
Liberal government appealing
the Federal Court of Appeal's ruling that the Liberals' use of the Emergencies Act
violated the constitution. If the extremism and double-talk which comes
out of this woman's mouth is an example of the best and the brightest
women in top spots in industry then industry is indeed in poor
shape.
Carney's recruitment of Gladu is consistent with what the ruling circles praise as evidence of his "pragmatic realism." His is an alleged non-partisan sort of technocratic government for which he is amassing CEOs and senior executives for the restructuring of the state in the name of nation-building, security, prosperity, sovereignty, civilized values and more – all of which are rendered meaningless because of his partisanship to nation-wrecking, militarization. and war preparations in concert with the U.S. war machine. The aim of his technocratic government is to destroy any vestiges of liberal democratic institutions in favour of the prerogative police powers of ministers and advisors and consultants recruited from private industry and banking concerns. There is no doubt that Gladu has been courted because of her career as a corporate executive in energy and petrochemical monopolies. It is these reactionary narrow private interests she is representing.
Gladu's Corporate History
Gladu was a professional engineer who held executive positions at Dow Chemical in Sarnia for 21 years, was engineering manager and then director of engineering at Calgary-based oil sands monopoly Suncor Energy, and finally held a consultant role at Worley (formerly WorleyParsons). Australia-based Worley describes itself as "the world's largest provider of engineering, project and asset management solutions in the energy, chemicals and resources sectors." Worley has pivoted heavily into technologies such as carbon capture and storage, electrification of older facilities, etc. Suncor recently partnered with Brookfield Properties in a $90 million redevelopment of the Suncor Energy Centre in downtown Calgary where the energy giant's headquarters are located. Dow and Brookfield have also partnered in recent years in billion-dollar investments for building infrastructure for circular plastics in the U.S. and Canada.
Each of these former employers has definite demands for handouts from the federal government. The Dow plant in Sarnia is an old facility, and not competitive with the new Dow "Path2Zero" plant in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta and those on the Gulf Coast. It would benefit from recognition of "trade exposed status" to receive special regulatory treatment, particularly regarding environmental and carbon pricing regulations, as well as federal pay-the-rich funding for low-carbon technologies. The new Dow plant in Alberta received $400 million in handouts from the federal government.
Suncor is part of the Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage scheme which is demanding that the federal government increase its contribution to 75 per cent of the $16.5 billion cost of the facility in order to proceed. The deal between Alberta and the federal government on building new pipelines was said to be contingent on finalizing such a pay-the-rich agreement with the Pathways Alliance.
Worley's construction arm, WorleyParsonsCord was the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractor for the TransMountain (TM) pipeline Edmonton terminal and 12 pump stations. TM is planning significant expansion of the line. Worley is also the main contractor for the BHP Jansen Potash Mine in Saskatchewan, along with many other projects across Canada and Quebec including LNG developments.
Speaking of her background, Mark Carney said Gladu has "tremendous experience" both as an engineer and an international business leader. "She's going to be a great member of our team. Lots of energy, ideas, advice on a wide range of issues including execution, getting things done," he told reporters. He added that "This all comes at a time when the country as a whole is uniting."
In an interview with CBC at the time of the first Conservative floor-crossings, Carney was asked if there was any criteria that would bar him from accepting a floor-crosser. He refused to answer, saying it was a "hypothetical question." With Gladu having been accepted into the boundless Liberal "Big Tent," he seems to have answered the question.
Going to the heart of the problem of these desertions and
floor-crossings in the parliament requires addressing the system in
which cartel parties of the rich come to power. It is a system designed
to keep the people out of power, and is in contempt of a modern
conception of democracy in which
the people must have a decisive role in governance. The manoeuvres of
the Carney Liberals to get their majority are cynical and, in the
opinion of many, give rise to a fraudulent self-serving majority. They
only serve to deepen the crisis of legitimacy and credibility in which
the system called a
representative democracy is mired.
This article was published in
Volume 56 Number 16 - April 10, 2026
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/TML2026/Articles/T560162.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca