NDP MP You've Never Heard of Joins Liberals

Blah blah blah orange wave blah blah blah Bob Rae blah blah blah Belinda Stronach, basically.

NDP MP Lise St. Denis has announced that she's crossing the floor to join the Liberals, giving the third-place party 35 MPs in the House of Commons. There's just a tad of irony at play here, as NDP MP Mathieu Ravignat had introduced a private member's bill in November that if passed would ban the practice of floor-crossing. After all – and especially in Quebec during this past election – voters tend to vote more for the party or the party's leader than for individual MPs, and we wouldn't be surprised to hear a little bit of dissatisfaction among the residents of Saint-Maurice–Champlain over the switcheroo. On May 2, the Liberal candidate, Yves Tousignant, placed a distant fourth behind St-Denis, Bloc Quebecois incumbent Jean-Yves Laforest and Tory candidate Jacques Grenier. (Then again, maybe not, as the riding was held by a little guy from Shawinigan known as Jean Chretien for sometime, so...)

In the grand scheme of things, and especially in a majority government, one seat switching hands makes very little difference, but you can expect at least three (3) columns on the significance of the shift to emerge within the next 48 hours. Previous floor crossers, such as David Emerson (Grits to Tories, 2006) and Belinda Stronach (Tories to Grits, 2005) did so during minority governments (they also landed cabinet positions in the process), so there was a little more substance to those than for someone who's been an MP for all of seven months. Questionable skirting of democratic principles aside, this is kind of like (pardon the hockey metaphor) a mid-season trade between the Columbus Blue Jackets and Anaheim Ducks solely to distract from both teams' rather undesirable fortunes.