One new Tory MP doesn’t make a government

If you’re waiting for the trickle of one Liberal MP abandoning her party to turn into a raging flood of defectors, don’t hold your breath.

It won’t happen.

Leona Alleslev’s decision to cross over to the Conservatives the day Parliament resumed this week was perfectly timed to stir up the most political drama, grab the most attention and cause maximum embarrassment to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

And judging by the ecstatic welcome she received from Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, you’d think Moses had just led the Children of Israel out of the wilderness and to the edge of the Promised Land. Except this prophet was completely on her own.

To be sure, for a day or two Scheer can feel buoyed by the addition of a new caucus member who will offer first-hand testimony to the Liberals’ supposed failures and the Conservatives’ presumed superiority.

She’s the perfect poster girl for what Scheer calls Canadians’ “misplaced trust” in the Liberals. Just as Alleslev woke up to the unpleasant reality of her onetime party, so, too, will other Liberal supporters — or so Scheer hopes. Because the Liberals still lead in the polls.

Playing up Alleslev’s defection may appeal to the Tories even more because they’ve just lost a high-profile MP of their own — Maxime Bernier. He stormed out of their ranks to start a whole new conservative political movement that could make life tricky for Scheer in the next election.

But for anyone wondering if Ottawa’s tectonic plates just lurched to the right, there’s less here than meets the eye.

Alleslev may not have been following an unerring political compass as much as sniffing which way the wind’s blowing in her own Toronto-area riding of Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill.

The provincial version of that riding voted solidly Progressive Conservative in June’s Ontario election and is now a happy part of Ford Nation.

Alleslev knows she won her riding by a fairly narrow margin in the 2015 federal election. If she values the life of an MP, her chances of keeping it might be better if she’s a Conservative, too.

Other questions about her motives will arise, given her accolades for Trudeau and the Liberals just weeks before she turned around and trashed them.

On July 11, when part of Canada’s delegation at the NATO summit in Brussels, she emailed Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland to say: “You and the PM and Harj (Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan) were truly awesome today. This is not only who we are as Canadians — but also who we are as global citizens.”

Nine days later, when Trudeau visited her riding, Alleslev celebrated “all that we have accomplished since forming government,” and said she was “proud to be part of this team as we head into 2019.”

How strange, then, that just a few weeks later she met with Scheer to discuss the terms of her defection. And how odd that she left the Liberals denouncing their failures in foreign, defence and fiscal policies — none of which had changed much since she waved the Liberal banner in the 2015 election.

Perhaps Alleslev’s choice of a new political dancing partner merely shows the difference between being Liberal and Conservative is less than voters generally think and that pragmatism trumps party lines.

What’s certain is that Scheer’s biggest challenge today isn’t persuading more Liberals to cross the floor but keeping any restive Conservative MPs and voters from cosying up to Maxime Bernier and his new party.