Opinion: Confidence Is the True Measure of Leadership

What floor crossing, confidence, and compromise tell us about who can actually govern

It has been an interesting week in Canadian politics. But for me, one of the most revealing aspects has been watching how many people struggle with their own bias when it comes to floor crossing and confidence. Few issues seem to get people riled up faster, and few expose selective outrage more clearly.

What stands out is the contradiction.

Historically, Conservatives played a central role in defending parliamentary tradition and convention, often treating restraint as a virtue rather than a weakness.

Today’s Conservatives still invoke that language, but it increasingly sits alongside a different governing instinct. When the system produces inconvenient outcomes, reverence tends to fade. The response often escalates from outrage, to questioning legitimacy, and ultimately to embracing tools like the notwithstanding clause. A clause that itself is a relatively recent development in Canadian politics, and one that earlier Conservative prime ministers regarded with deep caution.

When it comes to the lesser known corners of Canadian parliamentary tradition, especially those that rely on convention rather than rigid rules, the current outrage says more about political culture than constitutional principle. These mechanisms exist precisely to allow Parliament to function when no one faction can simply impose its will.

The other thing that has made this week particularly interesting, in this very context, has been the resurfacing of old footage. Videos of Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer, and Michelle Rempel all on the record defending floor crossing when it moved in the opposite direction. At the time, it was framed correctly as a matter of conscience, representation, and parliamentary judgment.

“It’s a difficult position to leave a party, particularly to leave a party that’s in government and go to the opposition, so if the two parties were the same then I might not have made the same decision, but I needed to go to a party that believed in defense and security, and comprehesive foreign relations, and tax reform and the things that matter, because not all points in history are equal.”

—Former Liberal MP Leona Alleslev following her decision to join the Conservative caucus in September of 2018.

Nothing about the institution has changed. Only the direction of travel.

That contrast matters because it exposes what this outrage is really about. Not principle, but power. Floor crossing is legitimate when it benefits your side, and suddenly corrosive when it does not. Confidence is respectable when it topples a government, and illegitimate when it sustains one.

Since Stephen Harper, the party’s leadership has changed, but its governing instincts have shown remarkable consistency. After Rona Ambrose’s interim stewardship came Andrew Scheer, Erin O’Toole, and now Pierre Poilievre. With the exception of O’Toole, whose more moderate pitch briefly shifted the party’s direction, the underlying posture toward institutions and political strategy has largely remained the same. When O’Toole attempted to move the party back toward a more moderate, tradition-oriented conservatism, the experiment was short-lived, and he was removed as leader by his own caucus.

This is where Pierre Poilievre’s leadership failure comes into focus. His framing this week of confidence agreements as “back hand dirty deals” is not just rhetorical excess. It reflects what Stephen R. Covey described as the personality ethic rather than the character ethic. Covey, a leadership thinker best known for The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, drew a clear distinction between surface-level tactics and leadership grounded in trust, integrity, and credibility. In the personality ethic worldview, leadership is transactional, zero sum, and adversarial. Someone must lose for someone else to win.

But real leadership does not work that way.

The character ethic is built on trust, credibility, and the ability to gain the confidence of others. As Chris Voss, the former FBI lead international hostage negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference, has shown in practice, calibrated vulnerability creates leverage. Eye for an eye, split the difference leadership feels strong, but it collapses under complexity. It cannot build durable coalitions or survive pluralism.

That is why confidence itself becomes unintelligible in this framework.

If you do not understand how confidence is earned, you will insist it can only be lost.

If you do not know how to build trust, you will interpret cooperation as corruption.

And if leadership is reduced to dominance, then governance will always look like betrayal when it requires negotiation.

This is why Poilievre keeps failing at the moment that matters most. Leadership is a black swan to him. It does not fit his model, so he cannot see it when it appears.

And that brings us back to the central point. Floor crossing and confidence are not loopholes or tricks. They are expressions of a system designed to reward judgment, restraint, and the ability to carry others with you. A prime minister can lose confidence, but they can also gain it. Survival is not accidental. It is the outcome.

Confidence is the true measure of leadership. And moments like these, floor crossing, confidence, compromise, are where leadership is revealed. They are not abstract tests. They are practical ones.

Over time, they tend to sort those who can govern from those who can only campaign.