OTTAWA — It took nearly a full year and a handful of byelections and defections for Prime Minister Mark Carney to assemble enough members of Parliament to turn his minority government into a majority — a feat that has never happened in Canadian politics before.
The Canadian Press projected Liberal wins in two byelections in the Toronto area on Monday, giving the Liberals 173 seats in the House of Commons. The wins make Carney’s government the first federal government in Canada’s history to switch from a minority to a majority between elections.
Results were still being counted in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne, a traditional Bloc Québécois stronghold, when Danielle Martin took the stage to celebrate her victory in University—Rosedale.
“As of tonight, Mark Carney and our entire incredible Liberal team have earned an even more powerful mandate to continue building a better Canada,” she said Monday night.
“This is not a mandate to be quiet. It is not a mandate to take our time. It is a mandate to get to work.”
Carney congratulated Martin in a social media post, saying she spent her career “building better health care” for Canadians.
“Now she’s bringing her experience and determination to the House of Commons, and our country will be stronger for it,” he said on X.
He also congratulated Doly Begum, who was projected to win in nearby Scarborough Southwest, the seat left vacant when former cabinet minister Bill Blair left politics to become Canada’s high commissioner to the U.K.
Carney said “her tireless voice and experience will help build a stronger and more just Canada for all.”
In a speech to her supporters, Begum said the government has a responsibility to come together.
“We have to do the hard work of building. Building a country where opportunity is real, where dignity is protected and where every single person has a fair chance to succeed,” she said in a speech to supporters on Monday.
Begum surprised many when she left her seat in Queen’s Park as a member of the provincial NDP to run federally.
She also represents the growing Liberal tent that Carney has been building for the better part of six months, as he courted five opposition MPs to join the governing party — four from the Conservative benches and one from the federal New Democrats.
Wins in two ridings on Monday mean the government will soon be able to pass legislation in the House of Commons without the support of another party, something the Liberals have not been able to do since 2019. They will also be able to control House committees.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accused Carney of spending a year on “a cynical power grab.”
“The Carney Liberals did not win a majority government through a general election or today’s byelections. Instead, it was won through backroom deals with politicians who betrayed the people who voted for them,” he said in a post on X.
The suburban riding of Terrebonne, near Montreal, featured a rematch between Liberal Tatiana Auguste and Bloc Québécois candidate Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné a year after it produced the closest result in the country in the last federal election.
After a judicial recount of the results from last April, Auguste won by a single vote. Sinclair-Desgagné challenged the results all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which invalidated the results because of a clerical error on the return address for some mail-in ballots.
The Liberals dispatched their entire Quebec caucus and Carney himself to the riding to bolster support for Auguste.
Sinclair-Desgagné, who represented the riding for the Bloc between 2021 and 2025, said she fought hard to win the riding back and was congratulated at the doorstep for challenging the result in court.
Elections Canada’s count was slowed in Terrebonne by the fact that dozens of candidates signed up as part of a “longest ballot” protest.
The agency decided to go with a modified ballot to avoid issues with printing and folding the overly long ballots — meaning voters had to write in the name of their preferred candidate. It’s a measure Elections Canada has taken once before, in the byelection last August that saw Poilievre return to the House of Commons. In that race, more than 200 candidates were on the ballot.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 13, 2026.
— With files from Kyle Duggan and Catherine Morrison in Ottawa, Erika Morris and Morgan Lowrie in Terrebonne, Que., and Diana Mussina and Rianna Lim in Toronto
Sarah Ritchie, The Canadian Press
