Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals swept all three federal byelections held Monday, picking up a Conservative-held seat in Quebec’s Chicoutimi–Le Fjord riding while holding two Liberal strongholds in Ontario and British Columbia. Most coverage framed the result as fresh proof that Carney’s government is riding high five months into a majority. What that framing leaves out is that the majority was never in doubt Monday night — it was already secured back in April — and that the seat Conservatives actually lost only came open because Carney’s own government put it up for grabs.
A Majority That Was Already Won
Carney’s Liberals first crossed into majority territory in April 2026, when they swept a separate set of three byelections in University–Rosedale, Scarborough Southwest and Terrebonne. That win pushed the party to 174 of the House of Commons’ 343 seats — a tally that had already been boosted in the preceding months by four Conservative MPs and one New Democrat crossing the floor to join the Liberals. Because of those defections, Carney’s party needed to win only one of the three April ridings to take control of the Commons; it won all three anyway.
Monday’s results built on that same foundation rather than creating it. According to CBC News’s tally after the count, the Liberals now hold 173 seats, followed by 138 for the Conservatives, 21 for the Bloc Québécois, five for the NDP and one for the Green Party. The sweep didn’t hand Carney anything he didn’t already have; it simply widened a cushion he’s held since spring, heading into a fall sitting dominated by the ongoing tariff fight with Washington.
The Senate Seat That Triggered This Race
The Chicoutimi–Le Fjord seat wasn’t lost by Conservatives in open combat so much as vacated by Carney’s own hand. Four-term Conservative MP Richard Martel held the riding until July 7, when Carney appointed him to the Senate as part of a batch of appointments in which the prime minister explicitly scrapped the Trudeau-era convention of keeping Senate picks non-partisan. Martel, who sits in the Senate as an Independent, was the fifth Conservative MP to leave the party’s caucus since the 2025 election — a tally that includes both floor-crossers and now a Senate appointee.
That timeline matters because it means the byelection Liberal candidate Daniel Gobeil won with 51.3 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Bloc’s Caroline Dubé at 32.9 per cent and the Conservatives’ Régis Gaudreault at 12.5 per cent, was a contest Carney’s government created by pulling a sitting Conservative out of the riding in the first place. Dubé’s own campaign leaned on that fact, criticizing Martel for leaving before his term was up. Framing Monday’s Chicoutimi–Le Fjord result purely as a Liberal breakthrough with Quebec voters skips the more mechanical explanation: the seat came open because the sitting prime minister chose to make it open.
What It Means for Poilievre
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre cleared a formal leadership review in January with 87.4 per cent delegate support at the party’s Calgary convention — a stronger result than Stephen Harper posted after his own first election loss in 2004. On paper, that ought to have settled questions about his leadership for the remainder of this Parliament. In practice, it hasn’t. Conservative MPs have told CTV News privately in recent weeks that they don’t expect Poilievre to still be leading the party by the next general election, and a Nanos Research poll commissioned by CTV found Carney has “no obvious challenger” among Conservative alternatives — including former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, whom just five per cent of respondents picked as capable of beating Carney. Kenney himself ruled out a leadership run in a late-August interview, while arguing his caucus colleagues should direct their criticism at U.S. President Donald Trump rather than at each other.
Losing a four-term incumbent’s Quebec seat, even one Carney’s government helped empty, lands inside that same window of private doubt. It’s unlikely to trigger another formal review — Poilievre isn’t required to face one again before the next campaign — but it adds one more data point for Conservative MPs already questioning whether their leader can beat a prime minister who has spent 2026 growing his majority through byelections, floor crossings and now Senate appointments alike. The open question heading into the fall sitting isn’t whether Carney’s grip on the Commons is secure; Monday’s results confirm it is. It’s whether Poilievre’s grip on his own caucus is anywhere near as strong.
