Marilyn Gladu was planning to leave politics when she says a conversation with Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon changed her mind.
Gladu had a few offers lined up as she contemplated exiting her role as a Conservative MP, one she had held since 2015, and was pondering a return to engineering, a field she had spent years working in before entering politics.
“I was not really enjoying being on the Opposition benches, asking the food pricing question again and again and again, and not really being free to speak to the media, do meaningful roles,” Gladu recounted in a video published on Friday.
That conversation, a 45-minute sit-down with a community podcaster from her riding of Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong, offered Gladu’s most detailed account yet of her decision to defect to the Liberals and her experience inside the Conservative caucus.
“I was ready to leave the Conservative party, because, like I said, it was a very toxic environment, I found,” Gladu said.
Poilievre’s office has not yet responded to a request for comment. A spokesman in Gladu’s office also declined any further comment.
The MP recounts in the video how she never dreamed that the Liberals, a government that she admits she has said “terrible things about” for the past decade would ever take her — until she had a conversation with Solomon.
As the minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, a region Gladu represents, she says she had approached Solomon on a “begging mission” to restore funding that she says had been cut in her riding.
“And he said sure, ‘When are you coming over,'” recalled Gladu. “And I looked at him, and I laughed. I said, ‘Well, I didn’t get a call, and I don’t expect I will.'”
That’s when she says Solomon asked: “Would you like a call?”
“I said, ‘Well, I think that would be a discussion worth having.'”
That conversation in West Block set into motion a series of events that culminated on April 8 when Gladu stunned the Conservative caucus and many others on Parliament Hill with her decision to defect to the Liberals, a move that inched Carney’s party even closer to securing a majority government, which it ultimately did after winning a trio of byelections days later.
Gladu was the fifth MP to defect to the Liberals and the fourth from the Conservatives, with Lori Idlout arriving from the New Democrats.
When it came time to announce her decision, Solomon was in the room as Carney welcomed her to the team.
As for the private conversation she had with the prime minister, Gladu recalled in Friday’s video how she had been upfront about her past criticisms.
“I said, ‘Well, thank you for the meeting, but I’ve said awful things about you and the party for the last 10 years, and I can’t really fix that,'” she says she told Carney.
