Ms. Green (Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.), who extended her comments to cover Liberal MPs who she says have also been ordered not to respond to her proposal for backbench MPs to begin laying out groundwork for electoral cooperation, accused Mr. Mulcair (Outremont, Que.), and eight of the nine candidates for the federal Liberal leadership who have also rejected the idea, of being overly partisan and putting their own interests ahead of the country.
“This is the problem with hyper-partisanship, this is what I’ve been saying all along,” Ms. May told The Hill Times on Tuesday.
“Every party in this country, except the Green Party, puts their partisan, short-term, advantage ahead of the good of the country, and it sickens me, and it’s constant,” Ms. May said, following a Hill Timesreport last Thursday that NDP MPs could not discuss the topic of electoral cooperation or respond to a confidential letter Ms. May sent NDP and Liberal MPs last month inviting them to begin informally discussing electoral cooperation in opposition to Prime Minister Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.).
Without cooperation, say Liberal, Green and New Democrat supporters who back the idea, Mr. Harper could win another majority government with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote, as the Conservatives did in the 2011 federal election.
“I was disappointed that there was such top-down control that even that idea was forbidden by the NDP, and obviously I think, without it having been announced publicly, since Liberals who initially thought it was a good idea later told me they couldn’t do it, obviously they had similar instructions,” Ms. May said.
While criticizing Mr. Mulcair and the eight Liberal leadership candidates who opposed a cooperation proposal from leadership contestant and MP Joyce Murray (Vancouver Quadra, B.C.) during the party’s first televised leadership debate on Sunday, Ms. May predicted that Mr. Mulcair may face resistance from his party and caucus, particularly from thousands of New Democrats who supported B.C. MP Nathan Cullen (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.) when he made electoral cooperation his chief platform plank as a candidate in the 2011 NDP leadership election.
Mr. Cullen, now NDP House leader, came third to Mr. Mulcair, behind former party backroomer and union executive Brian Topp.
“I would think so, yes, this is, again, a generic comment about the current system, not just one leader and one set of MPs. How do a bunch of intelligent people who care about the future of their country stomach being told how to vote, how to speak, how to respond?” Ms. May said.
“A lot of the NDP Members of Parliament are friends of mine that pre-date either of us being involved in politics. They have to accept Tom Mulcair telling them they’re not allowed to respond to a letter from me, people who I’ve known since 1982 are not allowed to write back?” she said.
“I mean when you talk to Bruce Hyer about what drove him out of the NDP, well how do the others stand being treated like they’re in kindergarten?” Ms. May said.
Mr. Hyer (Thunder Bay-Superior North, Ont.) resigned from the NDP and now sits in the Commons as an Independent MP after he and another Northern Ontario NDP MP, John Rafferty (Thunder Bay-Rainy River, Ont.) were disciplined for voting in favour of government legislation dismantling the federal long-gun registry last year.
Mr. Mulcair later made his position even more clear, telling his caucus during a speech last Friday that the party would field candidates in every federal electoral district in the next election.
Coincidentally, only three days after The Hill Times reported Mr. Mulcair’s position about electoral cooperation, Ms. Murray’s proposal was opposed by the other eight candidates in the Liberal leadership, who argued the Liberals should instead strive to defeat Mr. Harper by offering alternatives that will appeal to the broad middle spectrum of voters.
Jonathan Mousley, a prominent Toronto Liberal, who weighed entering the race but decided against it and has since become policy chair for former MP Martha Hall Findlay’s leadership campaign, told The Hill Times that while the idea of cooperation may sound appealing to Liberals who want to oust Mr. Harper, the party could actually lose support, at least through electoral-district alliances with the NDP.
“I don’t think it works, the math doesn’t work,” Mr. Mousley, said.
“You lose some conservative Liberals or right-wing Liberals to the Conservatives,” he said.
“I also think it denies people the kind of choice that we hold in high regard as part of our democratic system. I don’t think it would be the end of the world, but I don’t think it’s palatable, I don’t think it’s going to lead to a victory,” Mr. Mousley said.
The position taken by the Liberal candidates, however, has drawn criticism from some in Liberal ranks, with a member of the Liberal electoral district association in the Toronto-area riding of Pickering-East Scarborough writing leadership front-runner Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) to challenge his opposition to electoral cooperation in 2015.
“They have decided, despite the numbers and despite three consecutive elections with an ever-diminishing share of the vote that somehow they are going to shoot for the miracle,” John Deverell, a former Toronto Star journalist who is a member of the association’s executive and a founding member of Fair Vote Canada, told The Hill Times after forwarding a copy of the letter he sent to Mr. Trudeau, with a copy to Ms. Murray.
“And, of course, my letter says, ‘Yeah, yeah we all understand, beat your chest and say you can do it by yourself,’ that’s always been the name of the game, but when you don’t do it, what happens, well you elect Mr. Harper,” Mr. Deverell said. “Having done it three times, eight of them are saying ‘let’s do it again.’ ”
Ms. May told The Hill Times she has also spoken to Conservative MPs about electoral reform and, while declining to forecast what might happen in the next election with opposition cooperation, predicted members of the Conservative Party may themselves not want Mr. Harper re-elected as Prime Minister.
“So much can happen between now and 2015, I don’t know how Conservative voters are accepting, and I think that some of them aren’t, that the leader of their party has brought in a whole lot of policies that they never voted for and they never heard of before and has abandoned a lot of the core principles of, say accountability and whistleblower protection and fiscal responsibility, all those things that people thought they were voting for in Stephen Harper, and transparency and all of that, that have been completely jettisoned,” Ms. May said.
She said she believes Conservatives may also be unhappy because with “a whole bunch of new policies they never voted for, like a Canada-China investment treaty, [have been] brought on board.”
“I find it hard to believe that Stephen Harper will hold on to the kind of strongman, iron-disciplined control of all parts of his party until 2015, that’s why I can’t answer a hypothetical question,” Ms. May said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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