Although the Liberal Party will also head into the byelections with at least one acclaimed candidate, the NDP, which has held contested elections to select its candidates so far, is also critical of the Liberals over allegations that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) and his close aides favoured two winning nomination candidates in Toronto and Montreal.
NDP MP Craig Scott (Toronto Danforth, Ont.), elected to the House in a March, 2012, byelection to fill the Commons vacancy created after former NDP leader Jack Layton died, said Tuesday the Conservative lead-up for the coming byelections shows the democratic process in Mr. Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) party has collapsed.
Mr. Scott told The Hill Times in an interview that the state of top-down management of the federal Conservative Party has reached a point where comparison to the grassroots, populist democracy of Mr. Harper’s old Reform Party has become a point only for historical consideration. “The question of whether it’s a contraction or not is almost a historical question, because Harper has shown himself to be running a party that’s based on top-down control, and so there is nothing particularly surprising if you have mostly acclaimed candidates,” said Mr. Scott, who had to contest his first nomination after Mr. Layton’s death. “Understand that on the Conservative side, the party system is just completely broken.”
The most controversial Conservative nomination took place in the Manitoba electoral district of Brandon-Souris, where a sitting member of the Manitoba Legislature became the candidate through acclamation after the party refused another candidate’s nomination papers, and a Brandon city councillor withdrew his intention to run.
MLA Larry Maguire, who has been a Conservative member of Manitoba’s assembly since 1999 and is a high-profile grain farmer and former president of the Western Canadian Grain Growers, will be the candidate in Brandon-Souris after the party rejected Chris Kennedy’s nomination papers. Mr. Kennedy was an assistant to the former Conservative MP Merv Tweed, who resigned his seat in the summer.
Brandon Sun managing editor James O'Connor, a former provincial Tory staffer, criticized the move in an editorial and endorsed the Liberals.
The Winnipeg Free Press reported however that “Kennedy's nomination paperwork, including a $1,000 cheque, was due in Ottawa at 5 p.m. Brandon time on Sept. 11. A Purolator tracking record obtained by the Free Press shows the paperwork wasn't mailed until 4 p.m., an hour before the documents were due in Ottawa. The paperwork didn't arrive until nearly 1 p.m. the following day, and the Conservative source said the cheque was missing. The [Conservative] source said there is no flexibility in the rules.”
Mr. Kennedy has said, however, that he followed the rules and is "absolutely" sure when he sent the documents, the cheque was also attached.
Mr. Scott said that appointing candidates makes them “much more pliable” when it comes to control. “If you don’t have candidates who have had to fight for their nomination and develop their own independent way of thinking about politics, and if they feel like they’ve been inserted by the party, then those two things together mean they’re going to be much more pliable as MPs and that probably explains why you see MPs on the Conservative side who are not exactly willing to push back very much against the party apparatus,” he said. But Mr. Scott criticized the Liberal Party as well, saying that in the Toronto Centre, Ont., riding, Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland was “completely handpicked from the top,” pushing out former Ontario Finance Minister George Smitherman from the nomination. “They wanted to make sure that there was at least a pretence of a race, but this was a totally, totally cooked nomination,” he said.
When he was elected leader, Mr. Trudeau said in a release, “I will ensure that in 2015, every candidate for Liberal Party will be nominated through an open nomination process. I will not appoint any candidate in any of Canada’s 338 ridings.”
In the other vacant Manitoba electoral district of Provencher, the president of an 80,000-member credit union in Steinbach, Man., has been acclaimed as the Conservative candidate, following the sudden resignation last July of former public safety minister Vic Toews.
The two other acclaimed Conservative candidates are Geoff Pollock, a lawyer and Parliamentary hobbyist who will carry the party banner in Toronto Centre, and Mahmoud Rida, whom Infrastructure Minister Denis Lebel (Roberval-Lac Saint Jean, Que.) unveiled as the party’s candidate in the longtime Liberal riding of Bourassa in Montreal.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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