“We do not work for the Conservative Party, never have, never will,” coalition president Peter Coleman told The Hill Times on Tuesday after a Hill Times report about the attack ad raised questions about the right-wing lobby group’s motivations.
But Mr. Coleman deflected and did not directly answer a question about whether the coalition, once led by Mr. Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) after he temporarily left politics in 1997, still maintains contact with Mr. Harper or officials in the Conservative Party.
Mr. Rae has not declared whether he wants to contest the post of permanent Liberal chief in a ground-breaking party election next year—with declared Liberal Party supporters from outside Grit ranks able to vote on the leadership—but support for his potential candidacy has grown over the past few months after strong performances as interim leader in the Commons and his ability to go toe-to-toe against Mr. Harper in the daily Question Period.
The possibility that the Citizens Coalition may somehow still have ties with Mr. Harper was aired in part because of the campaign-style attack ad against Mr. Rae and also because of the partisan posture the coalition’s new director in Ottawa, prominent Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor, often takes.
The ad and other activities by the coalition and Mr. Taylor prompted Liberal MP John McCallum (Markham, Ont.) to say Parliament should consider amendments to the Canada Elections Act to prohibit associations between third parties, which are allowed limited spending for ads in election campaigns, and candidates or political parties.
“I’ll give you one example of where we should be, which is a minimum,” Mr. McCallum told The Hill Times. “We hardly hold up the U.S. political financing system as a model, but at least in one respect they’re ahead of us. They say that third party entities cannot have any links with political parties. Some people think that rule may not be fully honoured and there may be loopholes, but at least they are trying to legislate against obvious ties between third-party advertisers and candidates or political parties.”
The heavily-financed role of Political Action Committees has become controversial in the U.S. Republican primary campaigns to elect a nominee for the presidential election this year, with hundreds of millions of dollars being collected and spent, most of it on attack ads, as so-called “Super PACS” weigh in to either promote candidates they support or target opponents. Vast amounts in donations from corporations were freed up for the 2012 elections by a controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling that lifted previous restrictions, but U.S. law precludes direct links between the PACs and candidates or parties.
“In this [Citizens Coalition] case, it’s perfectly obvious that there’s an enormously powerful link between the National Citizens Coalition and the Conservative Party,” Mr. McCallum said. “I mean Stephen Harper used to be the president of it. I think they are effectively just a shill for the Conservatives.”
But Mr. Coleman suggested the controversial ad—which accuses Mr. Rae of attempting to “take over” the Liberal Party and claims when he was Ontario’s NDP premier 20 years ago he led the province into its worst economic downturn since the 1930s, is intended only to convince Liberals they shouldn’t elect Mr. Rae as their new permanent leader—and is not aimed at undercutting Mr. Rae as a potential forceful leader who could take on Mr. Harper.
“If you want to call the ad an attack ad fine,” Mr. Coleman said in an email. “What the country needs is a Liberal Party with a leader that can present an alternative to the Conservatives. Having a leader like Bob Rae who believes in big government to the max is not what the Liberal Party needs.”
He pointed out the coalition has been criticizing Mr. Rae and his “big government policies” since his time as Ontario premier, “long before the Conservative Party in Ottawa came to power.”
“Rae is trying to take over the Liberal Party as you quote in the email to me, for you to think otherwise is naive,” Mr. Coleman said.
“We talk to all politicians that will talk and engage us in ideas around more freedom through less government,” he said.
“You seem to imply in your email question, when you ask if we maintain any contact with the Prime Minister or any of his officials, that we are being told what to do by them,” Mr. Coleman said. “We run the National Citizens Coalition on behalf of our voluntary members and survey them a lot about what issues matter to them and we act accordingly.”
After Mr. Harper became president of the National Citizens Coalition in 1997, a short time after he resigned his Commons seat in January that year, he challenged limits on third-party advertising in court, but he eventually lost the case in the Supreme Court of Canada and returned to politics to become leader of the Canadian Alliance Party, a successor to his original Alberta-based Reform Party.
Rob Anders (Calgary West, Alta.), the Conservative MP who entered the Commons by succeeding Mr. Harper to win election in the electoral district Mr. Harper gave up before he went to the National Citizens Coalition, worked for the coalition prior to his election, lobbying in favour of anti-union right-to-work legislation.
Original Article
Source: Hill Times
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