Voters outraged over NDP MP's decision to join Liberals

MONTREAL - Voters in Lise St-Denis’s Shawinigan riding expressed outrage yesterday after learning that their New Democratic Party MP crossed the floor to join the Liberals.

“It is completely ridiculous,” said Pierre Huot, director of the student association at Collège Shawinigan. “If she wants to join the Liberals, she should run in a by-election.”

Eight months after being elected as part of the Orange Wave that swept Quebec, St- Denis announced Tuesday that her political leanings are more in line with the Liberals.

Huot, who voted for the Bloc Québécois in the last federal election, said St-Denis was rarely present in the riding during the campaign.

“She stayed in Montreal,” he said.

“We invited her (to speak with the students), but she never answered us.”

The Commons: Lise St. Denis’ day

“This decision,” she explained at the outset, “has been made serenely.”

And so Lise St. Denis, dressed here in black and white, elected as a New Democrat some eight months ago, slipped from one party to the other. To her left sat Denis Coderre, beaming. To her right, Bob Rae listened intently. Both men had helped her with her chair when she arrived at the table. When she finished, the interim Liberal leader patted her on the back. She and they seemed reasonably happy with this little moment.

However serene the undertaking, however justifiable this business of euphemistically crossing the proverbial floor, it was not so easily explained.

Maybe it was something to do with Quebec. “This change in my political life is above all the continuity of my thought process on Canada’s future,” she said, reading from her prepared statement, “and the place that must be taken in our institutions by Quebecois and francophones from all over the country.”

Maybe it was something to do with the “difficulties linked to the globalisation of national economies.” “The decision that I have made is motivated by the challenges that people in my riding will face,” she explained.

Lise St-Denis, NDP MP Joins Liberals

A newly elected NDP MP Lise St-Denis joined the Liberal caucus Tuesday, in a surprise move that the NDP said showed blatant disregard for democracy.

The backbench MP, a retired school teacher, told reporters she could not imagine spending three more years in the Commons listening to her party propose ideas she disagreed with.

She pointed to policy differences on the NDP’s refusal to extend the military mission in Libya, its desire to abolish the Senate and its opposition to private and public partnerships on infrastructure projects such as Montreal's Champlain bridge as areas of disagreement.

"I am in the Liberal party because its direction on social policy, on job creation, on external affairs and on the environment appears to me as being able to generate hope for all people living in communities in my riding," she said at a news conference.