MORE DIRTY LIBERAL POLITICS.
‘This is the most open political party in the country,” said Liberal communications director Braeden Caley as he defended his party’s conduct in the nomination fight in the vacant Markham-Thornhill riding in Ontario.
Perhaps if that country were one of the less corrupt Silk Road ’stans.
Juanita Nathan is a school board trustee in Markham and a member of the board of directors of the local Liberal riding association.
An unlikely rebel, in other words.
She thought about running for the Markham-Thornhill nomination in 2013 but stepped aside to allow cabinet minister John McCallum to take the new seat that was carved out by electoral boundary changes.
In a statement Monday airing her concerns about openness and fairness in the race to replace McCallum, who stepped down to become Canada’s new ambassador in China, she says she did this out of her loyalty to the Liberal Party.
“I was assured I would receive a fair opportunity to contest in an open nomination in the future,” she said.
When McCallum said he was leaving in early January, she decided to seek the nomination but, “out of respect,” waited until the outgoing MP had made his farewell speech to Parliament before launching her campaign.
It was at that point, she said, that a campaign aide was contacted by someone working on behalf of Mary Ng, director of appointments in the PMO, who was interested in the nomination too.
Ng is a close friend of Katie Telford, chief of staff to the Prime Minister.
“I was told that other potential candidates have now dropped off in support of the PMO staffer and I was requested to do the same,” said Nathan. (Ali Manek, an Internet start-up entrepreneur in the riding, has withdrawn his candidacy to support Ng).
Nathan is not the only candidate to cry foul. Businessman Nadeem Qureshi said he feels the process has not been fair.
Both say the timeline was truncated to favour a candidate who is not from the riding and who may not have been able to sign up as many members.
Qureshi said he received his nomination package on Feb. 10 and was obliged to file all the paperwork by Feb 16.
On Feb. 20, he was informed that the nomination meeting would be held on March 4 and that members signed up after the 14th would be ineligible to vote.
“It was all designed so that the preferred candidate can be picked,” he said.
Nathan says the cut-off date for memberships was the day before she started submitting names online — thereby excluding 1,300 members she had signed up from being able to vote.
“The residents of Markham-Thornhill deserve more than just a parachute candidate,” she said. “I am appealing to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to intervene.”
Amanda Alvaro, speaking for Ng’s campaign, said the party has been using a retroactive blind cut-off system for 25 years and that her candidate had no more information about nomination dates than anyone else.
“We lost people we had registered too,” she said. “We didn’t know the cut-off time or when the nomination was going to be called.”
Caley, at the Liberal Party, said there was a five week interval between McCallum’s announcement that he planned to leave Parliament and the cut-off date — a period during which any new members looking to vote in the nomination meeting could have signed up.
But this is all horse-feathers, as anyone who spent more than five minutes in the Liberal Party knows full well.
The Liberals have been conducting Grammy Awardwinning nomination orchestration for decades.
One of the more odiferous contests of recent years came in 2005, when future leader Michael Ignatieff was parachuted into EtobicokeLakeshore, in Toronto.
The party reluctantly allowed the nomination papers of two local candidates, only to reject them later on ludicrous technicalities.
Justin Trudeau was elected Liberal leader on a commitment to open the nomination process.
But when Bob Rae retired in Toronto Centre, and now Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland expressed an interest, potential candidates like former Ontario cabinet minister George Smitherman were “encouraged” to go forth and multiply.
At the time, I suggested that, since open nominations had fallen at the first hurdle, perhaps no one should place too much faith in pledges about electoral reform. That idea was deemed by some to be unduly cynical.
But better to be derisive than hypocritical. If you want to parachute a “star” candidate into a riding, admit you’re doing it. Don’t claim you’re an open political party when, patently, you are not.
I WAS ASSURED I WOULD RECEIVE A FAIR OPPORTUNITY TO CONTEST IN AN OPEN NOMINATION IN THE FUTURE.