MACPHERSON

Messy Liberal nomination fight in St-Laurent has shown’s Trudeau’s style of politics to be merely cosmetic

Nobody comes out of this week’s DeSousa affair looking good.

Start with Alan DeSousa himself, who says he’s a victim of “character assassination” in the federal Liberal party’s mysterious refusal to allow him to seek its nomination for the April 3 byelection in the Montreal riding of St-Laurent.

Then there’s Yolande James, the “star candidate” who has been made to look as though the party Establishment, which is reported to favour her for the nomination, doesn’t believe she could beat DeSousa in a fair fight.

And last but not least there’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose vaunted new style of politics has again been exposed as merely cosmetic.

In addition to participating in pay-for-access fundraising events, Trudeau has at least tolerated the repeated apparent rigging of the “open nominations” of his party’s candidates that he promised.

When he ran for the Liberal leadership in 2013, Trudeau promised that all the party’s candidates would be chosen by votes of their constituents. Since he became leader, however, there have been several instances when would-be candidates complained that the party meddled in the nominating process before the vote.

For example, in the Torontoarea riding of Markham-Thornhill, where another byelection will be held April 3, the party hastily and retroactively cut off registration for the vote after a member of Trudeau’s staff became the first potential candidate to enter.

This stopped other would-be candidates from registering their supporters.

In St-Laurent, the party’s national candidate-vetting committee informed DeSousa this week that his name would not be on the ballot, for reasons that remain unexplained.

DeSousa has been borough mayor in St-Laurent since 2001, and it’s public knowledge that in 2013, the borough’s offices were raided by UPAC, the provincial anti-corruption squad.

Four years later, however, DeSousa has not been charged with anything. And he told me he received encouragement to seek the nomination at all levels of the Liberal party, from the riding executive up to the prime minister’s office.

That, however, was before James confirmed her decision to run.

DeSousa wasn’t scared off by the prospect of having to face the former Quebec Liberal minister, whose potential candidacy had already been floated before DeSousa announced his.

James is an unproven campaigner, even though she was elected to the National Assembly four times. She was never seriously tested, since she ran in a safe Liberal riding, and her majorities were smaller than those of the previous Liberal MNA.

Still, James would be a lock to win the byelection in St-Laurent, which is such a safe riding for the Liberals that the real election there is the one for their nomination.

In a truly open contest, however, James would be at a disadvantage against DeSousa.

He’s won several contested elections in his 31 years in local politics. And that suggests he could count on an established network in the riding to sign up supporters and get them to a nominating meeting.

James is from outside St-Laurent. And she brings some heavy political baggage with her.

In provincial politics, James was best known for campaigning against the niqab. As minister of immigration and cultural communities in the former Charest government, she was a leading supporter of proposed legislation that would have denied public services to women wearing such veils. And she had an immigrant woman expelled from a French course for refusing to remove her niqab.

In the three years since James left provincial politics, she says her thinking has evolved. Coincidentally, St-Laurent was 17 per cent Muslim at the 2011 census.

If James is such a weak candidate that she needs to be carried by the party to a nomination tainted by a backroom fix, then it would be better if Trudeau did what old-style leaders have always done. That is, he should name the candidate himself.

It would be no less democratic. And it would be cleaner, and more honest.