Green leadership candidate reinstated
Meryam Haddad says her support for another party no different than what Elizabeth May had done
OTTAWA — Montreal immigration lawyer Meryam Haddad issued a mic-drop rebuttal after she was briefly expelled from the Green party leadership race this week for allegedly endorsing a "rival" provincial party in the British Columbia election.
The 32-year-old wrote to the Green party's leadership contest committee to point out that almost exactly one year ago, former leader Elizabeth May had done the very same thing.
“I would like an explanation as to why this is a reason to expel me when just last year, Elizabeth May endorsed and encouraged people to vote for Jody Wilson-Raybould over our own Green candidate,” Haddad wrote in her appeal letter.
“Why are the rules so different when it comes to me?”
Haddad was reinstated as a leadership candidate about 18 hours after sending the letter of appeal, with the Green party saying in a statement Thursday that the committee had taken into account "mitigating circumstances."
Last year, May spoke at a rally for Wilson-Raybould, a former Liberal cabinet minister who was running as an Independent in the 2019 federal election after a very public feud with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the SNCLavalin affair.
May, who was Green party leader at the time, denied she was implicitly endorsing Wilson-Raybould, saying she was supporting a friend and standing up for ethics in politics.
Still, the Greens had to do some damage control, and issue statements insisting May still fully supported their own party’s candidate in Vancouver Granville, Louise Boutin.
The Green candidate ultimately finished a distant fifth, more than 13,000 votes behind WilsonRaybould, who was re-elected.
Haddad’s offence was retweeting an ad for the B.C. Ecosocialists party, which was critical of both the B.C. Greens and NDP for allowing pipelines and fracking subsidies.
“We find that you have discredited and intentionally damaged the interests of the Green Party of Canada,” Haddad was told in the letter from the leadership committee tasked with ensuring candidates conduct themselves properly.
Haddad said her retweet was not an endorsement, and pointed to other tweets critical of the Ecosocialists as well.
This week’s events have shone an unwelcome spotlight on the party's internal battles just days before voting begins in the first leadership contest for the Greens in 14 years.
Online voting starts Saturday, and the winner is to be announced Oct. 3 in Ottawa.