‘Message’ to Liberals as outsider wins plum nod
Stunning win seen as rebuke to party brass
MONTREAL • The stunning capture of the federal Liberal nomination in St-Laurent by a political unknown is a stern rebuke to party brass, according to the borough mayor shut out of the contest.
“The message from the Liberals in St-Laurent was that they don’t appreciate having a parachuted candidate dropped into our community,” said Alan DeSousa, who was denied the chance to run for the nomination in the April 3 byelection when party officials rejected his candidacy.
Emmanuella Lambropoulos, a 26-year-old teacher at Rosemount High School, beat out star candidate Yo- lande James, the apparent choice of the party establishment, on Wednesday night.
Lambropoulos was as surprised as anyone to learn she had wrested the plum nomination in one of the safest Liberal seats in the country from James, a former Quebec cabinet minister, who placed third, after lawyer and economics professor Marwah Rizqy.
“I am St-Laurent,” said Lambropoulos, who credited her hard work at doorto-door campaigning and her roots in the multicultural district for the upset victory.
Educated at LaurenHill Academy, Vanier College and McGill University, the St-Laurent native speaks English, French and Greek and has a master’s degree in educational leadership and administration, according to her LinkedIn page.
“I went around for three hours a day, for a month and a half, and I knocked on everyone’s doors. I had the support of the community. I know the people here. When your friends know you’re going into politics, they come out and support you,” she said Wednesday night.
But critics said James’s elimination in the first of two rounds of voting was a stinging retort to a party that seems to have forgotten Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 2013 promise to restore grassroots democracy by ending the practice of parachuting candidates into key ridings.
Trudeau has tried to rebrand the party as a genuine political movement by offering free memberships and restoring power to local constituencies.
But when a party committee rejected DeSousa’s candidacy 10 days ago, without explanation, apparently clearing the way for James’s nomination, it seemed to give the lie to those reforms.
DeSousa has been borough mayor of St-Laurent since 2001.
The Liberals have also come under fire in Markham-Thornhill, where a byelection is also scheduled April 3, for cutting off new memberships last week, thus guaranteeing the nomination to former Trudeau staffer Mary Ng.
In an interview, DeSousa said he received messages of support and expressions of outrage from local residents after being barred from seeking the candidacy and detected a community desire to send “a strong message” to the party brass.
“They wanted someone who could be the vehicle for the expression of their outrage and they didn’t find that in James nor in the other candidate,” Alan DeSousa said.
“People may be stunned and many were stunned ( Wednesday) night. But people wanted their voices heard. And this was in StLaurent, a community that some people thought might be docile and follow the proposals of the higher echelons,” he said.