Local candidates refuse to be bullied
To hear Dimitri Soudas tell it, he’s just a fool for love. The prime minister’s former communications director, never known previously for liking to cuddle, is so gosh darn head over heels “madly in love” that he couldn’t help himself: In a spin, loving the spin he was in, under that ol’ black magic called abuse of office, he violated the terms of his contract as executive director of the Conservative party, used party resources for preferential purposes, and otherwise tried to tilt the nomination race in Oakville North-Burlington in favour of his beloved, the Member of Parliament for Mississauga-Brampton South, Eve Adams.
Well, come on, you were young once. When a man loves a woman, can’t think of nothing else. If making hundreds of calls from a confidential party database to help your girlfriend jump from the riding she’s already in to a riding she thinks she’d have an easier time winning is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Love does strange things to a man, it’s true. In this case, it has caused Soudas to behave more or less exactly as he has throughout his career. As for Adams, though she has as yet declined to plead the effects of the moon in June, she was likewise moved to mail promotional flyers into the riding using her MP’s privilege, improperly access the same confidential party database, invade a riding executive meeting, verbally abuse several of those present and gener-
Adams plainly felt that … she could throw her weight around with impunity.
ally attempt to bigfoot the proceedings. But then, this is not entirely out of character for Adams, either. Amour fou, c’est l’amour-propre.
The noteworthy part of the story, then, is not that either of these two lovebirds should have behaved as they did, but that they should have thought they could get away with it. The newsworthy part is that they didn’t.
Adams plainly felt that, as the fiancée of the party’s executive director, who had not hesitated to veto the candidacies of nomination contestants in other ridings when it suited him, she could throw her weight around with impunity. And Soudas plainly felt that, as one of Stephen Harper’s longest-serving loyalists, indeed as his personal choice for executive director, he, too, was invulnerable — as he had always been in the past. Alas this time he was not, and with his departure, her demise seems inevitable.
How could they have so misjudged the situation? Obviously it was Harper’s call, in the end, but what’s more important is why he acted as he did. And what seems to have been a critical factor is that the constituency officials in question fought back. Rather than welcome their new Adams/Soudas overlords, they objected, first to her face, then in an email to party brass (a complaint that appears to have got the writer fired), finally in a letter to the prime minister. Enough of the party took their side that the prime minister was obliged to fire one of his closest allies, four months after appointing him. It must have been humiliating, which is to say that he can’t have done so willingly.
This is good news, for fans of local democracy and the rights of riding associations to choose their own representatives — representatives who as a result will be accountable to them, and to their ridings, rather than placeholders for the party leader. And it’s not the only such controversy to erupt of late. The Liberals are wrestling with their own uprising, this time in the Toronto riding of TrinitySpadina, soon to be the site of a byelection, where the candidate of record, Christine Innes was rudely dumped by the party leader, Justin Trudeau. Moreover, she was told she could not be a candidate in any riding in the next general election.
Ostensibly the reason for this treatment was that her husband, the former Liberal MP Tony Ianno, had been campaigning a little too enthusiastically on her behalf, or as it was inevitably called, “bullying.” But it soon emerged that the real reason was that she had refused to abide by the leader’s decree that she not seek the nomination for 2015 in University-Rosedale — one of many new or redrawn ridings to come of the latest exercise in redistricting — a riding widely viewed as having been reserved for Toronto Centre MP Chrystia Freeland. Like the rebels of Oakville North-Burlington, Innes has vowed not to surrender, and is threatening legal action.
Imagine that. What’s common to both of these stories is not only the willingness of local candidates and riding associations to defy the powers that be but their obstinate insistence that these races should be what party leaders claim they are: open nominations. With any luck, this obstreperousness will spread. Thanks to redistricting, there will be other ridings where incumbents face off against incumbents; in others, the promise of open nominations will run into the reality that leaders have favourites.
Ridings that resist the inevitable attempts to stage-manage these races will do their parties a favour. Tilted nominations are not open nominations. They’re not even nominations, really.
The tendency, when these fights break out, is to view them as signs of weakness and division, if not anarchy. The tone of news coverage is often disapproving, as if party leaders were indulgent parents who neglected to discipline their children. Reporters pepper their stories with words like “messy,” “ugly,” even “vicious.” This is what you get, they seem to say, when you leave it to ridings to decide these matters. Yes, it is. Isn’t it glorious?