Calling an 11-week campaign was ‘a mistake,’ Chrétien says
With polls showing her comfortably ahead in Ottawa West-Nepean, Liberal Anita Vandenbeld recruited former prime minister Jean Chrétien Wednesday night to pump up her supporters for the stretch into election day.
“I feel very good,” the 81-year-old Chrétien told about 200 supporters who crammed into Vandenbeld’s campaign headquarters. “I think we’re winning.”
There was an almost poetic symmetry to Chrétien’s appearance. When Vandenbeld was 18, she was a youth delegate at the 1990 convention that chose Chrétien as Liberal leader.
Three years later, she introduced him at an election campaign event in Calgary.
That prompted Chrétien to tell Vandenbeld’s workers, to tumultuous cheers, “I’m here to introduce her as the next member of Parliament of this riding.”
The former prime minister said Conservative Leader Stephen Harper “made a mistake” by calling an unprecedented 11-week campaign because it gave Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau media exposure he otherwise wouldn’t have had.
“They said, ‘He’s good looking, but he’s not ready,’ ” Chrétien said. “He’s still good looking, but he is ready. I knew he was ready, and I’m very proud.”
Earlier Wednesday, Vandenbeld and four other Ottawa West-Nepean candidates — the Green party’s Mark Brooks, New Democrat Marlene Rivier, Marxist-Leninist Sam Heaton and Rod Taylor of the Christian Heritage Party — participated in the riding’s final allcandidates meeting at Algonquin College.
Once again, Conservative candidate Abdul Abdi wasn’t there. Abdi, who also didn’t attend a debate last Friday sponsored by the Muslim Association of Canada, “was already committed to another event when we received this invitation,” his campaign manager, Austin Jean, said in an email.
Jean pointed out that during the campaign, Abdi has participated in three debates as well as three meetand-greet events with his fellow candidates,
At Wednesday’s debate, the other five candidates initially highlighted their party’s student-friendly policies on things like tuition fees and student debt.
But the questions directed to them focused on broader questions of democracy.
Asked if they favoured restoring the per-vote subsidy for political parties eliminated by the Conservative government, Rivier, Vandenbeld and Brooks all said yes.
But Taylor said he opposed taxpayer money going to political parties and Heaton said the subsidy was created by a three-party “cartel” to fund their political activities.
Heaton and Taylor were also in favour of legislation that would let voters remove politicians from office through a recall referendum.
None of the other three candidates endorsed the idea, although Brooks said a recall law might be one way of improving accountability.
They said, ‘(Trudeau) is good looking, but he’s not ready. He’s still good looking, but he is ready.
— Former prime minister Jean Chrétien