Maverick MP bows out
PEEL REGION Parrish’s riding left up for grabs Nomination meeting Thursday night
A big question for Mississauga voters may well be what to do now that they won’t have Carolyn Parrish to kick around any more. Dumped by the ruling Liberals after tangling once too often with the Prime Minister — and the American president — the suddenly independent Parrish has announced she won’t be running in the upcoming federal election.
That leaves her old MississaugaErindale riding up for grabs. The Liberals announced yesterday they’ve scheduled a nomination meeting for Thursday night to pick a candidate. And it leaves the riding fraught with controversy once more. The tardy start could leave the Liberals in a hole in MississaugaErindale, where Steve Mahoney, a former Chrétien cabinet minister who lost a bitter battle with Parrish for the nomination last year, was trying for the nod again. He bailed out, according to Liberal riding president Elias Hazineh, when he couldn’t be assured the endorsement of the riding association or Parrish, who signed up nearly 4,000 party members still loyal to her.
“ He knew there was no chance in hell that he could win without our support,” said Hazineh, who still manages Parrish’s no- longer- office. “So he declined.” Mahoney said he wanted to run but was frustrated by the nomination process, in which a search committee interviewed nine or 10 potential candidates, choosing just three with close ties to the riding association or Prime Minister Paul Martin.
“ The current system not only precludes me from winning the nomination, but even being competitive,” Mahoney said. The search committee’s choices are:
Hazineh, although he stepped aside after the party asked him to withdraw;
Omar Alghabra, a director of the riding association and former president of the Canadian Arab Federation;
Charles Sousa, a senior manager with the Royal Bank of Canada, who tried unsuccessfully to unseat Paul Szabo in Mississauga South last year. A Martin pal, he’s considered a well- connected Liberal insider. Added to the mix is Khalid Usman, a Markham councillor who didn’t win the search committee’s support but has sought the party’s permission to run. Whoever gets the nomination, Hazineh said they’ll have Parrish’s “incredible machine at their disposal.”
Afactor in the decision may be the make-up of the riding membership, which Hazineh said is about 80 per cent Arabs and Muslims, although those ethnic groups are just 10 per cent of the riding’s population.
“ Absolutely, it is skewed,” he said. “ In a participatory democracy, that’s how it works.” Even Thursday’s just- announced nomination meeting is already plagued with strife. It’s being held at a Coptic church just outside the riding, a decision Hazineh said was made without consulting the riding association and one he said they’ll protest. The location is considered an advantage for Sousa, who reportedly has the support of hundreds of the church’s Liberal members. Such late-game tinkering is likely amusing to long- nominated candidates for the other two major parties.
Conservative candidate Bob Dechert is a senior partner with Gowling Lafleur Henderson, Canada’s second largest law firm, and a former president of the Empire Club of Canada. NDP candidate Rupinder Brar is a physics instructor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
Across Peel in 2004, Liberals won all but one of the region’s nine ridings, failing to win only in north end Dufferin- Caledon, where Conservative David Tilson broke the sweep. With few breakout issues facing voters, Brampton Mayor Susan Fennell, whose city has four of the region’s ridings, said federal candidates would be wise to bone up on local issues. She said issues such as federal immigration settlement payments to municipalities have a big impact on communities like hers where a high percentage of immigrants to Canada have chosen to live. Brampton and GTA- area municipalities get much smaller payments than other communities across the country, she said.