New Green Party leader Annamie Paul is running for a seat in the upcoming Toronto-Centre by-election, and this has already caused a bit of a friction between outgoing leader Elizabeth May and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Why? Because May argues that Singh should repay the courtesy that the Greens extended him when he was running for his own seat in a by-election in the previous parliament and not run a candidate to oppose him. The problem? That May’s conception of “leader’s courtesy” is not really what she thinks it is.
First of all, “leader’s courtesy” largely only existed when it came to government or official opposition – third, fourth, and fifth-place parties are not really owed any particular courtesies. Second, what this particular courtesy involves is a member of the new leader’s own party voluntarily resigning their seat so that the new leader can run there in order to get into the Commons as soon as possible – it’s generally not about unheld ridings, even if it just happens to coincidentally be the same riding where Paul ran in the last federal election. The Liberals are certainly not obligated to not run to keep their own seat for the sake of giving Paul a seat, no matter if she is a Black woman. Hell, they’re running a Black woman of their own in the riding. Not to mention, less than a year ago, during the election, Paul came in a distant fourth place in the riding with a mere seven percent of the vote-share. Bill Morneau, incidentally, got 57 percent, and the NDP came in second at 22 percent – even if Singh did the “classy” thing, as May demanded, and didn’t run a candidate, it’s still unlikely that Paul would win – especially when she’s running against a legitimate media personality like Liberal candidate Marci Ien.
I would also add that demanding that the other parties surrender their candidates so that Paul can win it because she’s a Black woman leader smacks of tokenism, and is an implicit declaration that she couldn’t win the seat on her own. Not to mention, it deprives the voters of the riding the chance to make the decision on who they want to represent them. Again, the historical “leader’s courtesy” was about a riding that the party held, and it was usually intended to be a short-term measure so that the leader would have a seat, and would then run in their intended seat in the next election and return the riding to the MP who stepped aside for the leader. This is clearly not what is happening in Toronto Centre, so unless May wants to resign her own seat so that Paul can run there, she’s conflating just what exactly this “courtesy” really is.
Good reads:
- Justin Trudeau says the federal government has signed agreements with Quebec, Ontario and Alberta to provide more assistance with contact tracing.
- Trudeau also says that he got a negative COVID test in August after feeling a “tickle” in his throat, and on the advice of his doctor.
- The government has (finally) re-tabled their bill to reform the medical assistance in dying regime to comply with a Quebec court decision.
- The parent/grandparent immigration sponsorship system is reverting to a lottery system after last year’s first-come-first-served system turned problematic.
- A five-year old Canadian orphan who was stuck in Syria after her parents were killed is on her way back to Canada, which leads to questions about other detainees.
- The government is suspending exports of military drone technology to Turkey while it investigates whether it was used in the Azerbaijan/Armenian conflict.
- Trudeau has tapped Ralph Goodale to become the next High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, after Janice Charette has been in the post for four years.
- The Wexit Maverick Party is planning to run in 49 Western seats with the strategic goal of winning enough of them to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.
- Nunavut has prevented any cases of COVID by implementing a system of quarantining before people are allowed into the territory.
- Here’s an attempt to fact-check some of Jason Kenney’s rhetoric about the size and scope of the oil and gas sector, and where he is conflating numbers.
- Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column explains the Conservatives’ attempt to get the Procedure and House Affairs committee a battleground over studying prorogation.
- Susan Delacourt laments that Canada doesn’t have the same disclosure requirements for the PM’s health that the Americans do for their president.
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I read the Process Nerd series the past few days and it’s not just that they want to study prorogation, it’s that prorogation is a red herring for wanting to open up a *fifth* tiresome inquiry into the WE nonsense and make prorogation *itself* part of the so-called “scandal” (imbroglio, kerfuffle, nontroversy, whatever). They sprung a surprise *15-part* motion on the Liberals and then demanded an emergency meeting to ram it through, even though it is ridiculously outside the scope of the committee’s mandate.
Even the Globe article about it quoted their on-retainer pollster who called it “smart politics,” that was all about getting it back in front of the cameras and in the headlines to thwart or even reverse Liberal momentum and “damage the PM’s brand”. Literally nothing in there was about finding answers or establishing a “verdict,” because nobody even knows what “allegations” are/were even being made anymore. It’s all about the damn horse race and slinging mud with vague suspicions of “corruption”. I’m sick of it. Democracy dies in horse race “journalism”. At this point the “free press” (controlled and manipulated by the wealthy Conservative ownership class) isn’t an enabler of democracy but a threat to it. This isn’t about accountability. It’s character assassination of the Trudeau family and everyone in the Liberal government. FFS they want Freeland to testify about God knows what. Probably just to smear her too because they see her as Trudeau’s heir apparent and therefore a threat.
You know, for all the complaints about Trudeau “abusing process,” the Conservatives not only have it down to an art, it’s embedded in their DNA. They have no policies to run on (or none that Canadians would find attractive if they were honest about it), and are desperate to distract from O’Toole’s impending clash of the so-cons, so they go back and dig this up because they have literally nothing else. My last-ditch hope is that 1) it backfires; 2) people are so consumed with COVID and the American fracas that they tune it out; and/or 3) as Kady also wrote in a recent column about it, the Canadian standoff is enough to stall as long as possible so that they don’t get to continue their malicious sabotage. For them to continue this obsessive pursuit of power in a *pandemic* and derail the government’s response to it is so shameful it should be criminal. Where’s the inquiry into their abuse of inquiries?
Thanks for the explanation about the “leader’s courtesy” — I had wondered why nobody seemed to care whether the VOTERS in the open riding actually wanted a Green Party MP foisted on them. Its useful to know that the original idea was that the new leader should run in a riding that has already shown its support for the party in question.