OTTAWA – The federal Conservatives have ousted their candidate for Toronto Centre, 43-year-old international-trade lawyer Mark Warner, and he says it's because he wanted to play up urban and social issues that are at odds with the master Conservative campaign strategy.
"We've had, for a number of months, a series of differences between our campaign and the national campaign, over the degree to which I could run a campaign that would focus on the kind of issues that matter in a downtown urban riding," Warner told the Star.
Conservative officials have been actively resisting Warner's emphasis on housing, health care and cities issues, he said, even blocking him from participating in a Star forum on poverty earlier this year and pointedly removing from his campaign literature a reference to the 2006 international conference on AIDS in Toronto – which Warner attended but Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not.
Don Plett, Conservative party president, signed the letter that was delivered to Warner this week precisely as the government was unveiling its mini-budget on Tuesday afternoon. Plett said yesterday he didn't want to elaborate on the decision to oust Warner, for privacy reasons. However, Plett didn't argue with Warner's characterization of the dispute. "Well let me just simply say this; that in a national campaign, that is exactly what it is – a national campaign. There are certain things that we expect all of our candidates to do in a national campaign," Plett told the Star yesterday.
I don’t know if the “urban & social issues” could be accurately characterized as conflicting with the master conservative campaign strategy because no enterprising reporter bothered to either ask those pointed question and/or report it in this article.
It might just be a case of those “urban & social issues” happened to be more ‘provincial’ in nature, and therefore, be irrelevant in a federal campaign. We will never really know if I am right or not; because the Toronto Star’s report chose to focus on the scary conservative hidden agenda ethos rather than the potential conflict between provincial and federal concerns.
Oh, and for all those who insist on putting their big girl/boy diapers and make ‘race’ an issue - let me remind you that Megan Harris won the conservative nomination and ran in the 2004 election for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. All of which means, there is a far greater chance of the Conservative party riding association of Toronto Centre electing a more ethnically diverse and/or female candidate – than say - the Liberals - who have yet to nominate a woman and/or a visible minority candidate in the last 14 years of this riding.
3 comments:
What are all these weird, stinky, oddly coloured fish doing here? Oh, wait a minute...who dropped all these red herrings?
The point, I think, is that having made grand pronouncements about his commitment to the promotion of a bottom-up, grass-roots driven Party, Stephen Harper's machine is illustrating the obsessive need for control that has characterized his management of caucus and the party to date.
Balbulican is incorrect on purpose of course. He understands as well as the next person that what few shredded values remain in the CPC repertoire are certainly at odds with the shopworn "progressive" and "urban" (add random, self serving meaning and stir)banners.
Or, to put it more succinctly, grass does not grow on the roots of a dandelion.
The Needle
Needle,
Grass does not grow on the roots of a dandelion great line. I am going to shamelessly use that line in the future.
That said, I think you are both missing the big picture here.
Harper brought a CP back from death on the outer fringes, he didn't do it by playing to every half-baked notion his fellow conservatives came out with but by establishing a policy and ruthlessly adhering to it. Either you play ball with the team or find a new team to play on. Even I know that which is why I am not a party girl. You want to change policy, do it in caucus, and not on the campaign trail. Its a poor leader who lets every Tom, Dick and Susie set their own CP agenda.
I have to admit to feeling somewhat strange here, here I am defending Harper and CP policy while the current CP has done everything to alienate me as a conservative - my vote is not guaranteed by a long shot in the next election. That being said, from the TS report we never learn how out of sync Warner's views were with the party - there is just the suggestion that they were. What I would love to know is what positions did Warner take and how they conflicted with federal pc policy.
Post a Comment