Tag: Belinda Stronach

Belinda Stronach was the Liberal Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development and Minister responsible for Democratic Renewal in the government under Paul Martin.

Stronach famously crossed the floor to the Liberals from the Conservative benches in 2005 saving the Martin government from defeat in the House of Commons.

Prior to this, Belinda Stronach was a contestant for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2004, a contest ultimately won by Stephen Harper.

Stronach is an heir the Stronach family fortune which was estimated to be in the range of $3.12 billion as of 2013. She is the daughter of Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International, an autoparts company.

She is currently the CEO of the Stronach Group which is a entertainment and horse-racing company. The company is also known as 1/ST.

Martha’s parachute

Today, Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion handed Martha Hall Findlay the safe Liberal riding of Willowdale to replace retiring MP Jim Peterson. As I said in December, even though I disagree with her ideas, I was quite impressed with Findlay as a candidate for Liberal leader.

Saying this, I believe that she could have fought and won a contested nomination campaign and a competitive riding.

This is also good for the Tories and NDP because it removes a competitive candidate from the field.

Today, Dion said:

“Martha, through her tireless traveling of our great country, first as a leadership candidate and now in her role as Platform Outreach Chair for the Liberal Party, has come to represent Liberal renewal.”

It is unfortunate that Liberal renewal doesn’t include a departure from appointed candidates.

In fact, the Liberal democratic body in charge of holding a nomination contest abdicated its duty enthusiastically:

“Our riding association overwhelmingly passed a motion requesting that Mr. Dion appoint Martha as our candidate,” said Willowdale Federal Liberal Riding Association President Joanne Pratt.

It’s too bad she’s not challenging Stronach’s nomination in Newmarket-Aurora.

Convention leftovers

I’ve a few convention leftovers that I want to share.

Convention buttons were a big hit on the floor among Liberals. (See my previous post for the other buttons)

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Speaking of Justin vs. Belinda in Smackdown 2008, check out Macleans top story about the race to replace Stephane Dion, the Liberals’ interim leader.

I mentioned in one of Greg Staples earlier hotstove podcasts that if Bob Rae had won, the Conservatives would have spun the new Liberal leader as “potentially Canada’s first NDP Prime Minister”. I think that this button captures that spirit.

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Staying on Bob Rae, and mocking him on his record instead of resorting to vicious ad hominem attacks we have this amusing button handed out on the convention floor:

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This button was critical of the lack of french spoken at the Liberal convention in Montreal. I heard that a full 80% of delegates could not speak french (or were unilingual, I forget which).

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Finally, on the last ballot between Iggy and Dion, these buttons made their first appearance on the convention floor. These are obviously funny for a few reasons.

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Moving on from the buttons, this piece came from the Conservative war room to help Liberals feel especially good about themselves at their party.

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And… the best piece from the convention, in my opinion, was produced by the NDP war room who were kind enough to email me the PDF of their “map to the scars”, an Adscam tour of Montreal. Print it out, fold it up and hand it out to your friends (but tell them to vote Conservative!)

Download the Adscam map (PDF)

Best.convention.swag.evar

Friday morning blogging the convention after a couple of great hospitality suites last night. Ignatieff had the big party at the Intercontinental, ironically where Ezra Levant had his Western Standard Party just two years ago at the CPC policy convention.

Activists at the Ignatieff hospitality suite were handing out buttons to delegates and they’re already a hit. I’ve heard that these edgy buttons even have asking prices.

I’ve collected them all!

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