Tag: liberal party

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.

BREAKING – Grits to walk out

I’m hearing a rumour that the Liberals are going to walk out of Question Period today in protest of Stephen Harper’s reading of that Vancouver Sun article yesterday which cast a shadow on the reputation of Liberal MP Navdeep Bains.

If the House cannot function as it should in a democracy, how can we get a democratic solution the important issues surrounding this debate (Air India, Anti-terrorism act)?

The Grits should stay and debate. After all, I once heard that 15 minutes of time in the House of Commons costs taxpayers $75,000.

UPDATE: The rumour turned out to be untrue.

UPDATE: Well… not exactly. I’ve learned a bit more. The Grits were indeed going to walk out of Question Period. That is, however, until Stephen Harper came down the stairs, flanked by members of the Air India families and then scrummed with reporters (which is rare). Likely not wanting to offend the families (which would sit in the gallery during Question Period and hold a press conference at the National Press Theater to back Harper’s position on the Anti-Terrorism Act provisions) the Liberals in the opposition lobby filed into, and stayed, in the House for Question Period.

CTV’s Canada AM makes a poor edit

Last week, I was watching Canada AM and would have spit out my coffee if I had been drinking some at the time.

I had just seen the program’s Seamus O’Regan interview Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion about climate change, the oil sands, the terror threat against the oil sands and then finally a potential election. It was a standard four minute interview which ended with some rhetoric from Stephane Dion, saying that Harper wants to make the country right-wing, Republican, far right, evil, etc… par for the course and standard fare for Dion. The Liberals have recently been pushing that very message in every QP breath they take.

At the top of the hour, they replayed a clip of the Dion interview which described the Liberals as a moderate alternative to Harper’s “far right” party. Again, inaccurate, but expected. Immediately following this clip, the anchor goes to the next news story to describe “far right” nutjob Ernst Zundel being convicted in Germany. It’s almost as if Dion teed up the ball and CTV drove it 350 yards.

Take a look (Youtube video):

In CTV’s defense, the same “far right” descriptor was used to describe Zundel in the previous top-of-the-hour news update (before Dion had given his interview – Dion went live at 7:40am EST). However, who cuts a clip of Dion describing Harper as “far right” and then gives the anchor text on Zundel describing the Holocaust denier as “far right”?

Also, what’s with the kid gloves Seamus? If Dion uses language to describe Canadian conservatives that CTV reserves for Holocaust denial, aren’t you supposed to call him on that? The proper response would have been “now wait one second there, Mr. Dion…”

For the record, this is editing on live television. I don’t think that there was any malice intended on the part of CTV… the result was just unfortunate. If this had been a pre-packaged broadcast, I’d be quite upset. With that said, I do believe that lessons above (and in the video) regarding language and kid gloves should be considered by CTV.

UPDATE: Should we instead be disappointed with Dion for twisting the misnomer (on all fronts) for his own agenda? Haven’t we heard Dion describe Harper as a ‘far right climate change denier‘?