Tomorrow, voters in the riding of Labrador will go the polls. According to three polls of voters there, the Liberal candidate, Yvonne Jones appears to be the prohibitive favourite.
If she wins, it will be the first time the federal Liberal caucus will have grown as the result of an electoral event* in nearly a decade.
Here is the list of electoral events going back to the last electoral event which saw the number of seats held by the Liberals in the House of Commons increase: Read more…
It took a few days but the Liberal Party of Canada has responded to the Conservative attack ad launched within hours of Trudeau winning his party’s leadership. I have personally spotted the attack ad running on widely viewed television shows like American Idol on CTV and during baseball games on Sportsnet. I’ve heard reports from others who have seen it during NHL hockey games. That demonstrates two things: a) the Conservatives have lots of money and b) a lot of people saw the Tory ad. Read more…
Last year, when New Democrats elected Thomas Mulcair their leader, every single paid-up member of the party was allowed to vote and every single vote counted. It was a one-member, one-vote system.
There was, at various points in the race, concern from the Montreal-based Mulcair camp that, since Quebec had never had — and still does not have — a provincial wing of the party and since members of provincial NDP parties in BC, Manitoba, Ontario and elsewhere are automatically voting members of the federal party, that the one-member, one-vote system would be a handicap to candidates, like Mulcair, from Quebec.
The one-member, one-vote system in the NDP leadership race turned out, after all, not to be a handicap for Mulcair because he won.
Still, though the province of Quebec has about 23 per cent of the Canadian population, just 9.6 per cent of the eligible voters in that NDP contest were from Quebec. By contrast, more than 30 per cent of the voters were from B.C., even though B.C. has only 13 per cent of the population. Those who were nervous about one-member, one-vote were worried that regional imbalances would either given an advantage to one candidate or another.
The Liberal Party of Canada is in the midst of its own leadership race and voting is underway this week. Again, Quebec is under-represented so far as voters go if one compares Quebec votersto the overall population. Just 11.6 per cent of the Liberal leadership voters are from Quebec.
This time next week, the leaders of the two leading opposition parties could be from Quebec and yet, judged on their participation in each party’s leadership contest, Quebecer’s seem not to care that much. That’s the starting point for my discussion with Le Journal de Montréal blogger Lisa Ravary, above.
On his last day in the House of Commons as Interim Liberal leader, Bob Rae speaks during Question Period on March 27, 2013. (REUTERS/Chris Wattie)
After his caucus colleague Ralph Goodale, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird (you’ll want to read what Baird said about Rae), and NDP House Leader Nathan Cullen said some nice things about Bob Rae — it was last day in the House of Commons Wednesday as his party’s interim leaders — Green Party Leader Elizabeth May had this tribute:
Latest from my Parliamentary Bureau colleagues