Shocker: It wasn’t ‘The Green Shift’
The Law Society of Saskatchewan has reasonable grounds to believe that Garret Oledzki may be guilty of conduct unbecoming a lawyer in that he: MORE…
I’m still, however, going to take credit for being right when I went all Doubty McColdWaterPouringson last week over that burst of conventional-wisdom-via-Conservative-talking-point that these two resignations – Oledzki and Bob Morrissey in Prince Edward Island – were all because of that dastardly Green Shift, and not for those maddeningly cryptic “personal and professional reasons” that, at least in Oledzki’s case, was the reason given by the party and the now former candidate at the time.
UPDATE: As for Bob Morrissey’s resignation, we still don’t know whether there is anything more to it than the new business opportunities that he initially gave as his reason for pulling out of the race. According to the CBC parliamentary bureau group blog “Political Bytes”, that may well turn out to be exactly what happened:
[...]Liberals are admitting they started hearing as early as last April that Morrissey lacked the “fiire in his belly” to run in the first place.
A former provincial MLA, Morrissey had been out of politics since 2000 before deciding to try a comeback as a federal candidate.
If rumours of him reconsidering his candidacy were surfacing in April, that would have been a couple of months before Dion’s plan was unveiled, or its details well understood within Liberal ranks.
One Liberal source admits that when Morrissey did finally decide to pull the plug on his candidacy, organizers were afraid he might use the Green Shift as an excuse, and were grateful when he didn’t.
The non-election call
Morrissey was nominated in November 2007 when the rush was on to get candidacies sorted out in the face of election threats at the time. But that election still hasn’t come to pass.
The on-again, off-again election call is making it difficult for would-be candidates who are not yet in Parliament. Some have spent months trying to decide whether to put their energies into campaigning now, pre-writ, so as to be ready when the race starts or to pursue their careeers outside the world of partisan politics. In Morrissey’s case, a recent business deal is said to have made his mind up for him.
Further, the Liberal spin on the Island is that the carbon tax, while unpopular, will not be the ballot question in PEI. Premier Robert Ghiz has endorsed the policy and he has been pretty good at checking to see which way the political wind is blowing before he takes a stand.
(I meant to post a link to that post when it first went up, but it turned out to a considerably crazier week than even I expected, and I completely forgot.)
