Beyond The Commons

 Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

It's all a big conspiracy

by Aaron Wherry on Monday, December 6, 2010 10:09am - 32 Comments

A week after those by-elections you’ve already forgotten about, an anonymous Conservative steps forward to tell the Hill Times that the Conservatives purposefully lost Winnipeg-North.

A top Tory from Winnipeg told The Hill Times that had the Conservatives mounted the same candidate who ran in Winnipeg North in the 2008 election, Ray Larkin, whose daughter Marni Larkin is a senior director and organizer for the federal Conservatives in Manitoba, NDP candidate Kevin Chief would likely have won.

Instead, late last summer, after Mr. Lamoureux defeated a prominent member of the large Filipino community in the riding for the byelection nomination, the Conservatives dropped Mr. Larkin and selected a little-known member of the Filipino expatriate population, Julie Javier, who barely ran a campaign, avoided candidate debates and media interviews, featured a mobile poster mounted atop an automobile that sporadically appeared in the riding, and drew criticism from even Conservative party members for her lacklustre effort.

This no doubt explains why Conservatives were so reluctant to attack Mr. Ignatieff in the days leading up to that vote and why the Prime Minister made sure to avoid appearing in the riding.

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  • briguyhfx

    Hilarious! 3 dimensional chess touted as a reason for getting trounced in a by-election. Failure is impossible if every loss can be spun as a win.

  • Andrew (not PorC)

    Isn't that how all their candidates campaign?

    • Rob Shift

      That's what I thought. But, I live in Calgary, so your experience may vary.

      • Crit_Reasoning

        Yeah, it's been years since Calgary has seen a non-lacklustre campaign in a federal election. Large margins of victory seem to be correlated to perfunctory campaigns.

        • Rob Shift

          Well, it isn't every day that Maclean's writes an article about your MP, and his ability to help the rest of his party because he never has to campaign in his own riding.

          Does that make us latchkey constituents?

  • WDM

    I want to be a senior source just too see how much blatant chicken sh…feathers…I can feed different media members and have them actually print it.

  • Mike T.

    Was the source CATS?

  • The Amnesiac

    Tory's secret election plan revealed!
    1. Be stubbornly stuck at 34 percent in polls
    2. Boost Ignatieff
    3. ??????
    4. MAJORITY GOVERNMENT!!!

    Or, perhaps, just more anti-Liberal psy-ops from the office of Jason Kenney.

  • tobyornotoby

    It's cute that there are Conservatives who think this seat could have been won. It's an NDP stronghold where the Liberal, Kevin Lamoureux, was able to win on his own steam, because he has been a popular and populist consituency representative provincially for more than a decade. He held the only non-NDP seat out of five or six in the northwest corner of Winnipeg provincially.

    It's even cuter that everyone assumes the way to get the Phillippino vote is to run a Phillipino. Judy Wasyleica-Leis was/is extremely popular in the Philippino community, and drew a large swath of her support from that community as the previous Member from Winnipeg North.

    As for the appeal of a star candidate, Marni Larkin is hardly a star. She might have run a better campaign than Julie Javier, but so could Julie's truck driver if he would have just pulled over and chatted with passersby now and then. Wouldn't make any difference, though.

    • Mike T.

      It's cute that there are Conservatives who think this seat could have been won.

      ***

      It would be, if they actually thought that. Since they don't, it's more insulting.

    • john g

      I don't think you understood the article. The Conservatives didn't claim they could win; their claim is that they thought a better candidate could have drawn enough support away from the Libs that the NDP could have eeked this one out; but they didn't want the knifes to come out for Iggy if he went 0 for 3, so they tanked it.

      Don't know if I believe this claim or not; seems hard to believe that you could engineer who people are going to vote for if it's NOT you, but that's what Senior Anonymous is on about.

      • Patchouli Blessings

        You don't know if you believe this claim or not?! Really?

        • Mike T.

          He knows.

      • tobyornotoby

        Really? I guess I didn't understand. In that case, please disregard the above because I'm sure the Conservatives could have found a better loser than Julie Javier.

  • hosertohoosier

    It isn't clear to me how the Tories would manage this.

    1. The NDP won over 60% of the vote here in 2008. I don't think anybody thought of this as a potential Liberal win.

    2. If it was known that the NDP vote would collapse, you would think that the Tories, who were second with 22% here, would view this as an opportunity (moreso than the Liberals at 11%).

    3. It is rare for a candidate alone to be able to move 12% of the vote. The difference between a bad candidate and an average one is very small because most people vote with a party or leader in mind.

    4. It isn't clear how they managed their riding nomination meeting to ensure the selection of a bad candidate. I guess they could have asked Larkin to not run, but how to stop another candidate?

    5. In the event of a defeat in Vaughan and Winnipeg, Ignatieff might have faced internal dissent. However, it wouldn't immediately lead to a leadership race.

  • Mike T.

    The unnamed source also claimed that the reason the Conservatives don't have 308 seats is because they like the challenges of dealing with a minority government, and don't want the other parties to "look bad".

  • MostlyCivil

    "A top Tory from Winnipeg told The Hill Times …"

    I stopped reading at that point. That's my new rule.

    Don't feed the trolls, Aaron. That's what these sources are now.

    • danby

      an anonymous Conservative…..

      Sounds like a good place to set up a Conservatives Anonymous branch.

      • lgarvin

        Agreed. The words "anonymous source" should be read as "discredited source."

        Don't use anonymous sources and don't give credence or attention to those that do.

        • briguyhfx

          Well, it's okay to use anonymous sources when they have legitimate fears of reprisal (such as for genuine whistle-blowers and such). Not so much for politicos floating trial balloons in the press, or for gossip-mongers.

          • Orson Bean

            But they're really good for lazy reporters who have to file a story and don't feel like doing the real work required to come up with a real story.

          • burlivespipe

            … specially now that Harper's inspirational advisor has sent out the message that they believe in the death penalty for whistle (wikileaks) blowers…

  • Stewart_Smith

    I thought we had decided to out unnamed sources that spout bs.

  • Anon 001

    So, what was the strategy behind *star* candidate Fantino scraping by on a 1,000-vote margin against a virtual nobody?

    • danby

      It's pretty simple really. By allowing Mr Fantino to win it in a squeaker, it keeps Don Cherry on board to assume a Glen Beck role in support of the Conservatives. Anonymous sources have confirmed that a landslide would have offended Mr Cherry's hockey sensibilities – you just don't embarrass the other guy, you let up when you've got the game in the bag
      Pretty soon Don will be appearing at Tim Hortons across this great land, espousing wholesome conservative values, and enlightening voters about the "commie-pinko" coalition threatening to turn Canada into a bunch of turtling, visor wearing Swedes.

  • BC Blue

    Of course Naumetz doesn't see the same conspiracy in Vaughan where the NDP were just smart to save their resources in a riding that they had no hope in winning.

  • madeyoulook

    "You beat us, eh? Well, that's because we LET you win."

    This playground false bravado is allegedly news… why, actually?

    • LdKitchenersOwn

      It's true that it's pretty commonplace these days for us to get false playground bravado out of our government, but still. I think that even as we get sick of it it's still worth highlighting the latest example.

      (Also, I get annoyed when people complain that what appears on any of the Macleans blogs isn't "newsworthy" enough for them. It's Aaron's blog, let him blog about what he wants to blog about).

      • madeyoulook

        Actually, my Q was directed more to the Hill Times that thought they had some sort of insider scoop, but your point remains valid. I apologize proFUSEly for having annoyed you.

  • Sigh

    We meant to do that.

  • LdKitchenersOwn

    I don't know why the Liberals didn't think of this!

    Fantino won because the Liberals LET him win.

    • Jenn_

      And you know, that might actually have played (ok, it wouldn't, but it would have been better than Winnipeg North) because Fantino may well become a problem for the Conservatives. So, the Liberals LET him win in order for the Conservatives to lose, if you will.

      But the Liberals didn't let him win, so they didn't try to say they did. Liberals don't really stay up nights thinking up lies, I think. I like to think that's principled, but I know Chet will just consider it a lack of planning.

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