Ottawa

Congratulations to the shadow cabinet

The Conservative press office sends its regards in a note entitled “Mr. Mulcair’s NDP Team.”

Late yesterday, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair announced his new shadow cabinet. This was Mr. Mulcair’s chance to demonstrate to Canadians that the NDP is a serious party representing moderate, responsible policies. Yet Mr. Mulcair chose a team that threatens dangerous economic experiments and believes Canada needs higher taxes, bigger deficits and less jobs and prosperity.

The shadow of Mr. Mulcair’s team is long indeed. With 55 critics, the NDP now have significantly more critics than the actual Cabinet charged with running the government – and nearly half are former union bosses or employees.
Mr. Mulcair chose to promote activists who have lobbied against Canada’s ability to develop and sell its own resources. It is a team of those who have consistently put the rights of criminals ahead of victims, repeatedly blocking Conservative efforts to crack down on crime.

It is also a team that cannot be trusted, comprised of many NDP MPs who promised their constituents that they would vote to end the wasteful and ineffective long gun registry only to break their word when the time came to vote.

And, perhaps most demonstrative of all, Mr. Mulcair chose Libby Davies as one of his three deputy leaders. Ms. Davies’s radical record reveals the stark contrast between her priorities and the issues that matter to ordinary Canadians. Her record includes support for legalizing drugs (Vancouver Province, March 26, 2010); legalized prostitution (Postmedia News, July 8, 2011); and being one of the few MPs who voted against raising the age of consent (Hansard, May 3, 2007).

In the coming days, we will continue to help Canadians get to know Mr. Mulcair’s team and highlight those he has chosen and ways in which they do not stand for the interests of everyday hard-working Canadian families.

That first paragraph is great fun. Do the Conservatives mean to imply that Mr. Mulcair could have chosen a shadow cabinet that they would have praised and welcomed?

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