Ottawa

The need for cooperation

Jamey Heath, a member of Nathan Cullen’s campaign team, responds to Bill Tieleman.

Critiques of Mr. Cullen’s proposal equate it with so-called strategic voting. Mr. Cullen is not proposing strategic voting because Mr. Tieleman is right: it does not work. He’s proposing cooperation … Every candidate proposes some form of cooperation with Liberals. Brian Topp has many things he’d consider: a coalition; an accord like the one in Ontario in the 1980s; an alliance case-by-case. He helped orchestrate 2008’s would-be coalition, when Peggy Nash was party president and Niki Ashton, Paul Dewar and Thomas Mulcair were all MPs who said yes. If differences are so vast, why does everyone agree the parties can work together? The issue isn’t if Liberals made some horrendous mistakes in government. They did. Rather, it’s that given everybody agrees they’d cooperate after an election, why not cooperate beforehand, too?

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