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Canada’s first Green Party Member of Parliament this week said the growing threat he posed to the federal Liberal Party power structure — not his failure to disclose his own business and financial dealings, as party officials claim — were to blame for his downfall with the Liberals.
With Green Party Leader Elizabeth May by his side, Blair Wilson on Saturday (Aug. 30) announced his own green shift, going from being an independent MP — a status that had prevailed since last fall after his ouster from the Liberals amid allegations of campaign misspending — to joining the Greens, just in time for the upcoming federal election.
In a statement issued Sunday (Aug. 31), Wilson said he thinks voters in West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky are ready to make history and make him Canada’s first elected Green Party representative either federally or provincially.
“I have always shared the Green Party’s values of sustainability, non-violence, participatory democracy, social justice, respect for diversity and ecological wisdom — and I am confident that most voters in my riding do so as well,” Wilson said.
With Prime Minister Stephen Harper expected to drop the election writ any day, both May and Wilson said having a sitting Member of Parliament should ensure that May is allowed to take part in the televised leaders’ debates.
“It will now be impossible to exclude the Green Party from the televised leaders’ debates in the next election,” May said.
Added Wilson, “Democracy is threatened when legitimate national leaders are barred from what is arguably the single most important political event in an election — the televised debates. It is shocking that the Green Party was excluded from the debates in the past, but by joining the Green Party, I can help guarantee that this travesty will not be repeated in the next election.”
Wilson stepped down from the Liberal Party caucus last October, after allegations of campaign misspending emerged in a two-part article in The Province newspaper. The articles also contained details of past Wilson business and financial dealings, many of which ended in failure.
A few weeks after Wilson left the caucus, Liberal Party officials announced they were rejecting him as a future candidate because, they said, he had failed to disclose relevant details about his past to the party’s Green Light Committee, which vets potential candidates, before he first ran under the Liberal banner in 2004.
In late July, Elections Canada issued a statement indicating that while the 2006 Wilson campaign had violated the Elections Act in three minor instances, it was meting out no penalty against him. Wilson characterized the report as a vindication and vowed to continue his political comeback.
But until Saturday, most had expected him to continue his bid to rejoin the Liberals. He had been planning to appear before the federal Liberal caucus in mid-August, but that meeting was postponed until mid-September.
Liberal Party officials have repeatedly insisted Wilson had been barred from running for the party in the future because of his failure to disclose some information about his past to the party. After the Elections Canada probe’s results were made public, a party official said a report on the specific omissions had been forwarded to Wilson and his lawyer, but the official declined to discuss the report’s contents.
In Sunday’s statement, Wilson characterized the articles, and the Liberals’ rejection of him as a candidate, as a politically motivated smear campaign. The statement said that at the time of the Liberals’ decision, the federal party in B.C. “was being hamstrung by a powerful group of unelected backroom players.”
Said Wilson, “I got on the wrong side of that group early on because my success in the party after I was elected in 2006 was perceived as a threat to their power.
