VANCOUVER â NDP leadership contender Thomas Mulcair was accused by his fellow competitors Sunday of turning his back on his party for trying to reach out and appeal to new voters.
The Quebec MP was the subject of most of the attacks from other leadership candidates during the NDP's last official debate in Vancouver before it convenes on March 23 and 24 in Toronto to elect a new leader.
âYouâve attacked our opposition to unfair trade deals, our links with the labour movement, our championing of ordinary people, youâve said that weâre one of the only social democratic parties not to renew itself,â Manitoba MP Niki Ashton told Mulcair.
âWould it not make more sense to go after Stephen Harperâs policies than to criticize our own party?â she said.
Ashton, former party president Brian Topp, and Ontario MPs Peggy Nash and Paul Dewar were all after Mulcair to come clean about the direction in which he would take the party.
"What direction will it take our party in, because so far youâve refused to say,â Nash said.
âI think you have been very critical of our party,â Topp chimed in after. âTom, instead of saying our party is the problem, (shouldn't) we be attacking unfair taxes, climate change and inequality, the issues our party was funded to fight?â
Dewar suggested Mulcair was ill-fitted to lead a party he didn't fully support.
âHow can you inspire people to vote for our party when you donât seem to be inspired by our party?â Dewar asked.
Mulcair told the estimated audience of 1,000 -- 500 of whom were watching in two overflow rooms -- that what he wanted to do was mimic the NDPâs success in Quebec in other areas of the country by changing and adapting the language used in party communications to different regions.
âOur boilerplate, our way of connecting with people has often been âHereâs the central campaign, stick our candidateâs face here.â What Iâve been hearing from across Canada is that people want us to adapt exactly as we did in Quebec. There was no contradiction between the Quebec campaign and the general campaign; we adapted and we won 59 seats. Thatâs what I want,â Muclair said.
The NDPâs Quebec election campaign used different messaging focused on throwing out the provincesâ ineffective politicians who barked at each other and taking a chance on a new party instead.
If the NDP didnât change, Mulcair suggested, it would never be able to obtain power.
âWe have to be cognizant of the fact that between the Ontario border and the B.C. border we now hold a grand total of three seats. So if we donât do something differently the next time around, it is guaranteed we will get the same result," he said.
After the debate, the candidates said they were unsatisfied with Mulcairâs answers.
Mulcair hadnât been âclearâ enough Topp said, while Dewar stated the Quebec MP hadnât provided âenough detail.â
âThese arenât just about superficial language or local issues, this is about the foundation of who we are,â Ashton said.
Nash, who told reporters she believes she will be on the final ballot with Mulcair on March 24, suggested he was holding a secret agenda.
âI think thatâs a fundamental question as a leadership candidate that he needs to answer, what direction is he taking the party, and I donât think we got a clear response,â she said.
âAs New Democrats start to vote, they need to know where each candidate would take the party,â Nash said. âIt is really a fundamental question about which way our party will be going in the future,â she added, saying she planned to raise it as she continues meeting with New Democrats ahead of the Toronto convention.
But B.C. MP Nathan Cullen, the hometown boy who charmed the crowd Sunday and who has suggested working with the Liberals and Greens to elect more progressive parliamentarians, told reporters he wasnât sure what the other candidates were fishing for from Mulcair.
âThis talk and notion of betrayal and these âSome New Democrats are good New Democrats and others need to be pass some other kind of testâ is offensive to me. I think itâs wedge politics, but done within the family,â Cullen said.
âSome of those same accusations have been levelled towards me⊠so I more than take offense, I reject any of these notions,â he added. âItâs wrong and offensive.â
Mulcair told reporters he thinks the other candidates are coming after him because heâs the frontrunner.
âWhen you get people coming at you with that question, what they are essentially saying is that they realize that your campaign is doing well,â he said.
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