Ottawa

It’s all a big conspiracy

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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