The Bloc influence

Brian Topp recalls the coalition negotiations from his perspective.

As I recall they made a couple of useful suggestions (notably on toughening up the environmental plank) but did not add anything that stuck in my mind to the economic agenda ... I was the NDP team’s lead negotiator and can report that the Bloc’s platform certainly did not influence my own thinking, since I had never read it in any detail and had last flipped through it several months before during the campaign ... Nor did I hear anyone ever refer to a Bloc policy platform or other document at any point that weekend.