- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,187
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
Losers, flops, duds and has-beens. After a brutal year in local, provincial and federal politics, here’s a sampler of who took a beating in 2014:
Tim Hudak
The leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives spoiled for an election for months and started his campaign strong when he got one. Then he torpedoed his chances with a hard-right platform backed by bogus math. After his party lost nine seats in the June vote, his second election loss as leader, Hudak tried to hang on as a caretaker but had to resign when his caucus deserted him. Now the candidates vying to succeed him are all trying to outdo each other with tales of how poorly run the Tory party was when Hudak was in charge.
Andrea Horwath
Though she comfortably survived a leadership review in November, the Ontario NDP leader provoked last spring’s vote when she refused to support the Liberals’ budget and wasn’t ready to campaign. No buses, no tour plans, no platform for the longest time. And when the New Democrats produced policy promises, their attempts to appeal to both left and right came across as incoherent. The party kept 21 seats in the legislature but lost three of its traditional strongholds in downtown Toronto and the NDP’s left wing called for Horwath’s head.
Teresa Piruzza
The Windsor politician served three years at Queen’s Park, taking over Liberal Sandra Pupatello’s seat in 2011 but losing it in 2014. Winning her seat by a comfortable margin in a rough year for the Liberals, when their majority government was reduced to a minority, she turned around and lost it – the one cabinet minister to be defeated – when the party’s fortunes improved overall. The longtime political aide and city official got a job with Chrysler afterward.
Randall Denley
The Citizen columnist took his second run at incumbent Bob Chiarelli in Ottawa West-Nepean, a seat the Progressive Conservatives dearly wanted to take away from the Liberals. After two years of campaigning, numerous appearances with leader Tim Hudak, and a major role in defining what his party would stand for if elected, Denley did worse the second time than the first, dropping his share of the vote from 39 per cent to 33 per cent.
David Livingston
The chief of staff to ex-premier Dalton McGuinty left a long career in banking to first run the province’s infrastructure agency, then become the top aide to Ontario’s top politician. He had a reputation as a no-nonsense, get-things-done guy. In the spring, it emerged he was the target of an OPP investigation, with police believing he’d arranged for an outsider to get into protected government computers to try to delete potentially important records of government decisions about cancelling gas generating stations in Oakville and Mississauga.
Katherine Hobbs
A private-sector manager, literary festival organizer and international aid volunteer, Hobbs defeated Christine Leadman to become the councillor for Kitchissippi ward in 2010. After four hard years of trying to manage controversial development projects and the effects of light-rail construction, which she couldn’t stop and couldn’t sell to her constituents, she herself was routed at the ballot box by community-association leader Jeff Leiper.
Peter Clark
The former mayor of Cumberland and regional chairman came back for an encore in local politics as the councillor for Rideau-Rockcliffe. Crusty and sometimes cranky in manner, Clark’s long memory and a fearlessness born of experience made him a competent councillor. But he wasn’t good enough to repeat his narrow 2010 win. His campaign limited by failing energy, Clark fell to challenger Tobi Nussbaum in October.
Jim Watson
Fresh off a huge election win, the mayor of Ottawa began his second term with a nasty spat with the National Capital Commission over his signature plan to extend light-rail service to the west and southwest. To live within the budget set by the proudly parsimonious mayor, the track will have to use NCC-controlled land along the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway and the city has spent years failing to convince the commission that the project can be done the way the NCC wants. At the end of November, a war of words between the city and the feds was getting out of hand until Watson sat down with federal minister John Baird and the two agreed to at least stop poking one another for 100 days and see if they could get something worked out.
Marcel Guibord
Voters in Clarence-Rockland took a broom to their city council, ousting Guibord as mayor and three councillors (after four others chose not to run for re-election). Guibord is facing breach-of-trust charges over an alleged plot to dump the city manager, which he says he’ll contest, and ran for re-election amid allegations that he’d moved council meetings to another venue to dodge protesters. He lost to challenger Guy Desjardins by a margin of well over two to one.
Olivia Chow
After more than eight years as an MP, the well-known spouse of the late NDP leader Jack Layton resigned from Parliament in March to run for mayor of Toronto. With a topnotch team of experienced campaign staff, she was expected to give the behaviourally challenged Rob Ford a run for his money. Instead, she proved as inspiring as a bowl of jello, and finished third – behind both winner John Tory and candidate Doug Ford, who had jumped in to uphold the family, uh, name, after his seriously ill incumbent brother withdrew. As one CBC commentator wrote: “It was Olivia Chow’s race to lose. And on election night, she indeed lost it.” Yup.
Rob Ford
Ford Nation was crushed when Rob Ford withdrew from the mayoral race after being diagnosed with a tumour. The normally blustery, highly divisive politician struggled gamely through treatment but was simply not well enough to defend his record. Nonetheless, he still ran for city council in Ward 2, and won, setting him up for a potential run at the mayoralty in 2018. “If my health holds up, my name will be on the ballot,” Ford told CP24 recently. “I’m plotting it as we speak.” Which, if it happened, would make the rest of the city losers, too.
Dean Del Mastro
The now-former Peterborough MP maintained his innocence until the bitter end after being charged by Elections Canada with falsifying election documents and knowingly exceeding the spending limit in the 2008 federal election. In October, he was convicted of violating the Elections Act, and now awaits sentencing. Even as he delivered his teary resignation speech to the House of Commons, Del Mastro still argued he was an innocent man, and is working to have a judge reopen his defence so he can introduce new evidence. Meanwhile, cousin David Del Mastro is charged with trying to dodge campaign contribution limits by funnelling $22,000 to the Del Mastro campaign through employees of his Mississauga electrical contracting company.
Michael Sona
The 26-year-old former campaign worker was sentenced to nine months in provincial jail (with an additional 12 months of probation) for his role in the deceptive 2011 federal election-day robocalls. He’s currently on bail appealing his sentence. (The Crown is also appealing, but for a longer one.) Sona was found guilty in August in the scheme to send misleading calls to more than 7,000 voters in Guelph, Ont., sending them to the wrong polling locations. Sona’s actions, said Judge Gary Hearn, “represent a complete disregard for our political system and its values.”
Shawn Atleo
The smooth-talking national chief of the Assembly of First Nations was comfortably into his second term when aboriginal leaders started attacking him for backing Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s planned legislation on aboriginal education, which would have handed control of on-reserve education to First Nations, but also imposed certain standards. The government had promised to provide $1.9 billion in funding, and Atleo had signed on to the whole deal. In May, when he realized the chiefs had very different views, he resigned. Also taking a hit in the controversy: First Nations children, since the bill was then put on ice and the AFN and government haven’t had meaningful talks about it since.
Alison Redford
Few politicians have plunged quite as steeply from their perch as the Alberta premier. Her downfall began with revelations that the Alberta government had covered the $45,000 cost for a trip to attend Nelson Mandela’s funeral in late 2013, including a privately chartered flight to return to Alberta. Then there were revelations about the travel of her daughter and a friend aboard government planes. With more details emerging of her flagrant spending, Redford resigned as premier in March. In August, she resigned as an MLA, just before a damning auditor general’s report was to be released, offering even more details of her profligate ways.
Pauline Marois
Few politicians can say they were brought down by a single fist-pump, but the onetime Parti Quebecois “minister of everything” can claim that honour. Marois won a minority government in 2012, and called the 2014 election with a lead in the polls. But that was before her gushy reaction to rookie candidate Pierre Karl Peladeau’s blunt declaration, at his campaign launch, that he wanted to “make Quebec a country.” Cue energetic fist-pump. Soon, Marois was daydreaming aloud about what the currency and borders would look like in this new country. Come April, the PQ had lost the election, Marois had lost her seat, and the federalists were again safely in power in Quebec City.
Mario Beaulieu
Mario who? Precisely our point. If anyone could top Marois for ill-timed enthusiasm on sovereignty, this was the guy. Beaulieu became leader of the next-to-invisible Bloc Quebecois in June, braying about putting Quebec independence above all else. He promptly proceeded to alienate respected former Bloc leaders, riding executive officers and his own caucus: Two of the Bloc’s four MPs have since ditched the party. In a further indignity, Peladeau (see Marois disaster, above) told a meeting of PQ youth that the Bloc had served only to justify federalism. His later retraction did nothing to enhance Beaulieu’s crumbling credibility. Oh, and he still doesn’t have a seat in the House of Commons.
David Bertschi
You just can’t fight the party, it seems, though Bertschi hasn’t given up in his spat over the Liberal nomination in Ottawa-Orleans. The lawyer and former federal Liberal leadership candidate originally had the green light to run for that nomination. Then the Liberals wrote to inform him that his “green light” had gone red because of unpaid debts from the 2013 leadership bid and his alleged failure to tell a candidate screening committee about a past lawsuit. Some say it was all a plot to clear the way for “star” candidate Andrew Leslie, a retired general. Bertschi is now talking legal action, while Leslie is preparing his speaking notes for the 2015 election.
Two unknown NDP MPs, and two known Liberals
Everyone, it seems, loses in this nasty tale of misconduct and harassment on the Hill. On Nov. 5, Justin Trudeau abruptly announced he was suspending MPs Massimo Pacetti and Scott Andrews from the Liberal caucus – and also suspending their re-election campaigns – over allegations of “misconduct” by other MPs, who were quickly identified as being New Democrats, but whose names were not revealed. As details emerged of the allegations (both men deny any wrongdoing), the lid began curling back on the Hill’s ugly “power” culture – with some staffers hurling accusations at their bosses, and party leaders dancing around the subject of whether they had acted precipitously or not quickly enough on the various accusations. And, it was revealed, no coherent policies existed to tackle such problems.
Dimitri Soudas
Soudas was once one of the “boys in short pants” – as independent MP Brent Rathgeber likes to call young-uns in the Prime Minister’s Office who wield considerable power with little real-life experience. The PM’s onetime chief spokesman went off to a plum job with the Canadian Olympic Committee, then resurfaced as executive director of the Conservative party in late 2013. But in March, he was forced out of that job after he became personally involved in the nomination battle of his fiancée, Eve Adams, in Oakville North-Burlington. Soudas defended his interference, saying he was “madly in love” and needed to “stand with the woman whose hand I’ll be holding when I’m an old fart.” Romantic, but none of it has done Adams’ political future any good.
查看原文...
Tim Hudak
The leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives spoiled for an election for months and started his campaign strong when he got one. Then he torpedoed his chances with a hard-right platform backed by bogus math. After his party lost nine seats in the June vote, his second election loss as leader, Hudak tried to hang on as a caretaker but had to resign when his caucus deserted him. Now the candidates vying to succeed him are all trying to outdo each other with tales of how poorly run the Tory party was when Hudak was in charge.
Andrea Horwath
Though she comfortably survived a leadership review in November, the Ontario NDP leader provoked last spring’s vote when she refused to support the Liberals’ budget and wasn’t ready to campaign. No buses, no tour plans, no platform for the longest time. And when the New Democrats produced policy promises, their attempts to appeal to both left and right came across as incoherent. The party kept 21 seats in the legislature but lost three of its traditional strongholds in downtown Toronto and the NDP’s left wing called for Horwath’s head.
Teresa Piruzza
The Windsor politician served three years at Queen’s Park, taking over Liberal Sandra Pupatello’s seat in 2011 but losing it in 2014. Winning her seat by a comfortable margin in a rough year for the Liberals, when their majority government was reduced to a minority, she turned around and lost it – the one cabinet minister to be defeated – when the party’s fortunes improved overall. The longtime political aide and city official got a job with Chrysler afterward.
Randall Denley
The Citizen columnist took his second run at incumbent Bob Chiarelli in Ottawa West-Nepean, a seat the Progressive Conservatives dearly wanted to take away from the Liberals. After two years of campaigning, numerous appearances with leader Tim Hudak, and a major role in defining what his party would stand for if elected, Denley did worse the second time than the first, dropping his share of the vote from 39 per cent to 33 per cent.
David Livingston
The chief of staff to ex-premier Dalton McGuinty left a long career in banking to first run the province’s infrastructure agency, then become the top aide to Ontario’s top politician. He had a reputation as a no-nonsense, get-things-done guy. In the spring, it emerged he was the target of an OPP investigation, with police believing he’d arranged for an outsider to get into protected government computers to try to delete potentially important records of government decisions about cancelling gas generating stations in Oakville and Mississauga.
Katherine Hobbs
A private-sector manager, literary festival organizer and international aid volunteer, Hobbs defeated Christine Leadman to become the councillor for Kitchissippi ward in 2010. After four hard years of trying to manage controversial development projects and the effects of light-rail construction, which she couldn’t stop and couldn’t sell to her constituents, she herself was routed at the ballot box by community-association leader Jeff Leiper.
Peter Clark
The former mayor of Cumberland and regional chairman came back for an encore in local politics as the councillor for Rideau-Rockcliffe. Crusty and sometimes cranky in manner, Clark’s long memory and a fearlessness born of experience made him a competent councillor. But he wasn’t good enough to repeat his narrow 2010 win. His campaign limited by failing energy, Clark fell to challenger Tobi Nussbaum in October.
Jim Watson
Fresh off a huge election win, the mayor of Ottawa began his second term with a nasty spat with the National Capital Commission over his signature plan to extend light-rail service to the west and southwest. To live within the budget set by the proudly parsimonious mayor, the track will have to use NCC-controlled land along the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway and the city has spent years failing to convince the commission that the project can be done the way the NCC wants. At the end of November, a war of words between the city and the feds was getting out of hand until Watson sat down with federal minister John Baird and the two agreed to at least stop poking one another for 100 days and see if they could get something worked out.
Marcel Guibord
Voters in Clarence-Rockland took a broom to their city council, ousting Guibord as mayor and three councillors (after four others chose not to run for re-election). Guibord is facing breach-of-trust charges over an alleged plot to dump the city manager, which he says he’ll contest, and ran for re-election amid allegations that he’d moved council meetings to another venue to dodge protesters. He lost to challenger Guy Desjardins by a margin of well over two to one.
Olivia Chow
After more than eight years as an MP, the well-known spouse of the late NDP leader Jack Layton resigned from Parliament in March to run for mayor of Toronto. With a topnotch team of experienced campaign staff, she was expected to give the behaviourally challenged Rob Ford a run for his money. Instead, she proved as inspiring as a bowl of jello, and finished third – behind both winner John Tory and candidate Doug Ford, who had jumped in to uphold the family, uh, name, after his seriously ill incumbent brother withdrew. As one CBC commentator wrote: “It was Olivia Chow’s race to lose. And on election night, she indeed lost it.” Yup.
Rob Ford
Ford Nation was crushed when Rob Ford withdrew from the mayoral race after being diagnosed with a tumour. The normally blustery, highly divisive politician struggled gamely through treatment but was simply not well enough to defend his record. Nonetheless, he still ran for city council in Ward 2, and won, setting him up for a potential run at the mayoralty in 2018. “If my health holds up, my name will be on the ballot,” Ford told CP24 recently. “I’m plotting it as we speak.” Which, if it happened, would make the rest of the city losers, too.
Dean Del Mastro
The now-former Peterborough MP maintained his innocence until the bitter end after being charged by Elections Canada with falsifying election documents and knowingly exceeding the spending limit in the 2008 federal election. In October, he was convicted of violating the Elections Act, and now awaits sentencing. Even as he delivered his teary resignation speech to the House of Commons, Del Mastro still argued he was an innocent man, and is working to have a judge reopen his defence so he can introduce new evidence. Meanwhile, cousin David Del Mastro is charged with trying to dodge campaign contribution limits by funnelling $22,000 to the Del Mastro campaign through employees of his Mississauga electrical contracting company.
Michael Sona
The 26-year-old former campaign worker was sentenced to nine months in provincial jail (with an additional 12 months of probation) for his role in the deceptive 2011 federal election-day robocalls. He’s currently on bail appealing his sentence. (The Crown is also appealing, but for a longer one.) Sona was found guilty in August in the scheme to send misleading calls to more than 7,000 voters in Guelph, Ont., sending them to the wrong polling locations. Sona’s actions, said Judge Gary Hearn, “represent a complete disregard for our political system and its values.”
Shawn Atleo
The smooth-talking national chief of the Assembly of First Nations was comfortably into his second term when aboriginal leaders started attacking him for backing Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s planned legislation on aboriginal education, which would have handed control of on-reserve education to First Nations, but also imposed certain standards. The government had promised to provide $1.9 billion in funding, and Atleo had signed on to the whole deal. In May, when he realized the chiefs had very different views, he resigned. Also taking a hit in the controversy: First Nations children, since the bill was then put on ice and the AFN and government haven’t had meaningful talks about it since.
Alison Redford
Few politicians have plunged quite as steeply from their perch as the Alberta premier. Her downfall began with revelations that the Alberta government had covered the $45,000 cost for a trip to attend Nelson Mandela’s funeral in late 2013, including a privately chartered flight to return to Alberta. Then there were revelations about the travel of her daughter and a friend aboard government planes. With more details emerging of her flagrant spending, Redford resigned as premier in March. In August, she resigned as an MLA, just before a damning auditor general’s report was to be released, offering even more details of her profligate ways.
Pauline Marois
Few politicians can say they were brought down by a single fist-pump, but the onetime Parti Quebecois “minister of everything” can claim that honour. Marois won a minority government in 2012, and called the 2014 election with a lead in the polls. But that was before her gushy reaction to rookie candidate Pierre Karl Peladeau’s blunt declaration, at his campaign launch, that he wanted to “make Quebec a country.” Cue energetic fist-pump. Soon, Marois was daydreaming aloud about what the currency and borders would look like in this new country. Come April, the PQ had lost the election, Marois had lost her seat, and the federalists were again safely in power in Quebec City.
Mario Beaulieu
Mario who? Precisely our point. If anyone could top Marois for ill-timed enthusiasm on sovereignty, this was the guy. Beaulieu became leader of the next-to-invisible Bloc Quebecois in June, braying about putting Quebec independence above all else. He promptly proceeded to alienate respected former Bloc leaders, riding executive officers and his own caucus: Two of the Bloc’s four MPs have since ditched the party. In a further indignity, Peladeau (see Marois disaster, above) told a meeting of PQ youth that the Bloc had served only to justify federalism. His later retraction did nothing to enhance Beaulieu’s crumbling credibility. Oh, and he still doesn’t have a seat in the House of Commons.
David Bertschi
You just can’t fight the party, it seems, though Bertschi hasn’t given up in his spat over the Liberal nomination in Ottawa-Orleans. The lawyer and former federal Liberal leadership candidate originally had the green light to run for that nomination. Then the Liberals wrote to inform him that his “green light” had gone red because of unpaid debts from the 2013 leadership bid and his alleged failure to tell a candidate screening committee about a past lawsuit. Some say it was all a plot to clear the way for “star” candidate Andrew Leslie, a retired general. Bertschi is now talking legal action, while Leslie is preparing his speaking notes for the 2015 election.
Two unknown NDP MPs, and two known Liberals
Everyone, it seems, loses in this nasty tale of misconduct and harassment on the Hill. On Nov. 5, Justin Trudeau abruptly announced he was suspending MPs Massimo Pacetti and Scott Andrews from the Liberal caucus – and also suspending their re-election campaigns – over allegations of “misconduct” by other MPs, who were quickly identified as being New Democrats, but whose names were not revealed. As details emerged of the allegations (both men deny any wrongdoing), the lid began curling back on the Hill’s ugly “power” culture – with some staffers hurling accusations at their bosses, and party leaders dancing around the subject of whether they had acted precipitously or not quickly enough on the various accusations. And, it was revealed, no coherent policies existed to tackle such problems.
Dimitri Soudas
Soudas was once one of the “boys in short pants” – as independent MP Brent Rathgeber likes to call young-uns in the Prime Minister’s Office who wield considerable power with little real-life experience. The PM’s onetime chief spokesman went off to a plum job with the Canadian Olympic Committee, then resurfaced as executive director of the Conservative party in late 2013. But in March, he was forced out of that job after he became personally involved in the nomination battle of his fiancée, Eve Adams, in Oakville North-Burlington. Soudas defended his interference, saying he was “madly in love” and needed to “stand with the woman whose hand I’ll be holding when I’m an old fart.” Romantic, but none of it has done Adams’ political future any good.
查看原文...
