Liberal who lost Montreal riding nomination to Trudeau-linked candidate appeals results
National Post
James Mennie
27 August 2015

John Kenney / Montreal Gazette
Grace Batchoun (right), put a smile on her loss after being defeated for the Liberal party candidacy in Ahuntsic-Cartierville by Mélanie Joly (second from right). 

Grace Batchoun says she doesn’t have a problem with losing. But she does seem to have a problem with pretty near everything else that happened during last Sunday’s vote to choose a Liberal candidate for the federal riding of Ahuntsic-Cartierville. And that could prove to be a problem for Mélanie Joly and, ultimately, Justin Trudeau.

Yesterday morning, Batchoun, a project manager who was one of three opponents contesting Joly for the nomination, announced that she had filed an appeal of the Sunday’s vote. Her challenge is based on several factors, the most worrisome based on simple arithmetic. On Sunday organizers of the vote announced that 2,065 ballots had been cast, including spoiled votes. But according to Batchoun’s reading of the list of ballots cast that she says was provided to her by a Liberal Party official, only 1780 people actually showed up to vote. That it appears there were 285 ballots counted in excess of the number of party members who actually participated is troubling enough. But the fact Batchoun lost the nomination by 194 votes pretty well explains why she has asked the Liberal Party to provide her with a final list identifying those who cast a ballot.

Batchoun also has problems with the fact the vote was carried out at two different venues – the Armenian Community Centre and Collège André-Grasset – despite earlier requests from the three losing candidates to have the voting take place at a single venue. Yesterday Batchoun told The Montreal Gazette her party wasn’t obliged to hear her appeal but hoped nevertheless it would send her the final list to clear things up.

And if the Liberals are as smart as they’ll need to be when it comes to handling the Quebec end of this federal election, they’ll send off that list lickety-split, because it has to be said that anyone who’s been following the events leading up to and following Joly’s being named candidate pretty well had a feeling something like this was going to happen.

That sense of foreboding began to coalesce last Friday, when Radio-Canada reported on allegations the party had delayed the nomination process to allow Joly to catch up with her opponents and that two candidates dropped out to give Joly an easier shot. Then there was the fact it took what seemed an eternity (in fact about six hours) to tabulate three rounds of votes on Sunday, which did little to smooth frayed nerves or still the muttering from some of the riding membership over the fact Joly had been parachuted into the riding by the party brass. And finally there was the decision by at least one defeated candidate not to participate in the traditional, ostensibly enthusiastic endorsement of the winner once the result had been announced.

Her challenge is based on several factors, the most worrisome based on simple arithmetic

Perhaps all of this will prove to be unfortunate misunderstanding, the kind of embarrassing glitch that occurs when the labour intensive process of grassroots democracy is carried out by volunteer and at times inexperienced hands. But whatever actually happened, the Liberals will have to move quickly and credibly if they expect to dissipate the darkening cloud over Joly’s candidacy.

After all, Joly is not some political unknown destined for the backbench if she wins the riding on Oct. 19. She’s the same Mélanie Joly who came out of nowhere in 2013 to place a respectable second to Denis Coderre in the Montreal mayoral race and the same Mélanie Joly who is described as a confidante of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and who worked on his campaign for that leadership.

She’s also the Mélanie Joly who will have to take on incumbent Maria Mourani, a former Bloc Quebecois MP turned NDP candidate who, while she may possess some political weaknesses of her own, nevertheless enjoys the advantage of having represented the riding for the past nine years.

It’s clear Joly will face a tough, seven-week campaign, and the quicker the Liberal brass who parachuted her in to Ahuntsic-Cartierville clear up questions over Sunday’s vote, the less time she’ll have to spend being dogged by questions from within her own party over whether she should be campaigning at all.


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