{"id":70193,"date":"2017-02-10T13:44:41","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T13:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/do-you-think-kellie-leitch-should-have-her-own-party-trudeau-asks-voter-upset-over-electoral-reform.html"},"modified":"2017-02-10T13:44:41","modified_gmt":"2017-02-10T13:44:41","slug":"do-you-think-kellie-leitch-should-have-her-own-party-trudeau-asks-voter-upset-over-electoral-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/political\/do-you-think-kellie-leitch-should-have-her-own-party-trudeau-asks-voter-upset-over-electoral-reform.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Do you think Kellie Leitch should have her own party?&#8217; Trudeau asks voter upset over electoral reform"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pointed to Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch\u00a0Thursday\u00a0to argue that one of the reasons he abandoned his electoral reform promise was to prevent politicians with &#8220;fringe&#8221; views from gaining the balance of power in Parliament.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Do you think that\u00a0Kellie\u00a0Leitch\u00a0should have her own party?&#8221; Trudeau said Thursday in Iqaluit. &#8220;Because if you have a party that represents the fringe voices\u00a0\u2026 or the periphery of our perspectives and they hold 10, 15, 20 seats in the House, they end up holding the balance of power.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The prime minister was walking through a crowd when Robyn Campbell approached him to ask why he killed a campaign promise made during the 2015 election, when he said that vote would be the last decided by the first-past-the-post system.<\/p>\n<p><span>&#8220;Proportional representation in any form would be bad for Canada,&#8221; Trudeau responded.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Campbell, visibly taken aback, she said she &#8220;very respectfully&#8221; disagreed. <\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/politics\/grenier-pollcast-wherry-omalley-1.3973920\"><span><span class=\"scayt-misspell-word\">The Pollcast: How electoral reform fell apart<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/politics\/electoral-reform-ndp-apology-1.3972366\"><span><span class=\"scayt-misspell-word\">NDP wants Liberal to apologize for dropping electoral reform<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/politics\/gould-first-past-the-post-1.3970658\"><span><span class=\"scayt-misspell-word\">With electoral reform off the table, minister defends first-past-the-post<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Trudeau pointed to federal Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch as an example of a &#8220;fringe voice&#8221; that could hold the balance of power in Parliament under proportional representation.<\/p>\n<p>The Ontario MP has sparked debate across the country by arguing in her leadership platform that new immigrants should be screened for &#8220;Canadian values&#8221; at the border.<\/p>\n<p><span>In making his argument, Trudeau told Campbell: &#8220;The strength of our democracy is that we have to pull people into big parties that have all the diversity of Canada and we learn to get along.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>She told the prime minister she is not a strategic voter, and what she does care about is &#8220;voting for the person I want to vote for.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>NDP partly to blame?<\/h2>\n<p><span>Trudeau said he prefers the ranked ballot system, where voters list their choices in order of preference. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Ironically, this system is being used by the Conservative Party to choose its new leader from a field of 14 candidates.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>  <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/64ad1_iqaluittrudeau.JPG\" alt=\"IqaluitTrudeau\" width=\"100%\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"figure-caption\">Iqaluit resident Bethany Scott wanted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to know how disappointed she was in his government&#8217;s decision to abandon its electoral reform initiative. (Nick Murray\/CBC News)<\/p>\n<p><span>Trudeau also laid some blame at the feet of the New Democrats for the death of his electoral reform plans.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>&#8220;The fact that the NDP was absolutely locked into proportional representation, no matter what, at any cost, meant there was no give and take possible on that,&#8221; he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The conversation ended amicably, with the prime minister saying electoral reform was an issue &#8220;we just weren&#8217;t going to be able to move on.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Campbell told Trudeau she appreciated the one-on-one chat and acknowledged that the politics of electoral reform are challenging.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pointed to Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch\u00a0Thursday\u00a0to argue that one of the reasons he abandoned his electoral reform promise was to prevent politicians with &#8220;fringe&#8221; views from gaining the balance of power in Parliament.\u00a0 &#8220;Do you think that\u00a0Kellie\u00a0Leitch\u00a0should have her own party?&#8221; Trudeau said Thursday in Iqaluit. &#8220;Because if you have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70194,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-70193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political","tag-political"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}