The executive of the Toronto area Eglinton-Lawrence Ontario New Democratic Party (ONDP) riding association has issued a statement unanimously opposing the decision of the party not to allow their President, Sam Kaplun to run for the party's nomination in the upcoming provincial election.
They say they are "are deeply troubled" by the move and call it a "grave error".
According to the statement he was barred by the party for alleged "inappropriate conduct" on social media, though they claim that he was only provided with one seemingly minor example of such conduct.
The statement goes on to say:
There are a great number of structural problems with the Ontario NDP’s candidate nomination process that have unfairly impacted Sam’s candidacy, and that of many others, including: arbitrary, unintelligible, and inconsistent vetting standards; unwillingness from the central campaign to allow candidates to defend perceived controversies; a complete lack of regular communication between candidate search and prospective candidates; no right for rejected candidates or their riding association to appeal or litigate vetting decisions; no input from riding associations on the vetting of prospective candidates. We remain committed to combating these issues, and continue to fight for increased transparency and democracy within our party.
The full statement can be found at Eglinton—Lawrence NDP Statement on the Rejection of Sam Kaplun.pdf as well as below.
As regular readers of The Left Chapter know, the NDP and ONDP both have a long history of using dubious and undemocratic tactics when it comes to nomination battles that range from ghosting candidates as they did federally to former union leader Sid Ryan and others in the lead up to the 2019 election, disallowing potential candidacies as they have many times including to Paul Manly who went on to be a Green Party MP and appearing to rig nomination fights as was alleged with the federal nomination in Parkdale in 2019 and Adam Giambrone in a 2013 by-election provincially in Ontario.
We looked at other recent examples in 2021 in the pieces ONDP accused of being up to its old anti-democratic tricks and ONDP up to its old Kafkaesque anti-democratic tricks again.
Full statement:
