Possibly Warner Should Think About Running For Mayor

The message seems to get lost on political activists that if you want your option to be picked up you have to play the game the way coach says and if you are not willing to do that then you get sent down to the minors. In retrospect maverick politicians do a disservice to their potential constituents when they campaign on an agenda that has no chance of being adopted by the party.

Harper's team dumps city-friendly candidate
TheStar.com - Canada - Harper's team dumps city-friendly candidate

November 01, 2007
Susan Delacourt
Ottawa Bureau

OTTAWA – The federal Conservatives have ousted their candidate for Toronto Centre, 43-year-old international-trade lawyer Mark Warner, and he says it's because he wanted to play up urban and social issues that are at odds with the master Conservative campaign strategy.

"We've had, for a number of months, a series of differences between our campaign and the national campaign, over the degree to which I could run a campaign that would focus on the kind of issues that matter in a downtown urban riding," Warner told the Star.

Conservative officials have been actively resisting Warner's emphasis on housing, health care and cities issues, he said, even blocking him from participating in a Star forum on poverty earlier this year and pointedly removing from his campaign literature a reference to the 2006 international conference on AIDS in Toronto – which Warner attended but Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not.

Don Plett, Conservative party president, signed the letter that was delivered to Warner this week precisely as the government was unveiling its mini-budget on Tuesday afternoon.

Plett said yesterday he didn't want to elaborate on the decision to oust Warner, for privacy reasons. However, Plett didn't argue with Warner's characterization of the dispute.

"Well let me just simply say this; that in a national campaign, that is exactly what it is – a national campaign. There are certain things that we expect all of our candidates to do in a national campaign," Plett told the Star yesterday.

"You're telling me Mr. Warner has admitted himself that he wasn't prepared to go along with that, then I think he's answered his own question. But I'm not suggesting that. I'm simply saying that we can't discuss the reasons why. If Mr. Warner says that is the reason, then he's, I guess, telling everybody `I wasn't prepared to go along with the rules.'"

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