Turmel's Turmoil

So, the NDP's interim leader was a member of the Bloc. And now she's not. Partisan hate machine, commence!

News that interim NDP Leader Nycole Turmel was a member of the Bloc Québécois until this January hasn't exactly gone unnoticed, even if it was leaked in the doldrums of summer following a long weekend. In The Globe and Mail, Robert Silver, a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party, wastes no time in heaping on the scorn on Turmel's about-face, saying that “if the NDP’s biggest challenge is to demonstrate competence ... nothing about today’s revelations should give any of us (in English Canada, at least) any confidence that they are even close.” Silver rightly calls on Turmel to come clean with why she split with Bloc back in January (besides “The NDP gave me a better offer, so...”) so that the public may judge if she has indeed been a federalist all along, as she says is the case. He also asks for the NDP to go through the process with all their MPs, which smells ever so faintly of a witch hunt.

The ever-reliable Aaron Wherry of Maclean's provides a nice breakdown of how the news has changed throughout the course of the day, from initial shock and feigned outrage to realization that this issue came up during Turmel's campaign a few times, Jack Layton knew about it, and that she rebuffed an offer from Gilles Duceppe to run for the Bloc because she wasn't too keen on the whole sovereignty thing. Which, gasp, suggests, to us at least, that Turmel's views can't be pigeonholed to a single party? That she might be capable of nuance? That, if we can take her at her word, she might have just been doing a favour for a friend running for the Bloc, kind of like buying a crate of oranges so that some friend's kid can take a band trip to Florida? Unthinkable! It's almost like finding out that the prime minister would believe that one province (not saying which one) would do better off to erect a firewall to protect itself from the grasp of Ottawa. But it's not like that would ever happen, right?

CBC's workhorse, Kady O'Malley, does some due diligence on the file and wonders just how Turmel's membership with the Bloc wouldn't have been caught in the vetting process, especially in recent weeks ahead of her ascension to the leadership. It's a bit of a face-palm moment for the NDP, no doubt, so O'Malley kindly urges the party to make sure there aren't legions of Manchurian Candidate-like Bloc supporters poisoning their caucus. Everyone can hope this will die down if Jack Layton returns as scheduled in September, but if “she does end up leading the charge on behalf of Her Majesty's Official Opposition when the House returns this fall, it seems all but inevitable that Turmel's past dalliance with the Bloc Quebecois – as well as any seeming separatist sympathies, past or present, on the part of other rookie NDP MPs – will be dredged up whenever the opportunity presents itself.” In that case, so much for the death of that “reckless coalition of separatists and socialists” meme.