Niagara, Ontario’s Malcolm Allen Receives Honourable Mention On CBC’s The National

A Brief One from Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

December 18^th, 2015

By some accounts from local NDP insiders, Malcolm Allen was feeling pretty depressed about his loss in last October’s federal election. And rightfully so given his own solid record as an MPP for the federal Riding of Welland, as a

Former MP for the federal riding of Welland, Ontario, Malcolm Allen.

parliamentarian for Canada, and as critic and deputy critic for everything from skills, training and apprenticeships to agriculture and food security in NDP leader Tom Mulcair’s shadow cabinet.

But the two-term New Democratic Party MP – and, until two months ago, the only member of the NDP in Niagara, Ontario to serve in government at the federal level – might take some solace from the fact that he received Canada-wide praise for his years of service on CBC TV’s National news program this past Thursday, December 18^th.

The praise came during the program’s weekly ‘At Issue’ panel of reporters following federal politics who this time were looking at the high points, low points and things in between that unfolded during Canada’s 2015 election. And it came when the program’s anchor, Peter Mansbridge, asked members of the panel who comes to mind for them, of all those were defeated in the election, as a real loss for parliament and the country.

On that one, panelist Althia Raj, the Ottawa Bureau chief for Huffington Post Canada, named Allen as someone she described as a nice, relatively quiet-spoken MP by Ottawa standards who, nevertheless, worked hard and got some good things accomplished for the Canadian people.

Those good things, said Raj, included Allen winning support across partisan lines for successfully getting rid of charging the Goods & Services Tax (GST) on the sale of poppies during the weeks leading up to Reembrace Day so the money could be used by Royal Canadian Legion branches across Canada for services for veterans.

They also included Allen’s success in getting the parliament to pass a motion that ensures that Karla Homolka, the former wife of convicted killer Paul Bernardo, who serviced 12 years in prison for her part in the murders of St. Catharines teen Kristen French and Burlington area teen Leslie Mahaffy, never receives a pardon for her crimes.

I live in the Welland Riding and it seemed certain when former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper called the election at the end of this past July, that Allen had a very good chance of keeping his seat when the votes were counted on October 19^th. Certainly, I can’t recall anyone I talked to in the riding saying a bad thing about the guy.

But as the weeks of the election rolled on, things happened at the national level that had little or nothing to do with Allen’s good standing in his riding.

First and foremost, the leader of his party, Muclair, who started the election with poll numbers showing he had the best chance of beating Harper and becoming Canada’s next prime minister, ran such a lame campaign that, in the end, he failed to win enough seats to even come in second and retain his party’s official opposition status.

Then there were the surging poll numbers in the final days of the election for Justin Trudeau and his Liberals and a strong Liberal candidate – former Port Colborne mayor Vance Badawey – running in Allen’s riding. Shortly before voting day, Trudeau made a stop in Welland that boosted Badawey’s chances and that proved to be a clear sign of the Liberals’ confidence they could win the riding.

Combine all that with so many people deciding to vote strategically in this election because, first and foremost, they wanted to see the Harper Conservatives ousted by the party that had the best chance of getting the job done. In the last days of the election, I heard a number of people in the Welland Riding saying; ‘I like Malcolm but … .”

So Malcolm Allen lost his seat in the election but it was no small thing that he received honourable mention for his years of elected service on CBC’s national news program.

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