Saturday, March 14, 2009

Ignatieff woos Francophones, will reinstate Court Challenges Program

LeDroit reports on interim Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's efforts to reach out to the Francophone and Acadian communities, reporting on a recent speech to the Francophone community in Emburn, Ontario where he promised to reinstate the Court Challenges Progam cancelled by the Conservatives.

Here's the original article in French and here's a Google Translate version in English, which incidentally, while certainly not perfect, seems to do a far better job than Babelfish.

Judging by those polling numbers yesterday that show the Liberals taking ground from the Conservatives in Quebec, pushing them to a distant third, his effors may be working.

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4 comments:

berlynn said...

But still, I wish someone would take Ignatieff out of my misery...

DivaRachel said...

ABC,
I don't want to burst your bubble, but Stephane Dion made it clear to us Franco-Ontariens that he would repeal the Programme de Contestation Judiciaire.

Somehow, GPR (Glengarry Prescott Russell)and neighbour Ottawa-Orleans voted more conservative than the previous election. GPR has a huge deficit.

Methinks this issue is not going to be enough to win these winnable ridings, as it was not enough for Iggy's predecessor.

Jeff said...

Rachel, I'm are Stephane also made this promise, I just wanted to emphasize that Michael was making it as well. And I don't think there are any single-issue silver bullets. The Court Challenges Program is also an issue for many other communities, and constituencies.

Mike said...

Jeff, what are your views on this story
out of Quebec?

I agree with what you wrote on this post and up until now I've been impressed with Ignatieff's efforts in Quebec, particularly his overtures towards Charest and the Provincial Liberals.

This to me seems like a step background and I hope Iggy slaps down Coderre over this - I don't think it's just me who would get shivers over ADQ members running under our banner (in my view they are worse than soft separatists - LaPierre wasn't great but at least he wasn't offensive and intolerant or an extreme libertarian and Dumont basically wanted de facto seperatism anyway).

Hopefully this is just ANOTHER case of Coderre shooting off his mouth saying things that aren't actually party policy, because things were going EXCELLENT in Quebec up until now.

The PLQ and ADQ HATE each other and I think we're better cosying up to the former who were winners in the recent Quebec election, than the latter who were HUGE losers.

What do you think Jeff?