Setting the record straight

Marjaleena Repo, Senior Advisor to David Orchard and Saskatchewan Vice-president for the (former) Progressive Conservative Party, in two recent letters to the editor:
 

Jim Prentice wanted a convention deal with David Orchard too...

Globe and Mail, January 7, 2004

Letter writer Stephen Woollcombe, (“Lord has a chance”, Dec. 27) presents a canard when he writes that Jim Prentice’s “well-organized leadership campaign [lost] out to Peter MacKay only after Mr. Prentice had rejected the same David Orchard deal promptly accepted by Mr. MacKay.”

In fact, Prentice rejected nothing and it was his team of negotiators who breathlessly pursued David Orchard to the very end. I should know as I was, as Orchard's senior advisor and negotiator, at the receiving end of urgent phone calls from the Prentice teams and was present when Scott Brison, on behalf of Jim Prentice, reached David Orchard's cell phone at the very moment when the agreement between Orchard and MacKay was being signed. As proof of this final fervent attempt to get Orchard's support is the phone number for Brison that Orchard scribbled in haste on the actual document that was to be signed. There it sits today, in the original, although for reasons only known to himself — and perhaps Scott Brison — MacKay had it whited out before it was released to the media. (The original is today where it was then: in David Orchard's possession.)

Marjaleena Repo
201 Elm Street
Saskatoon, SK, S7J 0G8
Tel: (306) 244-9724
mrepo@sasktel.net
 

Why call David’s deal with Peter MacKay “offensive”?

Letter to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, not yet published (sent January 6, 2004)

Chronicle-Herald columnist Dan MacDonald in his January 2 column, “Going way out on the limb for 2004”, writes about “the offensive deal he [Peter MacKay] struck with David Orchard on the floor of the PC convention in May,” without explaining what he finds so offensive. Would it be Orchard had MacKay agree to abide by the party’s constitution NOT to attempt any form of coalition or merger with the Canadian Reform Alliance, or agreeing to do a full-fledged in-party review of the FTA.NAFTA, or to put environmental and agricultural policies front and center, or to clean up the headquarters of staff who were obstructing the democratic functioning of the Progressive Conservative Party?

Macdonald needs to tell his readers what he is offended by in this open deal, done without any personal favours demanded by David Orchard, with two leadership candidates signing an agreement and shaking hands on it, in full view of the nation’s media and the convention delegates. Could it be that the columnist is offended because the deal was so unusually clean? (The complete betrayal of this agreement by Peter MacKay only some weeks later is another matter.)

Marjaleena Repo
201 Elm Street
Saskatoon, SK, S7J 0G8
Tel: (306) 244-9724
mrepo@sasktel.net

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