As B.C. Conservative leader John Cummins celebrated the John van Dongen defection from the B.C. Liberals Monday, one question from the news media gave him pause.
Was it not Cummins's position that an elected member, like van Dongen, who crosses the floor, should first resign and seek re-election under his or her new choice of political labels?
"I'm not aware of that," replied Cummins. He'd heard that view attributed to him but "that was news to me that that was my position." Not his position in the past? "Not that I'm aware of."
But his awareness began to shift when he was reminded that as a federal MP, he'd voted for a measure that would have automatically forced a byelection any time that a sitting member abandoned one party and crossed to another.
That ring a bell?
"You may be correct in that," Cummins told Mike Smyth, the columnist for the Province newspaper, who'd raised the matter. "It was one of those issues that had slipped my mind at the time. But you may be correct."
Even so, Cummins maintained that van Dongen, the four-term B.C. Liberal MLA, was under no obligation to resign and run for re-election before taking up the Conservative brand.
So his position on crossing the floor was a matter of convenience, depending on whether the member was
crossing to his party?
"No, it's not been a huge issue for me, the issue of a member resigning. When you are looking at an election 14 months from today, I don't think that that requirement would make a whole lot of sense."
Fair point. But that was not the position expressed in the bill that he
supported in the federal Parliament.
Next day, Cummins weighed in with a clarifying email to several members of the press gallery. Back in November 2005, he had indeed voted "yes" on second reading of a members-who-cross-the-floor bill introduced by Nova Scotia New Democrat Peter Stoffer.
But that did not necessarily mean he was fully in agreement with the bill's requirements that floor-crossers first
submit to a byelection.
"A vote on second reading to send a matter to committee should not necessarily be interpreted as support for a bill," wrote Cummins. "In this case Mr. Stoffer was and is a friend. His mother was a constituent and, according to Mr. Stoffer, a supporter. My vote was a courtesy vote to allow a friend's motion to get before committee."
At which point, a bit of context is in order. The Stoffer bill did not pass but it did attract the support of a number of federal Conservatives because of one floor-crossing in particular.
A few months earlier, Belinda Stronach, elected as a Conservative in 2004, had crossed to the Liberals in a dramatic switch that rescued the then government of prime minister Paul Martin from a pending non-confidence vote.
The switch came as a particular embarrassment to Cummins, one of the few B.C. MPs to support Stronach in her failed bid for the party leadership against Stephen Harper.
"It certainly caught a lot of people, me included, off guard," he said at the time. "I find it more than passing strange, considering that she was one of those who railed against the government and its spending like drunken sailors."
Still there was Cummins this week, insisting via email that his vote back in 2005 should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the view, expressed in the bill, that a floor-crossing should automatically be followed by a byelection.
"I don't believe I ever publicly expressed an opinion on the matter of floor-crossing," he wrote, adding "sorry for any confusion my memory lapse may have caused."
Sorry to say, Cummins's memory would appear to have failed him a second time. For as it happens, Smyth elicited a view from him on the matter of recruiting MLAs to cross the floor to the B.C. Conservatives a year ago, during an interview on radio station CKNW.
Cummins indicated that he had no time for any of the B.C. Liberals. "These guys were in there right from the get-go," he said. "I don't find any of these guys in that Liberal side to be commendable. They are certainly not the kind of people that we want to represent us."
What about Bill Bennett, who'd denounced then Premier Gordon Campbell and switched to sit as an independent? Was he talking to him? "No," replied Cummins. "I'm not talking to anybody."
What about Vicki Huntington, the longtime federal Conservative elected as an independent in Delta South in 2009? Cummins had been talking to her, but not with a view to securing a floor-crossing to his party before an election.
"My advice to Vicki was simple," he confided. "Vicki, you were elected as an independent. The people expect you to remain an independent to the next election. If before the next election you see that you would like to run as a Conservative, then I think that before the election you announce that in the next election you'll be running as a
Conservative."
So stick with the label that got you elected until you are ready to go back to the voters to get re-elected under a new label. "Consistent way to deal with it," he said, adding "that's what the people expect."
But not precisely what John Cummins expects, leastways not any more.
