Some candidates would rather switch than fight

By Janice Tibbetts
Canwest News Service

Briony Penn, a Vancouver Island environmentalist and a Green supporter for more than a decade, decided to run for the Liberals last year. (Jon Murray/Canwest)

OTTAWA - There are disaffected ex-Conservatives running for the Liberals. Former fringe candidates are making a bid to go mainstream. And candidates who once ran under the Green slate are seeking electoral success under other political banners, and vice-versa.

Indeed, party hopping has become a bit of a political sport, with almost two dozen candidates running for federal office in the Oct. 14 election who have jumped ship after running for other parties.

Some would-be MPs have defected to increase their odds of winning, and others because they have had a philosophical split with their former parties or simply because they failed to secure a nomination in contested races, according to an analysis compiled by punditsguide.ca, an independent website that tracks federal election data.

There are also several candidates who have left the political fringe - the Christian Heritage Party, the Canadian Action Party, the Marijuana Party and the Progressive Canadian Party - to run for one of the established parties.

Take the British Columbia riding of Saanich - Gulf Islands, where the Conservative incumbent, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn, is squaring off against three candidates with ties to the Greens.

One of Lunn's opponents is Briony Penn, a Vancouver Island environmentalist and a Green supporter for more than a decade before she decided last year to run for the Liberals. 

Penn says her decision to switch allegiances was inspired by Green Leader Elizabeth May's public endorsements of Liberal Leader Stephane Dion. 

"I was asked by three parties (to run) and I decided it had to go with a party capable of getting power," said Penn. "It's strategic. I did the math and I didn't stand a chance of taking this (riding) as a Green."

Penn is also competing against former Green-turned-New Democrat Julian West. In the western Quebec constituency of Gatineau, former Liberal MP Francoise Boivin, who was defeated in the 2006 general election, is trying her luck this time as an NDP candidate. 

Boivin, a labour lawyer who was a left-leaning Liberal, defected last winter after the Liberals informed her they were seeking a high-profile "star" candidate to parachute into the riding.

"Nobody can accuse me of being a political opportunist because I know it will be a battle," said Boivin, who says she feels more at home with the policies of the NDP than she did with the Liberals, whom she voted against at least five or six times when she was one of their MPs.

Included in the punditsguide.ca analysis of turncoats, conducted for Canwest News Service, are several seasoned incumbents who crossed the floor in the House of Commons, including Tory-turned Liberal Scott Brison, Liberal-turned-Independent-turned-Green Blair Wilson, and Bill Casey, a former Conservative MP who split with his party over the Atlantic Accord and is running in his Nova Scotia riding as an independent.

Also running are Wajid Khan, a former Liberal who jumped to the Conservative benches in 2007; Keith Martin, a former Canadian Alliance MP who crossed to the Liberals; David Orchard, a left-leaning former Conservative who is also running for the Liberals, and Garth Turner, a renegade who was kicked out of the Conservative caucus and joined the Liberals after a brief stint as an independent.

Both Brison and Martin already won election in 2006 under their new banners.