Race to the PQ: Guy Nantel is suspended for two days

The candidate for the leadership of the Parti québécois, Guy Nantel

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July 3, 2020 20h39

Updated to 21h55

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Race to the PQ: Guy Nantel is suspended for two days

The canadian Press

Guy Nantel, one of the candidates for leadership of the Parti québécois (PQ), was suspended Friday for two days as a result of non-compliance with the rules.

The party accuses the team Nantel have sent an email directly to a large number of members to apply for funding, confirmed to The canadian Press, an internal source close to the folder.

The candidates must go through the training policy, if they wish to communicate with members, in order to avoid that they are flooded with emails from candidates.

There has been a reminder of the rule during a teleconference on Thursday morning, which was attended by representatives of all teams and the director-general of the party, given that there were already tickets, has learned The canadian Press.

Shortly after, the team of Guy Nantel has nonetheless contravened the regulations of the election. The party has therefore imposed a sanction symbolic, but that does much more poorly in terms of perceptions.

“The candidate will no longer be displayed on the web site of the Parti Québécois for a period of 48 hours,” said the policy-formation in a message sent to the other candidates in the leadership.

“He is still a candidate and still participates in the race,” insisted Lucas Medernach, a spokesman for the PQ, while refusing to confirm the reasons for the decision.

“Far-fetched”, said the team Nantel

The team of Guy Nantel says not to put the regulation in question, but rather the interpretation that is made. According to them, nothing prevents them to communicate with supporters of the candidate, including members.

“If I write to my former university colleagues and I send 300 emails, and that on it there are 25 who are members, this is not banned and this is what we do now”, was illustrated by Martin Beaudry, a spokesman for the team of the candidate.

They do not understand why “this time, it is more correct”, so that an identical situation occurred before the pandemic and that the president of the election of the time, Agnès Maltais, who is “not a beginner”, had given them reason.

The team Nantel asserts that the list of members provided by the PQ does not include e-mail addresses and that, therefore, they are unable to identify the names to remove them from their own list.

They claim to have made several steps to comply with the interpretation of the rules made by the party, in particular by proposing that the party removed from their email list people who are members and even hire costs their team an outside firm to do this job in a neutral way. “It also, it does not interest”, noted Mr. Beaudry.

The penalty “sends a message about the integrity of our candidate so that we did nothing wrong”, has launched Mr. Beaudry in an interview with The canadian Press. “It is to tell the world that Guy Nantel does not comply with the rules”, he added.

The PQ is without a chief since the resignation of Jean-François Lisée in the evening the general elections of 1 October 2018, when the training was received to a historic defeat. It is the member for Matane, quebec, and Pascal Bérubé, who assumes the acting.

Le Soleil