OTTAWA — The Conservative Party launched a "groundless, strategic assault" against the labour movement, the head of Canada’s largest private sector union said Sunday after the Tories accused the NDP of accepting improper sponsorships from trade unions.
Wayne Hanley, the national president of UFCW Canada, issued a press release Sunday evening after The Huffington Post Canada first reported that the Conservative Party had asked Elections Canada to investigate whether the NDP had broken the law by accepting money from unions to advertise at its national convention in Vancouver last June.
The allegations, Hanley said, are "a groundless, strategic assault on the labour movement, and on ordinary Canadians who are fed up with the vicious, partisan politics the Harper Conservatives are so proud of."
Hanley said the Tories are well aware that ads at fair market value are allowed and there was no election law breach.
"There is nothing amiss here,” he said. “UFCW Canada respected every rule and regulation in an open and completely transparent manner. It is cynical timing, so typical of the Conservatives, to launch this smear on working Canadians and their unions on the eve of the annual celebration of the achievements of the labour movement."
Hanley suggested the Tories were reacting to news that support for the NDP was rising following the public outpouring of sympathy after leader Jack Layton’s death from cancer on Aug. 22.
The Conservative Party released a letter to the media Sunday morning that its lawyer Arthur Hamilton had written to Marc Mayrand, the chief electoral officer of Canada on Aug. 31, 2011, requesting a review of what it suggested were inappropriate NDP sponsorships.
