Flin Flon MLA Clarence Pettersen is mulling a run as an independent after NDP members stripped him of the party nomination for the next election.
“I haven’t decided whether I’m going to run or not,” he told The Reminder on Wednesday.
“I went into this not first and foremost to represent the NDP. I went in this and my main job is to represent this constituency.”
Pettersen said he will be taking time to ponder his political future and expects to announce in February whether he will seek re-election as an independent candidate.
“I’ll listen to the people,” he said. “If the people want me to run, fine. If people don’t want me to run, that’s fine.”
Pettersen, a one-term MLA, lost the NDP nomination for the April 2016 election to Tom Lindsey, a long-time union activist who lives in Flin Flon.
Results were announced last week, with 269 party members casting ballots. Lindsey’s margin of victory was not made public.
Pettersen said he received many calls about losing the nomination on Wednesday morning, when the news appeared in The Reminder.
He said he was “very disappointed” with the nomination process.
“I don’t agree with it, and could the premier have done something about it? I guess he could have,” Pettersen said.
“I mean, if you ask anybody about incumbents, generally you don’t have to go through this. I’ve got friends in the [Progressive] Conservative Party where [leader] Brian Pallister says, ‘All incumbents, you don’t have to worry about it.’”
Does the NDP have the same policy? Pettersen said that depends on who the premier is.
“If you go back in time when there was other premiers, there was different responses to the same situation,” he said.
“I don’t know if Greg [Selinger] could have done that. …That’s up to him, you would have to ask him.”
Asked whether he himself asked Selinger to intervene, Pettersen said: “He was well aware of the situation.”
Pettersen reiterated his feeling, first expressed shortly after losing the party nomination, that although the process was legal, he did not view it as democratic.
“There’s 10,000 possible voters in our constituency,” he said. “And if they vote against me and don’t want me, that’s fine. I’m a big boy and I don’t mind losing. But when I didn’t have a chance to fight, that’s when I get upset.”
Pettersen said the nomination race started when three party members wanted to “overthrow me” because he did not support Thompson MLA Steve Ashton in the NDP leadership race earlier this year.
He said “everything’s legal, everything’s right” when it comes to the nomination, but he still does not like how it was handled and felt betrayed.
As for Lindsey, he is stressing the importance of jobs and resolving problems on First Nations as he prepares to carry the NDP banner into the April 19 election.
He told the Canadian Press that the nomination race came down to who could best represent local interests.
“Obviously, I think I could do a better job. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have run,” Lindsey said.
Pettersen said he resents that comment.
“I put in four years of my life [as MLA] and I think if you compare whoever represented this constituency in the past, I’ve done pretty damn well,” he said. “We’re going to be driving on a new highway. We’ve got a new ER coming up. We’ve got a new emergency station, new school residence in Cranberry [Portage].”
Pettersen said that two or three weeks ago he came close to announcing his retirement from politics at the end of his term, for health reasons and on the advice of his daughters, who suggested retirement.
“Believe me, I thought long and hard about that,” he said. “And I’m still thinking long and hard about that. I don’t like the process, like I’m telling you, and so now I have to decide, where do I go from here?”
With Lindsey and Flin Flon city councillor Leslie Beck in as the NDP and Liberal MLA candidates, the Progressive Conservatives are the only major party without a declared candidate in the constituency.
In The Pas constituency, the Tories are running a well-known candidate in Doug Lauvstad, executive director of the Northern Manitoba Sector Council, an association of the major industrial players in the region, including Hudbay.
Lauvstad is also chairman of the Northern Health Region’s board of governors.
