Peggy Nash the candidate to watch in NDP race

Barbara Yaffe, Opinion, The Vancouver Sun:

Keep your eye on Peggy Nash. In a crowded field of New Democratic Party leadership candidates, she stands out.

It is partly because she’s smart and as she herself says, has “skin like a rhinoceros.” But it’s also because she exudes a calm moderation that would serve her well in reaching out to voters who aren’t NDPers.

She has been compared to Margaret Thatcher in her trim, proper appearance but not, of course, in her ideology. And she has kind words for Stephen Harper. “I found him easy to talk to,” she says, recalling an exchange she had with the PM shortly after NDP leader Jack Layton died.

Fluent in French, Nash uses the noun une rassembleuse to describe her ability to bring people together. Having her political base in Toronto, where she’s MP for Parkdale-High Park, won’t be a disadvantage in building on the party’s Quebec support, she insists. “I haven’t heard Quebecers say the next leader has to be from Quebec. I have heard them say they expect the next leader to be bilingual and open to Quebec’s culture and institutions.”

Nash, like her party, opposes both the Enbridge Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines, and would cut public subsidies to oilsands companies.

She favours a global financial-transaction tax — strongly opposed by the Harper Government — and, while generally supporting balanced budgets, during periods of slow growth would like to see strategic public investments in such things as transit.

“I’m not talking about building hockey rinks and gazebos, but investing in targeted infrastructure that would act as economic generators,” she said.

Continune reading here.