NDP Toronto-Danforth nominee meets party caucus

The Toronto Star:

Ottawa — Craig Scott, 49, was invited to sit in on the NDP caucus strategy meetings Tuesday as the nominated candidate for the party in the upcoming byelection in Toronto—Danforth to fill the vacancy left when Jack Layton died last summer.

“It was . . . a sense of excitement about the possibility, but I am not taking this for granted at all,” Scott, a human rights lawyer and professor at Osgoode Hall said in an interview in Ottawa on Tuesday.

“I’m going to have to work really hard to actually be walking through those doors in another capacity, so excitement, I think, is the right word. If I win the byelection, then it will be more a little bit of a surreal feeling.”

Scott also noted the adjustment to becoming the official Opposition has not been easy for the federal New Democrats — or the media covering them — but watching from the outside he believes the party “has done remarkably well” in both the Commons and the polls considering it had to deal with an unexpected election breakthrough, the death of its leader and the resulting leadership race.

“I wish a wider range of media commentators would recognize what they have accomplished in almost the first year,” Scott said. “I don’t know if the NDP could do anything differently. It’s just waiting for Canada to get used to the idea of the NDP as the official Opposition, because there may not be the full tradition of talking about the NDP in that role and it may still take a few more months of adjustment and it may take until we know our leader.”

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