OTTAWA—The pre-election war for votes between the New Democrats and Greens continues to intensify as news of mass defections from one party to the other turned to denials, condemnations of racism and accusations of poor leadership on Thursday.And the man at the centre of it all, a former NDP executive who joined his mother in heralding an exodus of failed New Brunswick provincial candidates from the NDP to the Greens, is refusing to explain how the tally of defectors was really — according to a late-day statement from the Greens — barely half as big as he originally claimed.Throughout the day Thursday, the NDP and Greens thrashed each other for engaging in unsavoury politics amidst the fallout of an announcement Tuesday that 14 failed NDP candidates in the 2018 New Brunswick election had defected from their party to support both the provincial and federal Greens.Speaking in Montreal, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh declared that this amounted to a “fiasco” of false information, and called on the federal Green Leader, Elizabeth May, to clarify what really happened. Moments later, Singh’s party published joint statements from five of the supposed defectors, who denied that they ever agreed to flip from the NDP to the Greens.“This is a fiasco that the Green party started. They put out a list of people, they spread some false information, and I think really the question has to go to them,” Singh told reporters in Montreal.“Really, it speaks to an act of desperation, maybe, by Ms. May and the Green party,” he said.Later, after declining to respond to the NDP’s claims earlier in the day, the federal Greens put out there own statement that said it was really only eight former candidates — not 14 — that agreed to defect from the NDP. That corresponded with what Marco Morency, the executive director of the provincial Greens in New Brunswick, told the Star earlier in the day.The statement also ...
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