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Liberals may not be keen on allowing pot activist to run in Vancouver riding

Jodie Emery: Liberal party dismissive of my nomination

You might think Jodie Emery would be welcomed as a star candidate for the Liberal party in next October’s scheduled federal election.

The Vancouver marijuana activist is young, articulate, telegenic and her work to legalize pot is in sync with the Liberals’ policy on the issue.

But you would be wrong. The Liberals seem to be nervous that the 30-year-old wife of Prince of Pot Marc Emery might become their candidate in Vancouver East, which normally is an NDP stronghold but may be in play with the planned retirement of longtime MP Libby Davies.

Evidence of that nervousness seems to be manifest in an email that CBC News reported was sent to some of her supporters from a Liberal worker in Ottawa stressing the party had no affiliation with the Emerys and it did not endorse the couple’s planned cross-country speaking tour.

Marc Emery, a high-profile pot advocate, was released from U.S. federal prison last year after serving more than four years for shipping marijuana seeds by mail to customers in the United States. He agreed to a five-year term after losing an extradition fight. He was eligible to serve part of his term in Canada, but the Conservative government refused permission.

In an interview Tuesday with Yahoo Canada News, Jodie Emery said the problem stemmed from incorrect media reports Trudeau had wooed her to run and that she was the preferred candidate in the riding.

“That wasn’t true, so from the get-go the Liberals have been accused of choosing me as a marijuana candidate because they support legalization,” she said.

It may be the opposite. Trudeau has already been hammered by the Conservatives’ attack machine for the party’s position on pot. The last thing they want is to give the incumbents leverage with moderate voters uneasy about the Liberal position, and the prospect someone like Emery might spearhead legalization.

The party’s position remains officially neutral while Emery and three other potential candidates for the Vancouver East nomination undergo the “green-light committee” vetting process.

But Emery’s supporters worry the B.C. campaign will find a reason to reject her bid to run in order to avoid allowing her to become a lightning rod for Tory attacks.

“The party has a pick out of the four candidates,” Mark Elyas, the Vancouver East riding association’s chairman of campaign outreach, told Yahoo Canada News. ”It’s not Jodie. Obviously they’re going to do what they can to work against us.”

Elyas, who with riding vice-president Russ Miller, enticed Emery to run, said the email is evidence the party wants to distance itself from the Emerys “and they’re trying to discourage our supporters somehow.”

The other nomination candidates include philanthropist Joanne Griffiths, ex-RCMP officer Richard Jacques and Vancouver lawyer Edward Wong, who Elyas believes is the B.C. campaign’s choice.

The NDP hasn’t picked someone to replace Davies but a lot of names are being tossed around, including New Democrat MLAs Jennie Kwan, Mable Elmore and Ellen Woodsworth, and Vancouver city councillor Raymond Louie, who in the past was seen as a potential Liberal candidate.

The Liberals have won the riding only twice since the 1930s, in 1974 and 1993.

Nothing in Emery’s background to rule out her candidacy

Elyas said despite her husband’s criminal conviction and the couple’s notoriety, there’s nothing in Jodie Emery’s background that should get her excluded from contesting the nomination.

"There’s no reason to red-light her," he said. "I’ve seen her nomination package. Every question that required a ‘no’ on the box was checked off ‘no.’ There’s nothing controversial about her at all.”

Still, the Liberals’ nomination rules give green-light committees, local campaign co-chairs and ultimately Trudeau wide discretion to reject candidates if it’s felt to be in the best interests of the party.

“They say she hasn’t gone through the green-light committee, but I’m quite confident they wouldn’t want her anyways,” Nelson Wiseman, director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto, said. “They can come up with all kinds of reasons for it.

“She’s not an asset. She’s a liability. If she were an asset they’d be keen to have her.”

[ Related: Liberal nomination troubles ‘inside baseball,’ unlikely to sway most voters ]

[ Related: Andrew Leslie’s Liberal nomination win draws protest ]

It’s been alleged the party has made things easier for its preferred choices, such as in Vancouver South, where retired Lt.-Col. Harjit Singh Sajjan was acclaimed last month after his main rival, businessman Barj Dhahan, withdrew following what supporters say were bogus allegations of vote-buying.

And in Ottawa, retired general Andrew Leslie was acclaimed after his opponent, lawyer David Bertschi, found his candidacy blocked over previous campaign debts and failure to disclose a defamation suit he’d filed and later abandoned.

Parties don’t like to campaign on divisive issues

Wiseman said Emery presents a different problem for the Liberals. She’s a symbol of a policy the party supports but doesn’t want to wave in most voters’ faces. It’s a divisive issue, like abortion and gay marriage.

“You want to run on anodyne issues,” he said. “You want to run on issues where nobody’s against it. Nobody’s against growing the economy. Nobody’s against the middle class.

“If you are for legalizing it … you don’t build your campaign around that, either nationally or in the constituency.”

Emery knows her public profile is tied to pot legalization and she was attracted to the Liberals by their commitment to that goal. But she insists there’s more to her than that.

“I really believe more in small-conservative ideas, tax reform, proper spending of our money, not violating people’s civil liberties, pro business,” said Emery, who took over and expanded her husband’s Cannabis Culture store while he was behind bars.

She doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a one-issue candidate.

“Most people who run for office have the credentials in one area of interest,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they care about; that’s just what they’re most known for.”

Emery said marijuana legalization is no longer a fringe issue, given the fact three U.S. states (Washington, Colorado and Alaska) have legalized it.

“If I’m a marijuana candidate, it’s not because I want everyone to get high, it’s because I want to save billions of tax dollars currently being spent on law enforcement, prisons and policing on pot,” she said.

There’s also a potential economic payoff, she said, pointing to the impact on Washington state and Colorado since voters there legalized the drug in 2012.

“Marijuana equals money and jobs, but right now gangsters control the market and citizens should be able to work those jobs instead.”

If the Liberals do green-light her candidacy, she will still have to win over party supporters in the riding. Emery said she’s sold only about 150 memberships so far.

Marc is helping with that but otherwise keeping a pretty low profile.

“When I finally did meet Justin Trudeau at a fund-raiser just recently, Marc was there, but nobody would have known it because he just stayed back,” she said. ”He wanted me to be able to do my job and he’s always supported me in doing my thing.”