A few weeks ago, my friend posted on Facebook that his wife had a meeting with Nathan Neudorf. I wrote about that meeting here.
She explained Neudorf’s position:
He told me he wasn’t personally in favour of the clause, but said that “due to the Democratic Process” he had to vote yes with his party. When I pressed him, he admitted that if he voted against, he would be removed from the UCP.
In this interview with Lethbridge News Now by David Opinko, published yesterday, Neudorf now conveniently ignores the part about needing to vote to take away teacher’s rights in order to stay in the party and instead says:
[A]lthough there might have been other avenues the government could have taken in its approach to labour negotiations, it was warranted due to the risk that students were facing.
“We had to take a fairly significant step to resolve that, to make sure that our 751,000 students got back to school and didn’t have to repeat an entire year. Sometimes, you have to take the good with the bad, and we have to work through that,” says Neudorf. “There’s more work that needs to be done to restore that relationship.”
But it’s pretty obvious which of those ways of framing it are more likely to be true. Nathan Neudorf is a smart guy who understands the severity of voting to use the notwithstanding clause. He knows it was a bad idea and that’s why he said he personally didn’t agree with it. Now he needs to own that and resign.