Original version at https://www.therealvote.ca/rabble-letter.html cc: LeadNow petition signatories Dear Meagan, I hope this email finds you well. I'm writing to correct a couple of falsehoods that Michael Laxer has published in his most recent blog post at Rabble, about a petition I helped start with others through a new group called The Real Vote. The petition asks LeadNow to stop including Liberals in their Vote Together campaign. Laxer's piece frames our petition as the work of "New Democrat partisans." This is untrue. The petition was drafted by three individuals: myself, Jennifer Allen, and Peter Glen. I wrote the final draft. While Jennifer is a longtime NDP activist, Peter is not, and I have criticized the NDP on some of the very same terms that Laxer does (indeed, I've cited him at length in doing so). The Real Vote is a grassroots group dedicated to the repeal of Bill C-51. The petition emerged out of an ongoing discussion among Stop C-51 activists, LeadNow organizers and LeadNow supporters about a conflict between two LeadNow campaigns. In one of those campaigns, LeadNow has been presenting Liberals as an option for voting strategically to defeat Conservatives in key ridings. In the other, more recent campaign, LeadNow has criticized the Liberals for their support of Bill C-51. While Laxer paints our petition as an "attack" on LeadNow by NDP partisans, it is actually a request by C-51 activists for LeadNow to get its own campaigns aligned in order to maintain a united front against the bill. There is a wide consensus among individuals and groups working on the Stop C-51 campaign that Liberals aren't an option in the coming election, because of that party's support for it. LeadNow is the only exception. Our petition thanks LeadNow for their work on the Stop C-51 campaign, but asks them to adopt the consensus. The petition has been shared with the 10,000+ members of the Stop Bill C-51 Facebook page and has collected 1,000 signatures. NDP and Green Party partisans can, of course, be found among them, but as the petition comments reveal, it has been signed and shared by Libertarians, socialists, former Liberal supporters, prominent Stop C-51 organizers across the country who have worked alongside and inside LeadNow, and even a founding member and core supporter of LeadNow, who said this about it: LeadNow has a very large base of more than 400,000 supporters and donors. Some of those are people who have voted Liberal in the past, but might vote differently to defeat Conservatives. According to LeadNow, it also has tens of thousands of people who have joined and donated because of the campaign against C-51, many of whom are justifiably upset that their election campaign still includes the Liberals. On one hand, LeadNow has received a lot of attention and donations from its (and our) opposition to C-51. On the other, LeadNow also gets a lot of financial and volunteer support from Liberal party supporters. Activists inside and outside LeadNow have been debating the best way to address this conflict since March, and the question has been put to LeadNow's volunteers and wider community by the group in their recent internal polls (see, e.g., http://www.votetogether.ca/feedback). I may write a response to Laxer's column, with a view to some of the larger questions of strategy that it raises. If so, I hope Rabble will grant me the courtesy of publishing it. In the meantime, please let me know when the false claims will be retracted. Thanks & best wishes, Chris Wiseman The Real Vote