I want to make Cullen my first choice but…

Lately I’ve been mulling over making Nathan Cullen the first choice on my ballot after previously completely discounting him as a potential recipient of my vote.

Cullen was originally someone I was excited about supporting in the leadership race. I’ve had the opportunity to meet him on several occasions and he’s always come across as both charismatic and genuine. I’ve expected him to run for leader for a while, and years ago I remember discussions with a friend of mine about who would at least run for the leadership after Layton left would usually settle on Cullen as both a and the best future leader out of that crop of MPs (this was back when there were only about 30 MPs). After the leadership vote was called I Tweeted him and posted on his Facebook page that I hoped he would run. Cullen was a great environment and then natural resource critic and has a great deal of credibility in those areas. Even in areas I didn’t agree with – like his decision to vote for scrapping the firearms registry, I still respected his reasoning for why he voted for scrapping it. I was excited when Cullen announced he was going to run and he was at the top of my list.
Then Cullen announced his plan for joint nominations. I personally think this is a short-sighted plan that will only result in another Conservative majority. It’s naive to assume that a New Democrat, Liberal or Green vote is simply transferable between those parties. Many first time NDP voters in the last election were former Conservative voters who if not presented with the option of voting NDP would simply go back to voting Conservative. Same goes for the large number of voters who traditionally switch between Conservative and Liberals – take away their opportunity to vote Liberal and they’ll go back to the Conservatives, not the NDP. Finally if Cullen’s plan had been instituted during the 2011 election we would have likely ended up with 1 MP in Quebec and many of our other new MPs across the country would also not have even been running. His announcement of this ill-concevied plan and his continual insistence on sticking to taking away the opportunity for many voters to vote NDP immediately put him to near the bottom of my list for quite a while.
I have started to reconsider my choice. Cullen has some pretty solid policies relating to public transit, food security, negotiating trade deals that are fair to Canada and promote Canadian manufacturing jobs, developing sustainable resource development plans and pledging to reopen negotiations on NAFTA (at least in relation to farming). I also like several of his democratic reform promises, specifically his promise to hold a referendum on instituting a mixed-member proportional electoral system, promising a referendum on getting rid of the monarchy and pledging to work towards eliminating the senate. If it was just these issues that Cullen was highlighting he would easily be my first choice for leader by far.
His plan for joint nomination meetings with the Liberals and Greens in Conservative held ridings concerns me though. I have a hard time supporting a candidate who won’t provide every voter in the country with the opportunity to vote NDP. I’m still considering making Cullen my first choice because I’m not convinced he’ll be able to implement the joint nomination plan. If he pledged to allow a convention to determine whether this was even permissible I could accept that (if convention voted for this through a constitutional amendment which would require a two-third majority vote). The NDP constitution also assigns the responsibility for nomination rules to the provincial wings of the party. I don’t believe that Cullen as leader would be able to circumvent the normal nomination process set out by the provincial wings of the party. However what I would really like to see is a pledge from Cullen that he would not interpret a victory by himself as an endorsement of his plan and would commit to seeking permission from the membership to implement it.
Basically I want to vote for Cullen… but I need to be convinced that he definitely can’t implement his joint-nomination plan unilaterally (and no that doesn’t mean repeat a bunch of false statistics and non-facts to convince me that his plan is a good one, you won’t be able to do that because it’s been consistently be detrimental to the NDP, I mean I need to be convinced that he can’t implement his plan).