Green Party kicks out candidate for anti-abortion posts on Catholic blog

John Chenery, spokesperson for the Greens, told CBC that the party voted to officially remove Marthe Lepine, also requesting that she cease representing herself as a Green candidate.

Unfortunately for the Greens, the deadline to remove her name from the ballot was missed, meaning voters can still select Lepine as their candidate.

Chenery went on to say that Lepine had views on the hot-button topic that weren’t aligned to the Party’s.

“The Green Party will always fight for access to timely, safe, legal abortions,” he later said in a statement.

“It recently came to light through social media posts that Ms. Lépine does not support this position, so she has been removed as a candidate.”

Lepine’s beliefs and comments which were made on Catholic blogs ring similar in tone, though, to comments made by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.

“My Catholic view is that abortion is a bad thing,” Lepine told CBC. “I understand some people feel like they have no real choice … it should be avoided as much as possible.”

In 2006, May was in the middle of controversy due to comments she made to nuns she at a convent that she has talked women out of having abortions, and “could not imagine any circumstances that would have caused her to have an abortion.”

“I don’t think that anyone is for abortion in the sense that you hope people are going to have abortions,” said May, according to Straight. “You hope in an ideal world that every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy. My friends and family members who’ve ever gone through abortions have found it a traumatically difficult decision to make. It’s a personally difficult decision. You can’t trivialize how hard that choice is. But a women has a right to make that choice, and it’s not a morally wrong decision by any means.”

The Greens, though, have been shying away from any position that could indicate that they’re open to re-opening the abortion debate. May recently told media that anti-abortion candidates would be “filtered out,” going on to insist that there is a “zero chance” of an elected Green MP reopening the abortion debate.