OTTAWA—Liberal leader Justin Trudeauhas made a rare and controversial decision to block a former candidate from running to replace Olivia Chow in a coming by-election in the Toronto riding of Trinity—Spadina.

The ban, billed as a bid to end party infighting, has nonetheless stirred up bitterness within Liberal ranks and accusations that Trudeau and his team are ruthlessly sweeping house of any dissenters.

Christine Innes is the wife of the former Liberal MP and cabinet minister Tony Ianno and she is also the woman who ran for the party in the 2008 and 2011 federal elections. But Innes was notified on Thursday that she was being blocked from participating in the nomination race for Trinity—Spadina.

The letter, from Ontario campaign co-chair David MacNaughton, said she was being blocked for bad behaviour by her campaign team, and in particular, efforts to undermine the new MP for Toronto Centre, Chrystia Freeland.

“Your campaign team began to use intimidation and bullying on young volunteers. Derogatory remarks were made to several young, enthusiastic Liberals about one of our leading MPs,” MacNaughton wrote. “Suggestions were made to volunteers that their future in the Liberal party would be in jeopardy if they were on the ‘wrong side’ in a nomination battle.”

Innes, in an email sent out to supporters later on Thursday, said the allegations were “manufactured” and “totally baseless” — and said her real crime was failing to go along with the Trudeau team’s plans for 2015, when all the Toronto ridings will be shuffled and Trinity-Spadina will no longer exist.

“It was made clear to me that if I did not submit to their demands that they would ‘still get their way,’ ” Innes said, saying that the whole episode proves that Trudeau is not sincere about his promise for open nomination meetings.

It’s rare for leaders to block candidates, especially past candidates, and the decision came down in the same swift, unexpected and some would say brutal way that Trudeau cut his ties with Liberal senators earlier this year.

And like the Senate decision, it was presented as a case of out with the old and in with the new — in this case, out with the old, infighting days of the Liberal party.

MacNaughton, in an interview, said Trudeau and his team are determined to turn their back on Liberal family feuding and he also said this in his letter to Innes: “We have all seen what Liberals fighting with Liberals can do, not only to the electoral chances of our party but to its soul. Our leader has made it clear that this kind of behaviour is not acceptable to him, nor to the thousands of people who have embraced the new way of doing politics under Justin Trudeau’s leadership.”

There’s another old-versus-new aspect to the controversy too, revolving around the coming shuffle of federal riding boundaries in Toronto in 2015 — and the shakeup that’s under way in Toronto Liberal circles.

Much of the current Trinity-Spadina riding will be divided between the new Spadina—Fort York and University—Rosedale ridings. It’s believed that Freeland is the preferred candidate for University Rosedale and Innes said in her letter she was being pushed to move to Fort York.

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Trudeau and his advisers do not appear as yet to have a preferred candidate for Trinity-Spadina, where a byelection could be called as early as this spring in the wake of Chow’s departure this week. Glenn Wheeler, a lawyer and former editor at NOW magazine, told the Star on Thursday that he may be running for the nomination.

MacNaughton said the riding dispute was not what set off the ouster of Innes. The party has been getting reportedly dozens of complaints about Innes’s team’s tactics, including written evidence, and the blocking of her candidacy was seen as the only option.

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