OTTAWA—Justin Trudeau quietly turned up on the streets of Trinity-Spadina on Thursday, less than 24 hours after angry Liberals in the riding formally demanded some answers on why the leader blocked a candidate from running in the coming byelection.

Trudeau’s visit to Trinity-Spadina wasn’t well publicized, but the Liberal riding association is getting more vocal about Trudeau’s ouster of former candidate Christine Innes from the nomination race.

In a statement, local riding president Julia Metus protested: “There was absolutely no due or fair process. . . . No one picked up the phone to contact me, there was no opportunity to discuss their concerns, and there was zero local involvement. This is contrary to everything the Liberal Party — new or otherwise — is supposed to stand for.”

The association is wondering whether Trudeau is committed to open nomination races. Earlier this week, he restated that commitment and promised to provide more “clarity” about how other would-be candidates can avoid the same problems that led to the Innes decision.

He didn’t let Metus know he was dropping in on the riding on Thursday, either.

In an interview, Metus said anger has been building among Liberals in Trinity-Spadina since late last week, when Innes was notified she would not be allowed to run because of bad behaviour by her campaign team, which includes her husband, former MP Tony Ianno.

Innes had run for the party in 2008 and 2011, and insists her real offence was refusing to sign a deal with Trudeau on where she would run in 2015, when the riding of Trinity-Spadina disappears in a big boundary shuffle. Trudeau’s star recruit, Chrystia Freeland, intends to run in the new downtown Toronto riding of University-Rosedale.

Last Saturday morning, Metus said, about 50 Liberals showed up for coffee in a Queen St. W. restaurant to vent their frustration at Innes’s fate.

“They were upset,” Metus said. “The night the message went out, I had people calling me, crying. I had so many messages: ‘What are we going to do?’ ”

But David MacNaughton, the Ontario campaign co-chair who wrote the letter to Innes, said there will be no review of the decision.

“I was given the responsibility for making these judgments and the advice on it. I’ve reviewed it, and that’s the judgment I came to. So that’s that — and it was supported by the national campaign co-chairs. So there we are,” MacNaughton said Thursday.

He admits that Liberals in the riding may have been in the dark about the problems with Innes’s campaign, but this was largely because the people who were complaining about her team’s behaviour wanted confidentiality and protection from further intimidation.

The complaints had been going on for weeks, MacNaughton said, and he asked some of the complainants to submit their evidence in writing. Once the Liberal campaign chiefs had all the evidence in front of them, the decision was made, he said.

MacNaughton said he spoke to Metus last Friday night and she wasn’t upset at all — she was focused on finding new candidates to run in the byelection.

Metus, for her part, agrees that was true. Her immediate worries are about finding a Liberal to run in the byelection that hasn’t been called yet, but could be looming soon. Trinity-Spadina became vacant when Olivia Chow, NDP MP for the past eight years, stepped down to run for mayor of Toronto.

All this Liberal drama is clearly giving the NDP more confidence that it can retain the seat in what is going to be yet another hard fought Toronto byelection between the red and the orange teams.

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In a statement Thursday, would-be NDP candidate Joe Cressy pointed to the Liberals’ battles as proof they were out of touch with the voters in the riding.

“Residents of Trinity-Spadina deserve an MP who will stand up and fight for them, not a political party that is more interested in fighting among themselves,” Cressy said.

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