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Thomas Mulcair, the front-runner to become the next leader of the New Democratic Party, would have joined the Harper government if the Conservatives had agreed to his demands for a Cabinet seat in 2007, according to a Tory source close to the discussions.

Mr. Mulcair calls the claims “transparently false,” while acknowledging he talked to the Conservatives (and the Liberals and the Greens) before opting to join the NDP, after quitting Jean Charest’s provincial Liberal government in Quebec City.

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According to the NDP MP, he quit Cabinet in Quebec City on a question of principle on the environment file and was approached by a friend who had joined the Conservatives. “He said the environment was their weakest suit in Quebec and he’d like to know if I’d accept work on that file. The Conservatives offered me two senior positions, one as head of a federal agency in environment and the other as a senior advisor. As you can see I took neither,” he said in an email Thursday. He said that the intermediary he was dealing with suggested he would have to adapt to the Conservative position on the Kyoto Protocol if he were to join the party, which ended the discussion.