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A former New Democrat who crossed the floor to join the Liberals says she refused to participate in a scheme to fund staff in NDP satellite offices in Quebec, despite pressure from the party leadership.

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Lise St-Denis is the only one of the 59 Quebec MPs elected in the NDP’s 2011 “Orange Wave” who didn’t contribute money from her House of Commons office budget to fund staff working in Montreal or Quebec City.

Other NDP MPs from Nova Scotia, British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario are listed as contributors to a plan to pool money to pay for staff, according to House of Commons records.

St-Denis, the MP for Saint-Maurice-Champlain, left the party and joined the Liberal caucus in January 2012, saying her constituents had voted for leader Jack Layton, not for his party.

She says that, before she left the NDP, she refused to bend to pressure from then-interim leader Nycole Turmel’s office to participate in plan that saw Quebec MPs contributing shares of their House of Commons budgets to pay the salaries of the “satellite” staff.

“Ms. St-Denis, then a member of the NDP caucus, refused to pay the sums claimed by the NDP for the creation of this satellite office,” her office said in statement Tuesday afternoon.