No one wants these fights between Liberals over riding redistribution to be happening, says Prime Minister Paul Martin.

But Martin told journalists in Regina Friday that his responsibility is to make sure such contests are very even-handed and that he won't intervene in individual riding fights.

"My responsibility is to allow the people in those ridings to make their choice."

Martin was commenting in the wake of a bitter fight in Hamilton between Transport Minister Tony Valeri and ex-cabinet minister Sheila Copps, who insists she's being pushed.

"I was told by a senior Quebec organizer that he had a direct conversation with the senior principal secretary to the PM, who informed him that I wasn't wanted," she said.

"That's just absolutely not true," Martin said.

Valeri's Stoney Creek riding has been eliminated. A new riding, Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, has been formed, and Copps would be the incumbent. But the only person to challenge Martin for the Liberal leadership right to the bitter end has been publicly complaining that Martin's people are trying to push her out.

Martin was asked about the fact Valeri doesn't live in the new riding but in the neighboring one of Niagara West-Glanbrook. "Tony Valeri's house overlooks the new riding," he said, adding that 53 per cent of Valeri's old riding is in the new one.

In analyzing Martin's remarks, CTV Newsnet's Mike Duffy said his sources tell him that Valeri's primary purpose in seeking the Hamilton East-Stoney Creek nomination isn't to push out Copps.

Instead, Valeri's people have run the numbers and decided it's a more solidly Liberal riding, and he would have a higher probability of winning there, he said.

That explanation "doesn't make a lot of sense to me because we know that Ontario is a Liberal province," the Globe and Mail's Jane Taber said on Newsnet. "I think what Mr. Valeri is doing is basically a power play."

Copps says she won't back down

Earlier Friday, former heritage minister Copps said she wouldn't back down in her political battle with Valeri, adding she wasn't ready to change parties just yet.

"Well, I hope to stay a Liberal," she told CTV's Canada AM.

Reports that Copps might defect to the NDP began to surface this week as a battle for nomination in the riding of Hamilton-East Stoney Creek heated up.

Both Copps, who lives in the riding, and Valeri, who lives just outside the newly-drawn boundaries in what will become Niagara West-Glanbrook, say they will run in Hamilton East-Stoney Creek.

Copps, who lost the Liberal leadership to Paul Martin, says she's being pushed out.

"I think the work that I've been doing over the last number of weeks to sell memberships and the hope that I have a fair race is really what's driving me. I just want the race to be fair," Copps said.

"There's no doubt in my mind that this is part of a concerted effort that could be very easily solved if the prime minister asked Tony Valeri to run in the riding where he lives."

On Thursday, Valeri told reporters at a news conference in Ottawa that his designs on the riding have nothing to do with any sort of vendetta.

"She's not being pushed out by me," he said, calling the fight for the nomination an "exercise in democracy."

Five ridings are being reduced to four due to population shifts in the Hamilton area, he said. With five incumbent Liberal MPs, that means a nomination fight somewhere.

"I don't get up in the morning and relish the thought I'm in a nomination race," he said, adding that when the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for Ontario held its hearings, he argued unsuccessfully to maintain Stoney Creek as a separate riding.

Copps, a long-time Liberal who represented Hamilton East from 1984 onward, said she feels like she has to stay and fight for her riding.

"And I think I have it in me," she said. "But I must admit that it's getting very wearying to be in a situation where as you climb over one hill and you look onto the horizon, standing up into the next hill you see your own guns sort of facing down, bearing down on you."