Front Burner - White supremacist and homophobic posts force UCP candidates out

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

Since the writ dropped in Alberta, two candidates have resigned from the United Conservative Party over Islamaphobic, white supremacist, homophobic and transphobic messages on social media. This is only the latest controversy for the party. The Jason Kenney campaign has been accused of supporting a 'kamikaze candidate' to help him win the leadership race in 2017, and the RCMP is looking into allegations of voter fraud. Maclean's Alberta correspondent Jason Markusoff says the scandals may not prevent Jason Kenney from winning the premiership. "This is an economically anxious province," says Markusoff. "Albertans are frustrated and anxious, they're looking for some change to make to liberate themselves from the status quo."

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Uncover. The Village. Coming April 2nd. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So it's been a tough couple of weeks for the United Conservative Party in Alberta. There's this ongoing kamikaze candidate scandal. Documents obtained by CBC suggested his campaign worked with another candidate to undermine Brian Jean. That called into question how Jason Kenney became the leader of the party. There are also allegations of voter fraud.

And that thousands of emails were created offshore and used to vote for Mr. Kenney. And since the provincial election was called, two high-profile candidates have dropped out of the race because of white nationalist, homophobic, and Islamophobic remarks. Another Calgary UCP candidate, Kaylin Ford, resigned last week over controversial online messages. But in an election where Alberta's economy is the most important issue to most voters, will the UCP's track record with problematic candidates even move the needle? That's today on FrontBurner. I'm joined today by Jason Markeshoff. He's a correspondent for Maclean's. Jason, thanks for joining us.

My pleasure. Busy time in Alberta? I'm not getting too much sleep these days, no. I bet. So I want to start today by zooming in on these two candidates. Remarks that they have made have come to light since the election was called. And first, let's talk about Eva Kiriakos, who was running for Calgary Southeast. And what is she accused of doing? She had in her social media past what I would call the triple crown of dreadfulness or hate. Islamophobic, transphobic, and homophobic. transphobic and homophobic.

One of the deleted tweets that somebody was leaking around had her retweeting a meme about rapefugees, which is a terribly inflammatory ultra-right-wing phrase about Muslim refugees in Europe. And she was passing around a rather dubious allegation by a group about a quote-unquote rape crisis. Another tweet that she had was in reference to trans individuals. And she had also tweeted that her children, quote, had a right to not be brainwashed into accepting perversions as alternative lifestyles.

A third one was talking about gay-straight alliances, these student support groups in schools that are a big topic of discussion in Alberta. And she talked about how they are secretly for conversion of people to homosexuality. That's a lot of hair to have on one candidate and one candidate's past. Right, and these are not, like, semi-controversial. No party leader would want this stuff anywhere near them. So what happened to her? She resigned as a candidate.

But before any website or Twitter user could release what she had said, stuff that had apparently, and this is intriguing, been floated out there by disgruntled conservatives themselves, not by liberals or NDP or any other opposition party, she posted a video herself trying to defend these comments. I am doing this video today because I want to be transparent with you, my constituents, about what has been happening behind the scenes. And she resigned.

And Kenny said, I accept her resignation. She's selfless for resigning and taking one for the team, basically. Jason Kenny said that she was selfless. Because as her statement said, she does not want to be a distraction from the essential task of defeating the NDP and getting our economy back to work. He didn't back what she said, but he backed her. He actually quite liked her as a candidate. He's been trying really hard to recruit and bring out strong female candidates

because he knows that's a bit of a perceptive liability in his camp, that he's not very popular or well-liked around women. So he's been trying to promote these women candidates, and so he really hated to lose somebody, especially somebody of Iraqi Christian refugee descent herself. Another prominent female candidate who's now gone is Kaylin Ford. Yes, Kaylin Ford has resigned as a UCP candidate in the riding of Calgary Mountain View

after a report claiming she echoed white nationalist rhetoric. And this situation is similar, but a little bit different, right? It's different in a really important way. It's sort of the classic way that candidates get exposed as intolerant or with extreme views by somebody sharing their deleted or still living Facebook or Twitter posts. In the case of Kaylin Ford, the former UCP candidate for Calgary Mountain View, what was shared was her private messages. She was engaged in a Facebook chat with somebody who's, again, a conservative campaign activist.

And she said some things that were really, really, really hard to defend, stuff that was quite literally sympathetic to white supremacists. Here's one quote. I am somehow saddened by the demographic replacement of white people in their homelands. Wow. In the thrust of a campaign, I don't know how you explain that sort of comment in any way that is satisfying to people. So she, too, resigned. So she too resigned.

Did she try and explain why she said these things? No. Her frustration was that there was this fellow that she'd been chatting with who she says has been harassing and stalking her would put out these chats. She didn't try to really defend herself. Kenny did condemn her remarks. Let me be clear, I condemned the remarks included in the text that she had sent. And so we will be appointing a new candidate in the Calgary Mountain View constituency. You mentioned that these were private messages that have been made public. I understand that they were made public by someone with ties to the Conservative Party. You mentioned before when we were talking about Eva Kariakos that these remarks that she had made were also publicly released by people within the party. So what does that say to you that these are essentially being made public by fellow conservatives?

It's been quite interesting. And of course, the whole allegations about a kamikaze candidate, which you referred to earlier, this idea that Jason Kenney had put up another candidate to run in his UCP leadership campaign to basically kneecap Brian Jean, his chief rival. An incredible story. Documents leaked to CBC News show Kenney's UCP leadership campaign orchestrated the run of a kamikaze candidate. The sole purpose of Jeff Calloway's leadership bid was to inflict damage on Kenney's main political rival, Brian Jean, then drop out of the race to support Kenny. And all that information came from Conservatives as well. Part of that is born out of the fact

that people think out there, and the polling seems to back it, that it's inevitable that the Conservatives will win this election. So for a lot of people, a lot of people in the Conservative movement, they see that their way to get into government is to make sure they get a conservative nomination. They were competitive, bare knuckle, obviously very nasty races. And those who've been rejected for various reasons, whether legitimate or not, or just plain losing, some of them are very bitter. Right. There's a lot of bad blood there. But these are not the only cases. And I do want to just get a scope of this. So can we run through a couple other controversies at this party,

which is relatively new, has had in the last year or so? We can start with Lance Coulter. What happened to him? Lance Coulter was running for the ECP nomination. He wasn't a candidate yet. He was running for the chance to be a candidate in Edmonton. And there was a pub night of all the candidates for this contest. And who shows up? The Soldiers of Odin, which are a very anti-Muslim, rather white nationalist organization. When this came out that they were there, they were posing.

I don't know if people who were originally there knew what the Soldiers of Odin were. But once this came out and some of the candidates in the UCP realized who the soldiers of Odin are, then they condemned them. This guy, Lance Coulter, basically said, you know, let's hear them out. You know, we should be tolerant of different views. Here's a quote from him. Now, I don't agree with everything that they stand for.

Nevertheless, people have a constitutional right to voice their opinions, and I'm not going to deny them that. They didn't let him stand for nomination. Okay. I also want to note, he also said that he condemns racism in the strongest terms. And then we should also talk about Todd Beasley, who was disqualified as a candidate in Brooks Medicine Hat in the summer. He called Muslims, quote, fools who are worshiping Satan. And then also another prospective candidate, Cindy Ross, she wrote on Facebook that she was opposed to a mosque opening in downtown Fort McMurray. She essentially said that it was awful news, that it would be opening in the center of the city.

And she apologized for that. And like the others, she is not running for the party. What do we know about what kind of vetting the UCP did? They screened out a lot of people who had intolerant views. I mean, anybody was free to run, put their name forward for a nomination, whether they were let stand. It was a different question. And the UCP rejected a lot of these candidates out of hand. And in that way, it's actually surprising that they let Eva Cariaco stand.

Did they know about these social media tweets? Did they know about her Facebook posts? There is a record. Somebody must have had them. And it seems like it might have been in the Conservative Party. Why would they have let her stand and not the others? On the Cailin Ford thing, that's a bit trickier because these were private chats. How is the party going to be able to vet out private chats somebody made? Right. And I guess that does beg the question, Jason Kenney is taking a lot of heat for these candidates. And should he be held responsible for the views that some of these candidates have made in private? The NDP will argue that it's about the culture he sets, the cultural tone he sets.

That, you know, why are these so many people with intolerant views feeling welcome in the party, feeling like they have a shot in the party? And also it's about how he handles them. in the party, feeling like they have a shot in the party. And also it's about how he handles them. You know, in the past, there are leaders who have tried to hang on to candidates because they like them, even if they do have intolerant points. He's been throwing a lot of people under the bus pretty quickly. Have we ever seen anything like this in Alberta before? I'll say two things about this.

One is that I don't think we've ever seen such scrutiny of people running, not even as candidates, but just for nomination for the parties. And part of this is an NDP strategy that Rachel Notley knew Democrats who are running behind in the polls. One of their strategies is to paint the UCP as a group of intolerance. I personally do not believe that Jason Kenney is racist, but I do believe that the UCP as a party has a problem with racism. So they're doing what they can. The NDP and their sympathetic supporters and people on social media and advocacy organizations are rooting some of these people out to try to paint this picture. So there's real pressure, like we haven't seen before, to root these out.

But there's also a major history that a lot of Albertans will think about as they hear these scandals and go to the polls in mid-April. We will not legislate on contentious social issues. In 2012, this was before Jason Kenney had united the Wild Rose Party and the Progressive Conservatives, who were governing Alberta for four decades, Wild Rose was ahead in the polls and the PC government was about to go down in 2012. Until the very last week of the campaign, and leaks started coming out about some of the Wild Rose candidates. Most notably, there was a Reverend Huntsberger, who was revealed to have said in a sermon that was posted online, that gays will die in, quote, a lake of fire.

A place of eternal suffering. He goes on to say that others shouldn't accept homosexuals for the way they are because that's cruel and not loving. Danielle Smith, who was leader at the time, did not handle that controversy very well. She kept on this candidate. The views he expressed were his personal views in the context of him being a pastor. And I'm not going to discriminate against anyone. And it's one of the rare cases in Canadian politics, perhaps ever, where one of these situations, one of these controversies,

actually helped play a major role in felling a party. The Wild Rose dropped in the polls at the very end, and the PCs won their 11th straight majority. You know, I suppose the obvious question is, could this affect the UCP now? How is this playing out in Alberta? This is one of the key questions that's at play in this election. There are a bunch of different controversies dogging the front-running United Conservatives and Jason Kenney. One is the kamikaze candidate thing.

One is this narrative about past comments by candidates. The NDP is trying to do is depict a pattern of these, that it wasn't just one candidate or two candidates. There was a series of people who were attracted to this party, hangers on, people trying to run for this party, carry the party's flag, who had racist backgrounds, who were Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic. That's going to be one thing that you're hearing the NDP press a lot. They're also going to be pressing certain things on some policies of Jason Kenney's. And there's one that really dovetails with their arguments about Jason Kenney's own social conservative background in his youth as a anti-same-sex rights

activist. He was actually quite active on those when he was a college student, then even early in his days as an MP. Where that hits the road in terms of policy is that there's a plan that Jason Kenney has to roll back some of the protections for gay-straight alliances, these student groups that are protecting gay students and their allies in schools. This is all about balance. The balance we want to strike is the protection of kids and the support they need, particularly children who might be facing bullying because of their sexual orientation. That will continue. We will have the strongest legal protection for GSAs in Canada, period. However, we are not going to allow Minister Egan to undermine the constitutionally protected charter right to freedom of religion for an independent school to say what they believe in terms of their basic faith commitment.

He's trying to roll back some of the protections the NDP put in for those. So they're talking about that a lot. We're actually having rallies in Edmonton and Calgary against this. It's not usual that we see mid-campaign public protests like this. All these things are swirling around Jason Kenney's campaign. Right. And there are also allegations of voter fraud, right? In a letter, Gill says, quote, possibly thousands of memberships sold by the Kenney leadership campaign had fraudulent emails attached to them.

Yeah. And now, well, we've just, I've just been able to report recently that the RCMP is now sniffing around on this. It's not just some rogue disgruntled Tories alleging this. Remind me very quickly the voter fraud allegations because I find them a little bit confusing. The idea was that in the 2017 race to run this new United Conservative Party that Jason Kenney helped form, not only did he run this kamikaze candidate to kneecap his chief rival, what he also did was partake in what could be conceived by the RCMP or authorities as identity theft. He took the real names of Albertans, had them on party membership forms,

then attached phony email addresses, so goes the allegation, to obtain PIN numbers or passcode numbers to vote electronically in the UCP contest. The allegation was that there were bulk batches of voting done by the Jason Kenney campaign for him at kiosk computer stations to get around some of the rules about only one computer can vote for one person. I just want to make something crystal clear here. When we're talking about both the kamikaze candidate and these unproven allegations of voter fraud, both of these involve Jason Kenney's campaign and not Jason Kenney individually. And with regards to the allegations of voter fraud, his campaign came out Thursday and denied the allegations

and said that they have followed the rules completely. They have also said they followed the rules when it came to the kamikaze candidate issue, but I want to focus a little bit more on these controversial candidates and how has Kenny dealt with them? Kenny has tried to talk about his party as a big tent organization. They're not going to be active on racial issues or social issues, although the stuff I talked about about gay-straight alliances sort of undermines that. But he's talking about his party as a very diverse party. They do have the more ethnically diverse candidate slate than the NDP or other parties as well. And he readily points to that. And he's also trying to say this stuff doesn't matter.

This is fear and smear stuff that the NDP are trying to perpetrate to distract from the main issue of the election, which is jobs, the economy, pipelines. Pipelines, which people are very angry about in Alberta, which I think brings us back to, like, how is this playing out on the ground? These controversial candidates, but also these other scandals enveloping his campaign. Like, what are people in Alberta saying about all of this? Jason Kenney seems to be right that Albertans really care about the economy, jobs, pipelines, and hating Justin

Trudeau. These are major issues. There's a very animated public on these things. This is a very economically anxious province. We're used to the big booms. We're used to having full employment. We're used to building pipelines, too, in Alberta. And now there seems to be none of that. And Albertans are very frustrated, very anxious, and they're looking for somebody, some way, some change to make to liberate themselves from the status quo, and Jason Kenney is presenting himself as that change. We will unleash a wave of job creation in Alberta. The NDP is trying to play this as trust of Jason Kenney and trust of his party to lead fairly for all Albertans, it's become

really hard to break through the clatter of economy and jobs at this point. Jason, thank you so much. This story has been developing so quickly. We really appreciate you taking us through it today. That's all for today. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. This week, the show was produced by Aisha Barmania, Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins, Abby Plenner, and Sylvia Thompson. Derek Vanderwyk and Austin Pomeroy did our sound design this week, and see you Monday. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging.

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