In my last post I said this time around we’d look at the environmental policies of the Wildrose party. I’m going to put that aside to focus a bit on some of the Wildrose candidates, and information about them that the voting public should be aware of.
First, two openly anti-gay candidates:
John Carpay is a Wildrose candidate. John Carpay was the defense lawyer for William Whatcott in 2010, and argued that Whatcott’s distribution of hate literature was a right of free speech, and supported his right to do it. This man will potentially be elected to office in Alberta.
John Carpay also accused former Premier Ralph Klein of favouring judge-made law by not invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to prevent Alberta from including homosexuality in its human rights legislation in 1994.
The party he is a candidate for is an ardent supporter of individual rights. Apparently, Mr. Carpary feels that the right to exist without retribution for your lifestyle and sexuality is not without its caveats.
Ron Leech is a Wildrose candidate. Ron Leech is a vocal opponent of equality for same sex couples, and questioned whether same sex couples can be a family. Mr. Leech declared that allowing same sex couples to marry would cause irreparable social engineering.
Mr. Leech is quoted as saying “Marriage is not about equal rights.”
Mr. Leech also declared that allowing same sex couples to marry will increase the tax burden on Canadian families, cause increases in crime and affect mental illness rates.
This man will potentially be elected to office in Alberta.
He feels that same sex marriage would destroy the sanctity of marriage. Maybe he should go have a conversation with Newt Gingrich and John Edwards about the sanctity of marriage…
I should note that a brief twitter exchange occurred about these two. I briefly waded into a conversation where a vocal Wildrose supporter was arguing that the party welcomed all people, and that their sex life wasn’t important to the party. That discussion had spawned from one about the Wildrose supporting conscience rights.
I asked the Wildrose supporter what John Carpay and Ron Leech might have to say about his claim that all were welcome regardless of lifestyle.
His response way “go away. #troll #blocked”
In fact, that’s the only response I’ve gotten from a Wildrose supporter about any question ever. Apparently, you’re free to your opinion, but not free to their response because you disagree with them…
Continuing on…
Link Byfield worked for his father’s Alberta Report magazine.
This magazine gave this country the likes of Ezra Levant and Lorne Gunter. Basically, Link Byfield’s family magazine gave us Sun Media.
Link Byfield was a founding member of the Wildrose party.
Before that, when he was working at his father’s magazine, he spoke at many dinners and hob knobbed with many people.
Like this.
Let’s look at one of those pictures again.
The man on the right, with whom Mr. Byfield is shaking hands, is Paul Fromm.
I rather enjoyed Gawker’s write up of a recent national gathering Mr. Fromm took part in.
If you’re too lazy to click the links, Paul Fromm is one of Canada’s most notorious white supremacists. Shaking hands with a WIldrose candidate.
I felt that this picture deserved a little more attention, so I sent the link of the blog it’s from to the CBC Â news room in Edmonton. I rather enjoyed the email they sent me back.
onwards…
John Oplanich is a Wildrose candidate. The party John supports argues that the Provincial Tories have received and given away funds unethically. John started off his campaign by placing an ad in a local paper saying that he would raffle off a big screen tv and 25 $1,000 scholarships to anyone who voted for him.
Elections Alberta is currently investigating to see whether this is legal or not.
Questions of legality aside, this amounts to voter bribery and should be punishable by rendering Mr. Oplanich ineligible for the election.
These are the kinds of people running for office in this province for the party that is threatening to win. Homophobes, friends of KKK members, and people who think being critical of one party’s behaviour means that they’re free to do it themselves.
The sad thing is that people will still vote for them, even knowing this.