Judges accused of bias, conflicts in landmark assisted suicide case

First published at True North on November 13, 2019.

The Supreme Court decision legalizing assisted suicide in Canada was shaped by judges with biases, conflicts of interest and personal connections hindering their impartiality, a motion filed at the very same court alleges.

The explosive allegations in the motion, filed by an Ontario man battling a terminal illness, seek to upend Carter v. Canada, the 2015 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that struck down the ban on assisted suicide, upholding an earlier ruling in the BC Supreme Court.

In his 162-page application, Roger Foley alleges a web of connections between Justice Lynn Smith, the judge who decided the case at the BC Supreme Court, and one of the plaintiffs, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA).

His filing also accuses then-chief justice Beverley McLachlin of prejudicial personal bias in favour of legalizing assisted suicide.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court dismissed Foley’s motion without a hearing on Oct. 21, the day of the federal election. No reasons were provided.

Through his lawyer, Foley declined to comment on this story.

Foley has no direct connection to the case, though he previously made headlines for exposing a London, Ont. hospital’s offer of assisted suicide despite his desire for home care.

The allegations in Foley’s affidavit have not been tested in court.

The motion says the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to strike down the assisted suicide ban was “predetermined,” which Foley contends is why Smith’s alleged bias and conflicts of interest went unchallenged.

“There is a reasonable apprehension of bias that Chief Justice McLachlin’s decision was fixed, staged and predetermined, and infected with bias,” the notice of motion reads. It goes onto say McLachlin “infected the remaining panel of judges” to such an extent that vacating the judgement is the only option.

Justice Lynn Smith and the BCCLA

Before being appointed as a judge, Lynn Smith served on the board of directors for the BCCLA, though that didn’t stop her from presiding over the Carter case, in which the civil liberties organization was not merely standing as counsel, but as a plaintiff.

This is one of several connections presented in Foley’s motion before the Supreme Court that he says points to a biased judgement at the BC Supreme Court, which went unchallenged later on at the Supreme Court of Canada.

The connections presented in this story have been verified independently by True North based on publicly available documents.

Smith is named as a “past Board member” in the BCCLA’s 2003 annual report. The affiliation is also noted in several biographies of Smith published by the University of British Columbia, where she previously served as dean of the school.

The BCCLA’s communications director did not respond to repeated inquiries from True North regarding Smith’s role and length of service with the organization.

Her support for the organization was not limited to board membership, however. When Smith chaired the Law Foundation of British Columbia from 1996 to 1997, she “provided funding and extended and increased grants to the BCCLA at a rate higher than the BCCLA had ever received from the Law Foundation of BC previously,” Foley alleges in his affidavit, citing a 1996 report from the BCCLA treasurer thanking the foundation for its “generous support.”

Smith, who also served as a Trudeau Foundation mentor and is now the acting Conflict of Interest Commissioner in British Columbia, declined to be interviewed by True North.

At the time Smith was hearing the Carter case, her daughter, lawyer Elin Sigurson, was working on at least one BCCLA case. She also had working relationships with several of the lawyers representing the Carter plaintiffs.

Foley alleges Sigurdson was a “staff lawyer” for the BCCLA while Carter was before the BC Supreme Court. There’s no record of her being referred to as such by the BCCLA, though the organization’s 2011 and 2012 annual reports do name Sigurdson in their lists of “lawyers who have volunteered their time to the BCCLA.”

She was also co-counsel on a high-profile solitary confinement case alongside Grace Pastine, the BCCLA’s litigation director and a member of the Carter legal team.

Sigurdson previously worked with Joseph Arvay, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs in Carter, at his firm Arvay Finlay. She also worked with Sheila Tucker, another Carter lawyer.

Sigurdson did not wish to be interviewed, but addressed several questions raised by True North in an email.

Her work with Arvay, Pastine and Tucker was all on matters “unrelated” to Carter, she said, noting her employment at Arvay Finlay ended in 2010 and the Carter trial at the BC Supreme Court didn’t take place until November 2011.

“It is…my understanding that my having worked at Arvay Finlay was raised with all counsel and no objection was raised,” she wrote.

Sigurdson said she ensured there was an ethical wall – a process for lawyers to separate themselves from cases and processes that could generate conflicts of interest – between her and Carter.

“There were no occasions on which I spoke to Madam Justice Smith or any of the litigators involved about the Carter litigation while the matter was before Justice Smith,” Sigurdson wrote. “The sole reference made to me by any of these individuals about the litigation was to convey to me at the outset that no one involved would communicate with me about the case in any way while it was before Madam Justice Smith.”

Sigurdson also said she has “never been employed by the BCCLA as a staff lawyer,” though did not respond to an email asking her to clarify her role with the BCCLA and on its cases.

The connection between Smith and the BCCLA doesn’t sit well with André Schutten of the Association for Reformed Political Action, which intervened in Carter to uphold the assisted suicide prohibition.

“There’s an old adage in law that justice must not only be done, but that it must also manifestly be seen to be done,” Schutten told True North. “And as a human rights lawyer fighting for the full and equal protection of the law for persons with disabilities, I don’t see justice done when there appears to be a conflict here.”

Schutten said there are “lots of judges in British Columbia” without close relatives attached to the plaintiffs that could have heard the case.

“So while the rules of professional conduct can allow for this ‘ethical wall’ to be erected on this particular file, it’s too big of an issue, too fundamental a policy change, for that to be sufficient,” he said, adding it would have been “prudent” for Smith to have recused herself from the start.

McLachlin’s Memoir

Beverley McLachlin said in her memoir she “had come full circle” when the Supreme Court of Canada, with her as the chief justice, unanimously avowed assisted suicide was a right in the 2015 Carter decision.

In the same book, Truth Be Told, published earlier this year, McLachlin reveals a longstanding attachment to assisted suicide that, by her own account, may have jeopardized her ability to assess it impartially.

Her previous husband Rory, while dying of cancer, asked her to help him end his life, decades before it became legal.

“One morning, as he lay in his bed in our home, he asked a special thing of me – to give him the morphine we had been doling out drop by drop in a single massive dose. ‘I want to die now,’ he said,” McLachlin wrote.

“Tears in my eyes, I left the room. I could not do it. I had always thought of myself as gutsy. I had never shrunk from unpleasant things. But this, I knew in my heart, I could not do. Because it was against the law. Because I could not physically bring myself to do it.”

So strong were her feelings about the matter that she weighed recusing herself from the 1993 Sue Rodriguez case on assisted suicide. She even approached the chief justice at the time, Antonio Lamer, with her concerns.

“I do not have settled views on the outcome, but I feel very close to it after (Rory’s death),” she recalled saying to him.

“Judges are human beings. They bring their lived experiences to the cases they decide. That is good, provided they remember that their ultimate duty is to be faithful to the law,” she quoted him as replying.

Schutten agrees that lawyers and judges will have their own opinions on contentious social and political issues, but noted McLachlin’s admissions reveal a far more fundamental issue in Canada.

“I’d say the problem is not whether she was objective enough,” Schutten said. “It is a much deeper problem, post-Charter, that allos judges to set public policy on very complex political and social issues, when that is not their job. It is Parliament’s job…. Chief Justice Lamer reminded Justice McLachlin that her ultimate duty is to be faithful to the law, but the tendency of our Supreme Court (and lower courts as well) is not to be faithful to what the law is, but rather to change the law to what they prefer it to be. That’s the problem.”

McLachlin did not sit the case out, instead pushing to strike down the assisted suicide ban, though it was ultimately upheld in a 5-4 decision. She said in a 2009 interview with Steve Paikin that her dissent would “provide seeds for future developments.”

Interestingly, in an unrelated section of that interview, she draws a much firmer line for avoiding conflicts than she appeared to have done with Rodriguez, and by extension Carter.

McLachlin said even something like support for a sports team could be enough to warrant recusal if that team was involved in a case before the Supreme Court.

“I think we try to watch out for things that are issues that could come before the courts,” she said in the interview. “And we don’t want to either take a stand or be seen as taking a stand on those issues…. We have to preserve not only our actual impartiality, but the appearance of impartiality. So we try to avoid getting involved in anything contentious in the community.”

McLachlin did not respond to several emailed requests for comment.

BC journalist fired after criticizing “corrupt, bought off media,” supporting PPC

First published at True North on October 31, 2019.

A British Columbia journalist was fired just eight days into the job, after his editors uncovered tweets critical of the mainstream media and in support of the People’s Party of Canada.

Alan Forsythe had just started work on Oct. 9 at the Hope Standard, a weekly newspaper published Black Press Media, a BC-based chain operating over 170 titles in western Canada and the United States. On Oct. 17, he received a letter from editor Ken Goudswaard terminating his employment.

“A recent review of your story on the all-candidates meeting led me to have concerns about your ability to perform the duties of a journalist in Hope,” the letter says. “Upon further investigation I learned that you had posted concerning statements on social media including, just days after you began employment with Black Press, a posting about ‘corrupt, bought off media” and which expressed partisan views with respect to federal political matters that you were covering as a journalist.”

The referenced story is about a community debate with candidates standing for election in Chilliwack—Hope. It remains available on the outlet’s website, though Forsythe’s byline does not appear on it.

The article exhibits no apparent bias. All candidates in the debate are quoted favourably. Forsythe told True North that one paragraph from his submitted version was removed, however.

That paragraph quoted PPC candidate and local teacher Rob Bogunovic as saying, “I’ve been called a Nazi and misogynist by Paul Henderson in the Chilliwack Progress,” in response to a question about his treatment by the media.

Sept. 13 tweet by Henderson directed at Bogunovic does, in fact, accuse the PPC of “the language and technique of the Nazis in the 1930s,” adding, “It’s all eerily similar.”

It was this allegation that sparked the post singled out in Forsythe’s termination letter.

“The corrupt, bought off media tell you the PPC are Nazis, a slap in the face to the candidates running and we who support them,” Forsythe tweeted. “Let the MSM know, Canadians are sick of their lies and we are taking back our country.”

The Chilliwack Progress is also owned by Black Press Media.

Forsythe relocated for the job, which required him to join Unifor. He indicated there’s a double standard in how Black Press treated his political opinions versus Henderson’s.

“I was shocked that after all the effort (Black Press) went to to get me out there, and all the effort I made in moving there, they fired (me) after a week,” Forsythe said. “I would understand a formal warning. After all…they had a reporter slandering a local high school teacher, the union I was forced to join was very publicly campaigning for the Liberals, but I’m the one summarily fired for a tweet?”

In response to an inquiry from True North, Hope Standard publisher Carly Ferguson said “Black Press Media does not comment on personnel matters.”

Forsythe said he would have worked with his employer had concerns been raised with him prior to his dismissal, including deleting the tweet in question.

“That comment was in retrospect none too wise,” he said. “However, I was thinking of the CBC, Toronto StarGlobe and Mail, where ridiculous, over-the-top, anti-PPC material was being published and ‘reported’ regularly. This wasn’t a matter of a difference of opinion on political philosophy; it was denigrating a diverse swath of Canadian citizens for daring to hold different ideas from the approved narrative. As a journalist, I find that distasteful.

A review of Forsythe’s Twitter feed for the period in which he was employed by Black Press shows numerous retweets of pro-PPC content, as well as his own criticism of CBC’s mid-election lawsuit against the Conservative Party of Canada. He also made clear that he voted for the PPC, though he told True North this wasn’t new information.

“I was tweeting (admittedly a lot) about the PPC before I was hired in the run up to the election,” he said. “It was an exhaustive interview process, lasting three weeks. Since I was already tweeting PPC support, I didn’t think too much about it.”

Forsythe pointed out that Unifor, which represents thousands of Canadian journalists, was tweeting explicitly anti-Conservative messages throughout the election.

“I’ve been a journalist for a while now, working in newsrooms that were always, and I mean always, uniformly left,” he said. “I’ve never made a secret of my right-leaning biases, which I feel challenges me to be as balanced as I can in reporting news.”

“The proof is in the pudding,” Forsythe said, pointing to a lengthy interview he did with former Treasury Board president Reg Alcock at the height of the sponsorship scandal.

“This despite the fact I had written anti-Liberal columns,” he said. “But I’d interviewed Alcock several months earlier and had covered other stories…so he felt I was a fair and balanced reporter.”

Forsythe said he aims to launch a news-focused podcast, though he hasn’t ruled out legal action against Black Press.

Brampton Liberal candidate accused of accepting $50,000 in illegal cash donations

First published at True North on October 19, 2019.

A source who volunteered for Brampton North Liberal candidate Ruby Sahota in 2015 says Sahota personally stapled illegally donated campaign cash to membership applications in the lead-up to her nomination.

The source, who spoke to True North on the condition they not be named due to fear of retribution said that thousands of dollars in $5 and $10 bills were attached to Liberal Party of Canada membership forms by Sahota and a volunteer. Sahota’s campaign then submitted these applications to the Liberal party.

Sahota won the nomination, then went on to win her seat for the Liberals in 2015. She’s now seeking re-election.

True North has also obtained court documents alleging Sahota’s 2015 nomination and general election campaigns illegally received $50,000 in cash from a restaurant owned by Sahota’s family, as well as $17,000 in undeclared expenses incurred on the restaurant’s credit card.

The allegation appears in a divorce application filed by Sahota’s former sister-in-law, Satinder Kaur Johal, against Sahota’s brother, Rajveer Singh.

Also named as respondents in the file are Sahota’s and Singh’s parents, Harbans Singh and Surinder Kaur Singh, because of their involvement with the restaurant and other commercial ventures. 

Johal and Singh, who are now divorced, owned a Brampton Fionn MacCool’s franchise with Harbans Singh.

“In or around 2014, my husband’s sister, namely, Rabinder Ruby Sahota, decided to run as a nomination candidate for the Liberal party in Brampton-North (sic),” Johal alleges in the court filing. 

“My husband, without my consent gave her $10,000.00 for her nomination membership and spent $40,000.00 for her election. This money came by way of cash transactions at the restaurant as well as payment through his father’s MBNA Credit Card in the amount of $17,000.00. Even that amount was paid from the restaurant during the marriage.”

The case never went to trial and these allegations have not been proven in court. 

Sahota won the Liberal nomination at a March 2015 meeting that saw more than 3,700 Liberal members of Brampton North show up to vote. Reports at the time said this set a new record for the most members to vote at a nomination meeting in Ontario. 

While the Liberal party removed its membership fee in 2016, at the time of Sahota’s nomination it cost $10 to join the party: all membership forms required would-be members to affirm they were paying with personal funds and would not be reimbursed.

Donations to nomination campaigns are capped at $1,600 per person. Corporate donations are illegal, and all contributions over $200 must be publicly disclosed.

Sahota’s 2015 nomination campaign’s return filed with Elections Canada says the campaign spent $16,827. Most of this went towards advertising and bulk mailing, though a $3,616 payment to Sahota’s father, Harbans Singh, is listed only as “VARIOUS.”

The campaign claimed just under $22,000 in monetary and non-monetary contributions from 17 donors.

True North has chosen not to publish the entire court record because it contains a number of family details not relevant to Sahota or her campaigns.

Numerous inquiries to Sahota’s personal email address and campaign media representative went unanswered, as did text messages, phone calls and an email to Sahota’s brother.

Johal, who works as a lawyer in Brampton, declined to comment.

Green advocacy group says $171,999 pro-carbon tax ad campaign “not partisan”

First published at True North on October 18, 2019.

The commissioner of Canada’s elections won’t “speculate” as to whether a six-figure sum spent advertising pro-carbon tax messages to Canadians violates the new third party rules, True North has learned. 

Canadians for Clean Prosperity, a green energy advocacy group, has put $171,999 into Facebook advertising since June, urging Canadians to vote against political parties opposed to a carbon tax. Its posts also make clear that the Conservative Party of Canada is the only one of the four major parties against a carbon tax.

Facebook’s new ad registry contains 1,012 separate advertisements from Clean Prosperity’s Fair Path Forward page. Most of the advertising ceased in early September, though $151 was spent promoting ‘get out the vote’ posts between Oct. 9 and Oct. 15, the registry shows.

Neither Canadians for Clean Prosperity nor Fair Path Forward is registered with Elections Canada as a third party, a requirement for organizations or individuals that spend more than $500 engaging in partisan activities, election surveys, partisan advertising or election advertising.

Clean Prosperity’s executive director says the organization’s activities fall outside of the third party legislation.

“Clean Prosperity and Fair Path Forward both did not register with Elections Canada, as the content of our ads is not partisan,” Michael Bernstein said in an email to True North. “Our ads, which you can see in the Facebook Ads library, have been focused on issues – namely carbon taxes and climate change. The only ads we’ve run since the writ dropped are about the importance of considering the environment when voting.”

Elections Canada’s website says “organic social media campaigns” can count as partisan activity.

“An activity promotes or opposes a political entity by naming it, using the party’s logo or showing a photograph of the candidate, for example. In some situations, even without directly referring to a party or a candidate, an activity could be perceived as partisan,” the website says.

“Issue advertising” – defined by Elections Canada as “advertising that takes a position on an issue that is clearly associated with a candidate or party, without referring to the party, candidate or other actor” – is regulated in the election period, but not the pre-election period, which spanned from June 30 until the day before the writs were issued.

The bulk of Fair Path Forward’s online advertising appeared during the pre-election period. While most of the ads are generic in nature, asking voters to think of the planet when casting their ballots or questioning “why…there are still some politicians against putting a price on carbon pollution,” others specifically reference the Conservatives.

In June, Fair Path Forward advertised a post linking to a Toronto Star op-ed saying “Andrew Scheer’s climate plan will be less efficient and more expensive.”

In July, the page advertised a CBC article about a Clean Prosperity report that took aim at the Conservative party’s climate plan.

Clean Prosperity published a press release in September, titled “Conservative Party releases highly deceptive ad about the carbon tax and rebate.”

In the release, which was picked up by numerous news organizations, Clean Prosperity doesn’t just criticize the Conservative position on the carbon tax, but quotes Bernstein as accusing the CPC of “fake facts” and deception.

“Using fake facts to attack climate policies is not much better than climate denial,” Bernstein says in the release. “I would encourage the Conservative Party of Canada to take down this deceptive and misleading ad, and instead focus their energy on improving their own climate plan.”

Bernstein, who is one of the two spokespeople for the Fair Path Forward campaign, also praised the Liberals in a separate statement published the same day as the one about the Conservative carbon tax ad.

“The Liberal Party of Canada’s announcement that they intend to reach a net-zero emissions economy by 2050 is a big deal,” he wrote. “For the first time in Canada, we now have a climate target from one of the two leading parties that, if met, would ensure we’re doing our part to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

In the statement he urged the “Conservatives to revisit their climate plan,” citing Clean Prosperity’s July report accusing the Conservative climate plan of leading to increased emissions and added costs.

That 15-page report, co-authored by Bernstein, focuses exclusively only the Conservative Party of Canada’s “A Real Plan to Protect Our Environment” policy paper. Clean Prosperity did not publish any similar reviews of any other party’s plan.

If the Conservatives don’t comply, Bernstein says “voters should take that into account when deciding who they’re going to support in October’s election.”

These are “quotes supporting the carbon tax and/or increased climate ambition, including correcting the record on a misleading statement about the carbon tax,” Bernstein told True North. “They are issue-based stances, not partisan ones.”

Bernstein published an op-ed in the National Observer on Oct. 11, grading the various political parties’ plans to cut carbon pollution. The Conservatives came out on bottom with a D score, while the Liberals and NDP were tied in first place with their respective B grades. (The Green party came in third with a B-).

An Elections Canada spokesperson declined to comment on whether Fair Path Forward and Clean Prosperity are in violation of the third party rules, simply stating that “any individual or organization that incurs more than $500 in expenses on regulated activities must register as a third party with Elections Canada.”

The $500 doesn’t just apply to advertising, but all expenses supporting the legislation’s four regulated activities.

The Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections declined to address the legality of Clean Prosperity’s activities.

“Our office doesn’t speculate about the legality of a particular issue,” a spokesperson said in an email. “It may also be useful to know that the Act does not regulate the content of advertising, except in very limited circumstances.”

The spokesperson reiterated the requirement for organizations spending more than $500 to register with Elections Canada as a third party.

Clean Prosperity’s board chair and founder, Greg Kiessling, has a long history of political contributions, in particular to the Liberals.

Elections Canada’s donor database shows that Kiessling has given to the Liberal, NDP, Green and Conservative parties. In 2016 and 2017 he contributed a combined $1775.00 to Michael Chong’s leadership campaign. (Chong was the only Conservative leadership candidate supporting a carbon tax). He also gave the Conservative Party of Canada $629.00 in 2016.

Since 2014, however, Kiessling has donated $6798.27 to the Liberals, the database shows. He also made a $5000.00 contribution to Stephane Dion’s leadership campaign in 2006. His most recent donation was $1600 – the legal maximum – to the Liberals in May of this year.

Bernstein does not appear in Elections Canada’s donor database, though someone with the same name has made several donations to the Conservatives.

Salim Mansur’s battle against Islamism

First published at True North on October 16, 2019.

There’s no such thing as a simple answer when it comes to Salim Mansur.

The academic and journalist-turned-political candidate wants every question and every issue raised to be understood in what he says is the “necessary context.”

It makes for long conversations, though no doubt thoughtful ones.

Mansur is the People’s Party of Canada candidate in London North Centre, one of the highest profile and most vaunted candidates of Maxime Bernier’s fledgling populist party. Though this wasn’t the path Mansur had envisioned for himself even four months ago.

In June, Mansur was nine months into a campaign for the Conservative Party of Canada’s nomination in the same riding when he received a terse email from the party’s executive director notifying him his candidacy had been “disallowed.” No reasons were provided, though Mansur told me in a later interview that the Conservative campaign manager, Hamish Marshall, had told him there were concerns his past writings on Islam would be slammed in the media as “Islamophobic.”

Instead, the Conservatives acclaimed Sarah Bokhari, a Muslim woman from outside London, as their candidate.

It would seem like a blow against racism to replace a so-called “Islamophobic” candidate with a Muslim one, except there’s one problem. Mansur is, himself, a Muslim as well. His decades of writings and public statements have been in opposition to Islamism, not Islam itself.

The disqualification from the Conservative party and subsequent PPC candidacy is the latest iteration of a battle Mansur has been waging for decades. Or as he describes it, one being waged against him.

I’ve known Mansur for several years, meeting him first when I was a student at the University of Western Ontario, from which he retired last year. Though I was never in one of his classes, I sought him out because of my familiarity with his work. When I launched the podcast that ultimately led to my career in radio, he was its first guest.

He’s always been a fearless and credible commentator on immigration and multiculturalism, even when I’ve disagreed with his conclusions. This is why I was happy to assist him, as a friend, not in my capacity with True North, when he launched his nomination campaign. In the interests of disclosure, I’ve had no role in his PPC campaign, nor any other campaigns during the election period, but I consider Mansur a friend and a great Canadian.

I conducted a series of interviews with Mansur for this article both on the phone and in his downtown London campaign office.


Just over a month after being disqualified by the Conservative Party of Canada, Salim Mansur received a standing ovation when he was announced as the People’s Party of Canada candidate by Maxime Bernier himself in a London hotel conference room.

“We in the People’s party with Maxime Bernier are the only people in Canada, at this time in our history endangered by globalism and Islamism, fully prepared to engage in a national conversation on the subject,” Mansur said in his nomination speech.

Though this wasn’t always his position. Just three months prior, he published a video on YouTube entitled “The Conservative Party Stands Up For Canada.”

In it, Mansur makes the pitch that the Conservatives are not only the best choice for Canadians to defeat Justin Trudeau, but the only choice.

“I am confident the Conservative party under Andrew Scheer’s leadership understands the threats confronting Canadians, and has the resolve to counter them,” Mansur says before listing numerous sources of “pride” for him in the CPC platform, from fiscal management to tackling mass migration to standing up for freedom of speech.

“Let me remind you that since the act of Confederation in 1867 there are only two parties that have governed Canada: the Conservative party and the Liberal party,” he says. “That is not about to change, and any change that goes to weaken and divide the Conservative party can and only will benefit the Liberal party.”

Despite the apparent contradiction in these two speeches, Mansur explains it with his own take on Ronald Reagan’s famous quip that he never left the Democratic party, but rather it left him.

“I didn’t leave the Conservative Party of Canada,” Mansur says. “It was the Conservative party that kicked me out.”

The party has never provided any details officially about why Mansur was disqualified, though in a televised London North Centre debate, Sarah Bokhari, the Conservative candidate, said “Mr. Mansur was disqualified by the Conservative party because he’s been saying some questionable things for the ethnic communities.”

Mansur, who’s devoted his career to combatting radical Islam within small corners of the Muslim community and the western world more broadly, says his expulsion from the race is evidence of an Islamist infiltration into the political system.

“The word given to me for why I would not be the candidate is because I’m Islamophobic, Mansur says. “So from there you can draw the inferences that the leadership is bent upon appeasing the very people who for 20 years have been hounding me, which is the Muslim Brotherhood…. It is very clear to me that the party didn’t want me because then I would be, in a sense, the point man taking on the Muslim Brotherhood. But the party doesn’t want to discuss that.”

“The party is in full mode of appeasing the Muslim Brotherhood,” Mansur charges. “The four establishment parties – Liberal, Conservative, the NDP and the Green – are in full appeasement of the Islamists in the country. Except for PPC.”

Without any official statement from the Conservative Party of Canada, it’s difficult to accept or dispute Mansur’s interpretation of things. It’s well documented that the Muslim Brotherhood’s legitimate-seeming organizations in Canada and the United States have no doubt been embraced in the political process. However, it’s also plausible that the Conservative leadership, wishing to run a safe, centrist campaign, simply wanted to avoid a candidate who would obviously force the Conservatives to take a stand on the issue of Islamism.

It’s a necessary discussion in Canada, though clearly not an easy one.

Though Mansur’s critics may characterize him as being on the fringes, that simply isn’t accurate. His books on multiculturalism and Islamic reformation have been widely cited by academics and politicians. He was frequently called upon by the previous Conservative government to testify before various parliamentary committees.

Less than two years ago, Mansur was given an award on the Senate floor by Conservative senator Linda Frum, recognizing him for his work to promote interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims.

Mansur’s Conservative nomination campaign was endorsed by a long list of prominent Conservatives, including former national campaign manager Tom Flanagan and former member of parliament Diane Ablonczy.

This support shouldn’t surprise anyone given how long Mansur has been involved in Conservative politics.

In his first two elections as a Canadian citizen, he voted for Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals. But in 1984, he cast a ballot for Brian Mulroney. Since then, he’s been a stalwart rightward voter, even joining the Progressive Conservatives in 1988 before aligning with Preston Manning’s burgeoning Reform movement.

“I voted Liberal, but things changed,” he says. “My thinking changed. My understanding changed.”

Mulroney’s support for free trade was what initially galvanized Mansur’s support of the PCs, though it was Manning’s interest in Mansur’s writing on multiculturalism that sparked a friendship between the two. This eventually led to Mansur running for the Canadian Alliance in 2000, then supporting the campaign that brought the Alliance and Progressive Conservatives together as the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.


Mansur was born in Calcutta in 1951, just a few years after the Indian partition created the Muslim-dominated state of Pakistan. It was tensions from that partition that led to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 that would threaten Mansur’s life. This not only triggered his move to Canada, but also shaped his outlook on the clash between liberty and the radicals seeking to upend it.

“In my teenage years, I lived through horrendous military dictatorship that turned into a genocide,” Mansur says. “To me this was not an abstract question sitting in some academic library and writing about it. This was a real question…. We are so privileged in Canada. We are so privileged in the United States. For children growing up here, all of this is abstract. The real concern is about people being able to live their life as God has given them the right to live their life – according to their choices, according to the values they treasure, according to the tradition that they want to defend.”

Those rights have been under “systematic attack” throughout the 20th century, Mansur says, whether it was communist China, the Soviet Union, or Arab dictatorships in Africa and the Middle East.

“We have repeatedly seen war – genocide. I spoke about that, and wrote about that having experienced it,” he says.

Mansur breaks away to talk about the work of political philosophers John Milton, John Locke and Bertrand Russell – authors he began reading as a teenager even before coming to Canada.

“I read them with the lived experience,” he says. “I didn’t read them as an academic or an undergraduate or graduate student in a classroom with professors. I read them as I was going through the experience. I was reading Russell when I was in my teenage years, seeing what was happening with the massacres taking place, and the repression taking place. I, too, was under repression. My friends were killed. My family members were attacked. I was attacked. I survived, somehow.”

Members of his immediate family were killed, however. He ultimately came to Canada in 1974 as a war refugee, sponsored by an aunt who was living here. The dire situation in his native land got his refugee file accelerated.

That slaughter has a death toll of as many as three million people – making it one of the most deadly conflicts of the 20th century, sandwiched between the Holocaust and the massacre at the hands of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

“It was Islamists,” Mansur says. “I came to Canada. I went to university. I did all of that. And then, suddenly, I see the very people who had brought the disaster in the part of the world from where I fled were now ensconced right here in Canada. So I started talking about it. I started writing about it.”

As the Taliban in Afghanistan was gaining steam in the 1990s, Mansur was, as an academic and a journalist, closely monitoring the impact on south Asia. Afghanistan became the nesting ground for al Qaeda, birthing the 9/11 attacks.

Mansur understood Muslims needed to be the most prominent voices criticizing terrorism. He was shocked when people in the mosques would tell him to keep quiet.

“People came around and said, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t talk about this,’” Mansur says. “Especially the pro-Pakistani mosques, because of the Pakistani connection to Saudi Arabia…. These people in the mosque were basically fundamentalists – those who wanted to hold onto or take back the country as the Taliban was doing with Sharia law.”

While Sharia law is a well-known concept now, at the time it was just the subject of internal discussions amongst Muslims, Mansur says.

“I was opposed to that, but I was in the mosque, I would go to the mosque, I would engage with people, but they told me to stand down or cool down.”

Then came September 11.


You often hear people described as 9/11 conservatives – liberals who moved to the right when they saw the threat of Islamic terror. Mansur was a 9/11 pariah – a Muslim who realized the complacency, or in some rare cases complicity, of western Muslims in the radical Islamist current sweeping the world.

When Mansur ran for the Canadian Alliance a year prior, he found a great deal of support from the Muslim community. Many were conservatives; others knew and supported him as a friend; some were just eager to see Muslim voices represented in Parliament.

“Looking back, it was as if on a dime the world changed. On September 11, 2001, everything changed,” Mansur says. “It pushed me out of the (Muslim) community here in London.”

The more radical-minded Islamists within the Muslim community wanted an insular, exclusive society with their own laws and their own values.

“I was on the other side,” Mansur says, explaining how he felt – and still feels – people should engrain themselves in Canadian society.

“I’m a Muslim, but I’m reconciled with the modern world. In fact, that is the critical split inside the Muslim world – those who want to bring the Muslim world of the 13th century into the 21st century, and those who want to build a democratic society. That’s what I was trying to make these people understand. Their children are going to grow up as Canadians. Islam is their personal faith, but they have to be part of the Canadian society.”

The pushback from the Muslim community got so strong that Mansur, who is still a devout and observant Muslim, had to withdraw from the local mosque. It was either that or shut up about radicalism, though Mansur says the latter was never an option.

“To me it was a responsibility to warn my fellow Canadians that this is now the problems of the Middle East and the problems of the third world coming right into our society,” he says. “How are we going to confront this?”

Confronting this evil has come at a cost, however. Mansur has faced death threats, not to mention threats to his livelihood by activists insisting on de-platforming him.

In 2006, Mohamed Elmasry of the now-defunct Canadian Islamic Congress sent a formal complaint to the University of Western Ontario accusing Mansur of “hate-literature” and demanding the administration “instruct” him “to refrain immediately from promoting himself and his opinion columns through by (sic) associating them, in print or broadcast media, with one of Canada’s great universities.”

The school, to its credit, did not buckle. Two years later, Elmasry sent another complaint to Western, calling Mansur an “embarrassment” to the university and urging the school to investigate his “classroom approach and research methods.”

As taxing as the ongoing opposition is, Mansur says it’s only strengthened what he sees as a moral obligation to speak up about freedom and the fight to preserve it.

“It became the very principle upon which I stake my own philosophy,” he says. “My anchor – my worldview – is of freedom.”

For the last 30 years, he saw that anchor as having a foothold in the Conservative party, which he always understood to be rooted in the classical liberal tradition, even with the oft-cited big tent coalition of red Tories, blue Tories, libertarians and social conservatives.

Mansur says blue Tories like him are being forced out.


It’s easy to be skeptical of this claim given that Scheer himself comes from the blue Tory side of the conservative movement, having worked in both the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties before being elected as a Conservative member of parliament in 2004.

Scheer is also a social conservative, albeit one who’s worked to mute the pro-life presence in the Conservative caucus and slate of candidates.

Hamish Marshall, the Conservative campaign manager, is often criticized by left-wing conspiracy theorists as being on the “far-right” for his past directorship with Ezra Levant’s Rebel News.

Despite this, a belief that the Conservative party is no longer a conservative party is a cornerstone of the PPC’s existence. Mansur says even in the weeks before his candidacy was disallowed by the CPC he had started to grow concerned about a number of decisions the party had made.

Chief among them was the Conservatives’ treatment of their own their own MP, Michael Cooper. Cooper was the vice-chair of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, but was booted from the post and had his words edited out of the official transcript after he rebuked a Muslim committee witness’ claims about conservatism being linked to violent killers.

“That gave me a sense that this party has lost whatever little remained of that blue Tory, small-c conservative (identity) with which I was associated,” Mansur says. “So I think the fair analysis is that I did not change. The party has changed. That is, the party under this leadership has changed. Hopefully a new leadership will bring it back.”

He thinks many of the Conservative members who backed Maxime Bernier in the 2017 leadership race will support the People’s party, though he’s aware that many will stay loyal to the Conservatives. This was a reality with which Mansur had to reckon even on his own campaign team.

“I said to my people in London that I am considering running for the PPC,” Mansur says of the period following his disqualification by the Conservatives. “I’m not going to allow the CPC to dictate my life and my politics. My friends who were with me in this campaign for the past 10 months, they made their decisions. Some decided to break away from me and remain loyal to the Conservative party and others chose to follow me and come with me and my campaign.”


The campaign has been far from uneventful. In the early days of his candidacy, Mansur’s son died in a car accident in British Columbia. Mansur learned this at the PPC’s convention in Ottawa, where he was due to give a speech.

His campaign signs have been vandalized, and his office windows broken.

And he was barred from an “all candidates” event at the London Muslim Mosque, where he used to pray.

The mosque hosted debates for the various London ridings’ election candidates, excluding from each one the local People’s party candidate. The reason, according to a mosque statement, is that the PPC “does not respect our religion and our people.”

“It is one thing to have differences of opinion on matters of foreign and domestic policy which go to the heart of the notion of democracy and why we have election campaigns. However, it is another thing entirely to show a complete lack of respect to an entire religion. And since our community has felt the wrath of Islamophobia and hate, we cannot give a platform to a party that cannot respect our faith or our people,” the statement said.

Call it a fitting twist for a man whose greatest frustration seems to be that no one wants to listen to what he sees as the pressing issues of our time.


Mansur relishes his status as a “public intellectual.” Through our conversations he often refers me to sections of his books. It’s not uncommon to feel as though you’ve wound up in an academic lecture while speaking with him. Like anyone who enters politics, he feels he has something to offer, though it doesn’t come from the opportunistic place it does for so many others. It’s clear Mansur has a heart for Canada – and is driven more by frustration than arrogance that his warnings about Islamism and globalism haven’t been heeded by the Conservatives.

Mansur is convinced that the Conservatives will not win the election. He hopes for a scenario in which the People’s party has enough members of parliament so as to be able to drive the agenda rather than the power going to the left-wing parties.

For the PPC to have success, Mansur says conservative voters need to get over what is at times an obsession with beating the Liberals.

“I think the bulk of the Conservative party members are obsessed with the idea that the priority for the country is to defeat Liberals,” he says. “That’s the compromise that they’re making. They’re bending or softening their position for the larger context that the Liberals have to be defeated, and that any sort of wavering on that issue will only weaken the coalition that makes up the CPC.”

He wants to see the Liberals defeated too, but notes that the People’s party is more concerned with what replaces the Liberals than the Conservatives are. If current trends keep up, Mansur says “you can kiss goodbye in our lifetime a conservative party forming a government in Canada.”

While he wants to be elected, he doesn’t see that as being essential for his campaign to be a success.

“I don’t see myself as a winner or loser,” he says. “I see myself as contributing to the conversation, and then it’s up to the people.”