http://Canada’s Conservatives Welcome Extremists, Reject Reformers by Jakob Glogauer
The Conservative Party of Canada might favor extremist Muslims in order to secure more votes and broaden the party “base.” All the while, Muslim reformers with a long history of loyalty to the party are being rejected, and not chosen as candidates. Party members who oppose advancing Sharia law and who run for leadership positions are disqualified.
Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and current Conservative leadership candidate Peter MacKay co-founded the modern Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) based on the promotion of “freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” Canada’s right-wing, however, has recently been consorting with Islamists patently opposed to these fundamental ideals.
Across the Western world, extremist Muslims have long partnered with the Left, perhaps out of a shared partiality for identity politics; or, at the very least, because progressive movements can easily be exploited to advance radical causes. Now, however, even the Conservative establishment is courting Islamist activists and politicians. At the federal level, frontrunners in the CPC leadership race, Peter MacKay and Erin O’Toole, have each welcomed prominent extremist activists into their campaigns.
In January of this year, O’Toole appointed Walied Soliman as his campaign chair. Throughout his professional career, Soliman has supported applying the Sharia banking system in Canada. In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Soliman dismissed concerns that a Sharia-compliant economy would violate Canada’s secular system. “This is simply about market demand and interest,” he said. He may, of course, support more than that.
One LGBT group has criticized O’Toole for welcoming an advocate of Sharia into his campaign. Why, they asked, is Soliman “unable to publicly reject sharia law despite repeated attempts for clarification. Does he believe in sharia application to #LGBTQ people?”
O’Toole replied, “I will always oppose any threat to those principles [of “freedom, democracy, and the rule of law”], here and at home, including Sharia law. Any suggestion otherwise is preposterous, tinfoil hat thinking. The fact I even have to say this is profoundly sad.”