Ex-Liberal candidate says context missing from posts
Cheryl Thomas wishes she hadn’t apologized and quit so quickly
Less than three weeks before election day, Cheryl Thomas got a 6 a.m. call from Ottawa that changed everything.
“What’s this about a black Santa?” she was asked.
After hours of conversation among Ottawa, Vancouver and Victoria campaign heads, it was decided that because of old socialmedia comments Thomas had made about the conflict in the Middle East, she could no longer be the Liberal candidate in Victoria.
“And then they cut ties,” said Thomas, who quickly issued an apology and shut down her campaign. “I was backed into a corner and had nowhere to go.”
Because the Elections Canada deadline to withdraw from the race had passed, the party could not replace her. (She ended up in third place behind the NDP’s Murray Rankin and Green Jo-Ann Roberts, with 8,482 votes.)
Within hours, Thomas would be portrayed as anti-Muslim, antiIsraeli, and, if that wasn’t enough, a racist. She calls it very hurtful cyber-bullying.
Her old posts were shared by the online satirical site The True North Times. By day’s end, those comments would play out in the mainstream media.
Thomas, a business consultant who teaches at the University of Victoria’s Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, had run a master of business administration program in Iran for eight years.
She also worked in Dubai, Iran, Jordan, Bahrain, Syria and Qatar, returning in 2012.
In a July 2014 post, Thomas wrote about what she called the other side of the Israel-Palestine conflict, because “we were fed the Israeli/British/American version ....”
She described meeting some Palestinians who were forced from their olive farms. “The oppressed of the Warsaw ghettos and the concentration camps have become the oppressors, keeping the Palestinians who are left in their ‘homeland’ in ghettos where they limit their access to education and stop most opportunities for them to make a living,” she wrote.
A July 2013 post reads: “Unfortunately, now the mosques are used as brainwashing stations, desecrating those holy places.”
And the nail in the coffin: In a December 2012 post, she wrote: “Santa has to be white!!! You can’t have a brown guy with a beard sneaking into your house in the middle of the night! You’d be calling the bomb squad!”
“It was all out of context,” said Thomas. “A character assassination.”
When Thomas referred to mosques as “brainwashing stations,” she referred to “some” mosques in rural Pakistan.
As for the Santa joke, it came from Indo-Canadian comedian Russell Peters, who uses humour to expose racist stereotypes. The Facebook thread starts: “It’s Russell Peters Christmas on CTV - LOL!!!!”
A strong believer that both Israelis and Palestinians are responsible for making peace, she wanted to explain the context of her posts, but couldn’t risk a scandal that would distract from the national campaign.
“The race was too close, the polls showed it was a third, a third, and a third for the Liberals, NDP and Conservatives.” Her imagined nightmare? Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, in B.C. at the time, having to answer for her.
Thomas, a Liberal for three decades, swallowed her pride. “We were sacrificed, but I agreed with it, as a party person.”
Looking back, Thomas regrets that she did not first consult her campaign team, friends, family, students and Liberal supporters. She regrets her apology because it said there was no place for her comments in political discourse, even though she defends free speech.
Some supporters said she could have explained her remarks and it might have blown over in 48 to 72 hours. The majority, she said, were angry with her decision.
She heard from Liberals upset that she left them without an active candidate and students who asked “whatever happened to free speech?”
She had vowed to reserve comment until after the election. She fled to family in Alberta.
“There was no 72 hours to deal with this,” said Thomas, one of several federal election candidates forced to step down over socialmedia posts. “It was really a lonely time. I was in shock.”
Thomas also had to explain herself to the dean of the University of Victoria’s business school. Later, she addressed her MBA students.
The moral of the story, Thomas said, is not about scrubbing clean one’s online presence, but what happens when all future politicians do so — too afraid to state their opinions and defend them as part of critical political conversations.