Charges against PC activist dropped
Rida Ali faced five counts of criminal harassment after complaints over texts
Prosecutors have dropped criminal harassment charges laid against a young Progressive Conservative activist during the party’s leadership campaign earlier this year, the Star has learned.
Rida Ali, 23, faced five counts of harassment after workers for former MPP Christine Elliott’s leadership campaign received threatening text messages and complained to police in February.
Ali, who had volunteered on the leadership campaign of Lambton-Kent-Middlesex MPP Monte McNaughton and worked briefly in his Queen’s Park office as a part-timer, has agreed to a $500 peace bond and to have no contact with the complainants for the next 12 months.
“I’m happy that the Crown withdrew the charges against me without having to prove my innocence at trial,” Ali said in a statement to the Star.
Her lawyer, Marco Sciarra, said the charges were dropped last Thursday at the College Park courthouse.
“We were confident that after calling into question the integrity of the police investigation against Ms. Ali that she would be exonerated at trial. She is completely innocent of the allegations against her.”
Crown attorney Alan Spiegel referred questions about the case to the Ministry of the Attorney General, which said the charges were dropped after Ali agreed to the peace bond.
“In all criminal matters, the Crown is required to assess the strength of a case throughout a prosecution, and is duty-bound to withdraw charges if there is no reasonable prospect of conviction, or if it is not in the public interest to proceed,” spokesman Brendan Crawley said in an email.
“In this case, the Crown carefully considered the totality of the evi- dence and circumstances of the case in recommending the proposed resolution to the court.”
Ali claimed in her statement that she was also the subject of troubling and anonymous messages on her own mobile phone — including threats of sexual assault.
“I hope, in future political cam- paigns, that matters such as this are taken seriously, and that no woman is forced to fear for her safety due to anonymous threats of rape and other violence as were myself and others involved in the leadership campaigns,” she wrote.
Ali was critical of the way the probe was handled by authorities.
“It is unfortunate that the investigators failed to recognize or appreciate that I, too, was the recipient of the same threatening text messages, and was in the presence of many other campaign team members and staff when the messages were received . . . many of whom were prepared to come to my defence in court,” she added.
“The most troubling thing is that as a result of the charges against me, no further investigation was done into determining the identity of the true assailant.”
Police investigated and laid four charges of criminal harassment-communicate and one of criminal harassment-threaten early last March, with the courts subsequently releasing Ali on $1,000 bail. A publication ban was imposed on details of the text messages.
During her Queen’s Park sojourn, Ali accompanied McNaughton to some leadership events and to a rally against Liberal government’s updated sex education curriculum, where the MPP spoke to the crowd.
McNaughton, who later dropped out of the leadership race and threw his support to eventual winner Patrick Brown, suspended Ali from his Queen’s Park office after her arrest.
“We’re obviously looking forward to moving past this,” he said after hearing the charges were dropped.
Prior to working for McNaughton, Ali worked as a chase producer at the now-defunct Sun News Network and was an associate news editor at the University of Toronto Varsity Newspaper. She was given the Conrad Black Award for Conservative Journalism by the Ontario PC Campus Association two years ago.
Ali was appointed director of events for the Ontario PC Youth Association by the youth executive at their annual general meeting last February.
She said she no longer holds that post and no longer has any work affiliations with Queen’s Park as she looks for future employment opportunities.