MLA takes aim at UCP for ‘crooked party politics’
Gill says ‘sham’ probe resulted in his exit from party over alleged vote impropriety
EDMONTON A former UCP MLA used a rare point of privilege in the Alberta legislature Tuesday to slam the United Conservative Party over what he labelled “crooked and racist nomination politics.”
MLA Prab Gill left the UCP caucus in July after claims of improper vote handling at the founding meeting of the UCP Calgary-North East constituency association.
Retired judge Ted Carruthers investigated the matter at the behest of the UCP. His report led to Gill’s exit. At the time, Gill said he didn’t agree with all of Carruthers’s conclusions, but accepted the findings as a “fair, independent process.”
That changed Tuesday when Gill, now the Independent member for Calgary- Greenway, slammed the investigation as a “sham” that didn’t interview key witnesses.
The UCP dismissed Gill’s claims as a case of “sour grapes.”
Gill raised the point of privilege Tuesday after NDP house leader Brian Mason brought up the ballot box issue in the legislature last week. Gill said he wanted a chance to clear his name in Hansard.
“The accusations against me are all part of crooked party politics inside the UCP,” Gill said.
After the Carruthers report was issued, Gill said Tuesday, he was told the UCP would “use its massive financial resources to bankrupt me in the courts” if he fought to defend his name.
“In my weakness I caved and agreed to quietly sit as an independent. But by not defending myself to my fullest ability I left the impression that I had done something wrong,” he said.
Gill said allegations of ballot impropriety occurred after he was ordered by a UCP operative to run only in “ethnically Indian areas in Calgary” following a boundary redraw of his Calgary-Greenway riding. “We all know that politics can be dirty and that leaders and their back-room operatives in the establishment parties have run the process for their own interests. The Tory elite bosses of today are as bad as they have ever been,” Gill said.
The report was never released publicly, but Postmedia obtained a copy Tuesday. In it, Carruthers outlines something of a he-saidshe-said affair, in which a volunteer described seeing Gill remove a pile of ballots and asked him to return them.
Gill “absolutely denied” taking the ballots, Carruthers wrote, but the retired judge found “on a balance of probabilities” that the MLA removed them.
Carruthers concluded that while he didn’t know where the ballots went, he was “unable to accept Mr. Gill’s position.”
Gill said nothing in the report contradicts what he said in the legislature.
Matt Solberg, UCP director of communications, said Gill’s accusations are “without merit.”
“The circumstances of his departure ... are well known and were well reported,” he wrote in an email.