Nomination hoax stings Tories
‘Art project’ intended to ‘mess with’ PM
MONTREAL — At first glance, the face put forward by Conservative candidate Chris Lloyd on social media was that of a committed Tory looking to unseat Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.
He posted photos of himself alongside Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Conservative cabinet ministers and enthusiastically shared the party’s talking points.
But it did not take much digging to reveal that something was unusual about this candidacy. His cheerleading was over the top. “Keep foreign criminals out of canada (sic)! And build more prisons for local criminals!” he wrote in February while sharing a Conservative party message on foreign criminals. “We proud!” he wrote last month above a report that the government would have to slash its contingency fund to balance the budget.
In fact, Lloyd is a wellknown artist who in the past has made no secret of his opposition to Conservative policies. During a lecture in March, a month after he was acclaimed Conservative candidate in the Montreal riding of Papineau, he acknowledged that his candidacy was an art project designed to “mess with” Harper’s Conservatives.
On Tuesday, after Lloyd’s hoax was exposed by the CBC, party spokesmen could not even bring themselves to name Lloyd when they informed reporters by email, “This individual has resigned as the Conservative party candidate.” The spokesmen did not respond to requests for additional comment.
Lloyd, who describes himself on Twitter as “personal confidante to the Prime Minister of Canada since January 1, 2001,” changed his profile Tuesday to read “former candidate.”
Originally from Saint John, N.B., Lloyd lives in Montreal and has a blog called Dear PM detailing his project of communicating with the prime minister daily, going back to 2001 when Jean Chrétien was in power.
The biography on the blog lists his occupation as “secret agent” and his interests as conservative politics and art.
At a talk Lloyd gave in March in Fredericton, he said he was committed to defeating Trudeau in Montreal’s Papineau riding. But he had other motivations.
“I’ve been telling the prime minister about this whole thing from, like, the get-go with all sorts of imaginings and fantasies and options, like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to become the candidate, I’m going to like mess with your party.’ I’m totally, like, going to wait till the writ is dropped then it’s going to be party time,” he said, according to the CBC report.
An article on Lloyd’s talk, in the St. Thomas University newspaper The New Brunswick Beacon, began, “With the intentions of outwitting the Conservatives’ public relations machine and (upstaging) Justin Trudeau in his own backyard, Montreal-based performance artist Chris Lloyd has hijacked his local electoral riding and become the Conservative candidate for Papineau.”
Despite listing his occupation as secret agent, Lloyd’s project has not been particularly stealthy. The announcement for his Fredericton talk said Lloyd’s plan had “taken an exciting and unconventional turn” with the coming election, “as he will seek public office, challenging Justin Trudeau in his home riding of Papineau.” As far back as 2013, he told the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal he had “a secret project on the go that merges art and politics, to be unveiled during the next federal election in 2015.”
He has described his Dear PM project as being driven by “a concern with the tightening control on human activity through increased surveillance and the proliferation of reality-type entertainment.”