Would-be Ford voters can’t claim innocence

Racial indifference in politics can lead to dire consequences

If a man is known by the company he keeps, in politics and especially before an election, said company has been known to make or break the man’s chances.

But in the past 18 months, thanks to the outsized influence of our southern neighbour, politicians have slid from contrition to shamelessness in their associations. Where mere months ago, a Canadian conservative could be damned for trying to divide the country by blowing the dog whistle of “Canadian values,” today a Canadian conservative can court far more overt divisiveness without fear of consequence.

And so Doug Ford, pitching himself as worthy of leading Ontario and careful not to say anything openly discriminatory himself, appears to feel no compunction being surrounded by those who do.

The latest in the list of dubious people who want to be part of Ford’s team is Merrilee Fullerton, the PC candidate for Kanata-Carleton.

According to her website, Fullerton is a doctor who stands for “values of responsibility, compassion, integrity and accountability.”

A look at her past writings provides some guidance regarding these values. A tweet in November 2015 pulled out a quote from a story on Islamic radicalism: “Usually it is not the first generation (of refugees or immigrants) that is the most dangerous, it’s the second.”

Before that was a tweet referencing Breitbart News exhorting people to watch a march by thousands of supporters of the anti-Islam group PEGIDA in Dresden, Germany.

Another tweet reads: “the ghetto.” And it goes on to define that as “home to almost 20,000 immigrants, overwhelmingly Muslim, almost half of them jobless.” This tweet, which appears to refer to the Rosengard housing scheme in Sweden, is taken out of context from a story in the Guardian five years prior about a Swedish backlash against immigration.

In others tweets, she rails against a “wear-a-hijab” day in Ottawa in 2016.