Kamloops Liberal candidate urges civility after campaign trail threats in Ottawa, harassment of volunteer in Little Fort

Lake adds it’s concerning to see the incivility that can occur during elections. Early Monday morning (Sept. 23), Liberal candidate for the Ottawa-area riding of Kanata-Carleton Karen McCrimmon tweeted a photo of an apparently hand-written lawn sign which reads: “We shoot every 3rd Liberal 2nd one just left.”

A sign for the riding’s Conservative candidate, Justina McCaffrey, was planted next to it.

McCaffrey said on Twitter that threats of political violence have no place in a democracy, and that she’s instructed her campaign to remove her election sign from the property.

Lake believes the tense political climate in the United States could be playing a part.

“I think it’s largely a result of what we’re seeing particularly south of the border where we hear the media getting attacked all the time, and rivals attacking each other in a personal way all the time, the rallies that go on, and some of the violence that’s incited at some of those rallies, which is really unfortunate,” he says. “We’ve seen signs defaced and things like that in every campaign I’ve been in, and usually it’s pretty minor. But where I draw the line is — someone can yell at me that’s fine, but any attempt to injure volunteers, that’s beyond the pale and we need to make sure that doesn’t happen. And threats, like we saw on the signs in Ottawa, are absolutely unacceptable.”

Lake adds that the relationships between the candidates in Kamloops have been good so far.

“Once you start getting personal, that I think is always distasteful, and in our local campaign I think all the candidates have been very respectful, I know that when we go out when we see a sign for instance from another campaign that’s damaged we’ll try to fix it or replace it, and I think other campaigns are doing that for us too,” he says. “I wish that kind of discourse was followed by campaigns across the country and by the general public as well.”

Conservative candidate for Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo, Cathy McLeod says so far this year’s campaign has been uneventful when it comes to threats and harassment — but that wasn’t the case in 2015.

“We had some terribly disturbing things that happened with our campaign in terms of bobblehead dolls, in terms of animals that had been shot, like a bird that had been shot and placed at our office, in terms of the vandalism of signs, it truly was disturbing the things that happened last time,” she says.

McLeod says she also had her tires slashed last time around.

“Whether it’s social media or whether it’s on physical signs, it really is terribly concerning when we have the discussion degraded to such a degree where it’s really quite frankly a threat and it’s unacceptable,” she says. “I think we all have to condemn from all parties when this happens, and I think certainly from my perspective all candidates are doing that.”

Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo Green Party candidate Iain Currie says his campaign has run into the occasional voter who is loudly unsupportive, but nothing he would consider harassment.

— With files from Global News.

by Ashley Legassic

Kamloops Liberal candidate urges civility after campaign trail threats in Ottawa, harassment of volunteer in Little Fort

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