Gerrit Van Dorland deserved better. He spent six years working for Conservative members of Parliament, leadership campaigns, nominations, and general elections. In the last three months he rallied 2,500 constituents in the federal riding of Oxford, ON, to buy memberships in the Conservative Party of Canada and choose him to be the party’s candidate..So what did his party do with this young loyalist? They disqualified him days before the nomination vote and gave him no reason why..My acquaintance with the party’s insiders (some now party outsiders) has shown me the Van Dorland experience is not so isolated. Unlike the Liberal Party, whose leader Justin Trudeau explicitly banned pro-life candidates, the Conservative Party is more subtle and hypocritical in its bigotry. The party wants to appear as open as possible to social conservatives while simultaneously suppressing their representation and not owning up to it..It is disgusting the party allows some of their best people to run under the illusion of an open process, when they really don’t want them. They hope another candidate will beat them or they'll back out. When it’s apparent that won’t happen, they allow them to labour away under false hopes to rally money and members to the party. When the benefit of such slavery has been maximized, the candidate is removed..There are numerous examples of this happening..An Ontario friend of mine ran for the CPC in 2015. She was a black, pro-life, pro-traditional marriage advocate who won the 2019 nomination too — or so it seemed — by roughly a dozen votes. That number was confirmed in two recounts. However, on the third recount she had suddenly “lost” in what was termed a final and unappealable decision..I also know a woman in the Greater Toronto Area whose husband had his hopes to represent the party dashed the day before the vote was to be held. Both the woman and her husband were of Asian descent. The Liberal MP even told her husband he might not run again in 2019, if the latter became the CPC nominee..So why would the party take out such a strong candidate? In lieu of an explanation, her best guest was, “because he’s an evangelical.” Worse, she told me she knew many other candidates in the GTA the same thing had happened to..In 2019, a Conservative party coordinator told me about a Western Canadian hopeful who was denied the chance to represent the party. She was overall the strongest potential candidate; however, she had posted a meme of an organization that, at another time, apparently posted an anti-gay meme. Despite this weak connection, the party decided it wasn’t worth the risk and she was denied the chance to run..Those incidents got little-to-no press, probably because these upstanding people did not want to hurt the party that discarded them. But other cases were more public..Dr. Ann Gillies, a Christian psychotherapist and long-time CPC member, had her 2019 nomination quest stopped in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, ON. Six weeks into her campaign, she was disqualified without explanation. She was reinstated on appeal, then removed again. Concerns seem to stem from her 2017 book, Closing the Floodgates, self-described as an exposé of “how a determined minority is using social engineering to reconstruct our social and moral worlds by redefining gender, sexuality and the family.” She could have advocated well on that issue, but was not given a chance..Former 700 Club Canada host Laura Lynn Thompson didn’t get a shot either. She wanted to run for the Conservatives but could not get the party to waive the rule requiring a candidate to be a party member for six months. Party brass were probably leery because, as in the case of Gillies she might be smeared as intolerant..Salim Mansur, who'd just retired after a long career as a political science professor, secured the CPC nomination in London North Centre in advance of the 2019 race. Nine months later, and shortly after photographs surfaced of him at a March for Life, he had his nomination revoked without explanation. Mansur was a Muslim opposed to Islamic extremism, and for that he was banned from many mosques. Apparently that held sway with the Conservative Party, too. The best Mansur could find out was the party thought his candidacy would attract accusations of “Islamophobia.”.At least when Stephen Harper was in charge, he spoke out against the dangers of Islamism without opposing Islam. He also appointed Patrick Brazeau to the Senate as an indigenous person who could call out the problems with the reserve system and its governance. If the party still had courage and principle, Mansur could have been a similar voice in a different arena. Instead, it was not even willing to say its Muslim candidate was not Islamophobic. No wonder the Conservatives wouldn’t stand against transgenderism either — the party had lost its own balls!.Angelina Ireland gained fame in recent years as the president of the Delta Hospice Society, which refused to offer MAiD at its facility. She alleges the CPC “froze her out” until she felt compelled to withdraw her application to become a candidate. Ireland, Thompson, and Mansur ran for Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party, instead..Maybe Bernier was onto the problem ahead of others. When he left the Conservatives, he complained the party no longer advocated conservative principles openly. It still defies explanation how there were allegedly 7,466 more votes counted in the CPC’s final 2017 leadership ballot than there were allowable voters, giving Andrew Scheer a 7,049 vote margin of victory over Bernier. Too bad the votes were shredded that same night. We just have to trust Dominion Voting Machines did its job, I guess..Either way, the dilution of principle continues. In August of 2021, Yukon CPC candidate Jonas Smith had his candidacy revoked for what the party called his “opposition to calls for implementation of mandated workplace vaccinations and vaccine passport requirements..." So where is the problem, exactly? Three days later, Erin O’Toole announced he was against vaccine mandates for federal employees, but would require them to rapid test..Ontario MP and former CPC leadership candidate Derek Sloan was dismissed on the pretence that out of hundreds of campaign donors, one was a white supremacist. These days even math is called white supremacist, but that aside, it’s ridiculous to know a full bio of every candidate who donates. Besides, the party didn’t identify the issue either until its apparent real purpose was to remove Sloan. “True blue conservative” was a successful slogan Erin O’Toole to gain the party leadership, but he didn’t like to witness it so stridently with Sloan..We’ll see how long Leslyn Lewis lasts. A friend who helped her leadership campaign told me how, in the early days, she found herself at a Toronto-area CPC gathering. A man told her outright, “We have to get rid of the social conservatives!” To her credit, she surprised him by saying she was one..All of which brings us back to Van Dorland. After National Council refused to overturn his removal as a candidate, he thanked supporters of his campaign of “faith, family, and freedom” and left them with a plea that serves as a worthy end to this article..“Please continue to hold the Conservative Party to account on their promise to stand for freedom, to remove gatekeepers, and to fight cancel culture,” he wrote..“We cannot be a party that holds Liberals to a standard that we are unwilling to abide by ourselves.”
