The fallout from this Ontario Liberal nomination contest will be messy
There's nothing "civil" about the Ontario Liberal Civil War.
Oh boy.
I’ve written recently about the shadow campaign that Ontario Liberal insiders have waged against Nate Erskine-Smith in the run-up to today’s nomination contest. In an attempt to claim a seat in the Ontario Liberal caucus at Queen’s Park to bolster his leadership aspiration, Nate chose to seek the nomination in Scarborough Southwest, as there is a vacancy and the riding is adjacent to the one he represents federally.
Acrimony had already brewed over Ontario Liberal insiders using their resources to campaign against Nate, with party executives and caucus staff supposedly sworn to neutrality openly supporting his main opponent, Domino’s Pizza franchise mogul Ahsanul Hafiz. But after today’s voting, which lasted from this morning until 16h00 ET at Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute in Toronto and was conducted using a ranked ballot, the bitterness has only festered even further between Ontario Liberals.
By a final count of 718 to 699 votes on the second round, Ahsanul beat Nate by a slim margin of just 19 votes; in the first round, Nate led by 9 votes, but after the bottom two candidates were eliminated, their votes were reallocated towards Ahsanul in larger number, giving him the victory. Yet Nate and his people have not accepted the results, alleging that there were improprieties. And regardless of whether the result was fair, there are serious concerns about Ahsanul Hafiz’s suitability as a candidate.
In terms of the vote, while over 1400 people participated, Nate Erskine-Smith alleged to a gaggle of press outdoors in the rain that his scrutineers witnessed a large degree of irregularities, although as Policorner reports he would not elaborate on any specifics until he hears the details from every member of his team in the ballot counting room.
According to the claims of one scrutineer for Nate speaking to me privately, hundreds of voters were supposedly allowed to cast ballots in this nomination contest without providing ID. While this does happen in general elections in Canada, it has significant limitations to restrict abuse, requiring strict standards for attestation. In the Ontario Liberal Party, however, their official rules for nomination contests allow the Chief Returning Officer under Section 58 to arbitrarily determine whether someone without ID can still be granted a full ballot, based on their personal judgment.
Currently, these allegations are extremely fresh, and lack substantive evidence to conclusively prove that they did indeed happen. It will be important to see which claims Nate and his team make publicly, versus what this scrutineer has claimed privately to me. It will also be important to see if there are any witnesses independent of Nate’s campaign who can corroborate that these events occurred as described.
What is even more concerning, however, are various materials posted by Ahsanul Hafiz to his Facebook page. Fifteen years ago, on July 6th, 2011, Ahsanul shared a disturbing video on Facebook entitled “Brother rapes his sister”, captioned “She was Hurting [sic] for days, and could not walk!” While I am unable to confirm whether the linked video depicts a real sexual assault or merely a simulated one, I believe that viewing such disgusting material, let alone sharing it, is extremely disturbing.
In addition, on multiple occasions in 2013, Ahsanul made Facebook posts calling for the death of political opponents in Bangladesh, including Abdul Quader Mollah, who was later executed by the Bangladeshi government in controversial circumstances. He also made posts calling for violence, claiming political opponents would “lying in the jail hospital”.
As his LinkedIn profile states, Ahsanul obtained his Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Windsor between 2003 and 2007, and as his campaign website’s biography section boasts, he purchased his first Domino’s Pizza franchise in 2012. Thus, it is evidently clear that Ahsanul Hafiz was an adult man when he made these comments, fully responsible for his words and actions; they cannot be waved away as the stupidity of youth, and even if he had been a teenager when he wrote these things, it would still be vile.
These posts may be roughly fifteen years old—indeed, noted Nate opponent Quito Maggi is using their age to downplay them—yet they are still highly problematic for Ahsanul and the Ontario Liberal Party that just picked him as their nominee. How did this man pass the party’s greenlighting process, in which they are supposed to perform a background check and discover exactly these sorts of issues?
It seems implausible that they would be unaware, as from my research, it appears that knowledge of these posts has floated around Ontario Liberal circles privately for months, and that this information has also been known to the Ontario NDP and Ontario PCs as well. The latter two parties have surely been sitting on this information, hoping that Ontario Liberals would pick this guy for Scarborough Southwest, and that they would then be able to use their opposition research to crush the Ontario Liberal campaign.
Now, it appears the Ontario Liberals have walked into exactly such a trap by opting for Ahsanul Hafiz over Nate Erskine-Smith. And if there were irregularities that affected the outcome of the vote, the full magnitude of this self-inflicted error would become even more pathetic than it already is.
To call this scenario a mess is, quite frankly, an understatement. The fallout from these events on the Ontario Liberal Party’s future will be more substantial than people realize. It will significantly impact how Ontario Liberals are perceived…and they may discover their poll numbers will stop looking so rosy.