Independent candidate avoids questions about accusation of using deceitful election signage

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Crypto

As the smoke clears and the dust settles and the remaining mail-in ballots are tabulated, that $600 million Nothing Burger otherwise known as the 2021 federal election is pretty much over and done with. But there are some epilogues to this sordid saga that must be noted.

Case in point: what transpired in the riding of Richmond Hill, Ontario. Charity DiPaola/McGrath, a wannabe Conservative for years now, was running as an independent — although Charity surely wanted constituents to mistakenly believe, primarily through her deceptive signage — that she was A. the incumbent, and B. the Conservative candidate. A Toronto Star story noted that at least one Richmond Hill resident, who wants to remain anonymous, filed a complaint with Elections Canada.

I reached out to Elections Canada but was informed that my queries regarding the Charity case had to be directed toward the Commissioner of Canada Elections. And that’s exactly what I did. But check out the inexplicable reply:

Hi David.

The CCE generally does not confirm whether it has received a complaint, or not, into a particular issue. This is in keeping with the confidentiality provisions of the Canada Elections Act. Generally speaking, however, every complaint is reviewed to determine if it falls under the Commissioner’s mandate. If the issue falls within the Commissioner’s jurisdiction, a review or investigation may be carried out to determine whether or not there was, in fact, wrongdoing under the Act.

With respect to the specific case outlined below, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to speculate as to whether or not the circumstances described in the Toronto Star article would be contrary to the Act.

Regards,

Michelle Laliberte

I think that’s a shocking response, given that I am not asking for the identity of the person who allegedly made the complaint, but rather, I just wanted to know if a complaint had been received. Say, whatever happened to “Sunny Ways” and that promise back in 2015 by Justin Trudeau that his regime would be the most transparent government in our Dominion’s history? Alas, the precise opposite has come to fruition.

But at the end of the day, if Charity Whatever-Her-Surname-Is was hoping to torpedo the Conservative campaign by siphoning off a few hundred votes, well, it turns out she wasted a whole lot of time and money for nothing. Surprisingly, the riding of Richmond Hill was nowhere near the photo-finish horse race that it was in 2019. Because this time, incumbent Liberal MP Majid Jowhari did not win by a couple of hundred votes, but rather, he won by more than 4,000 votes.

As for Charity, “Your Member of Parliament Candidate”? She managed to snag a miniscule 619 votes. Yes, 619. We’ll never know how many of those voters mistakenly thought Charity was the Conservative candidate, but really, it’s a moot point. That’s because Charity was a non-factor. She did not play the role of spoiler. She was, as the saying goes, “nobody’s nothing.”

But get this: in one last act of spite, this wannabe Conservative, actually tweeted out congratulations to Jowhari, a man who shockingly supports the Islamofascist Iranian regime. She also tweeted the following: “It was a wonderful experience. Now on and upwards.”

Um, “on and upwards?” Oh, Charity, your GPS is clearly malfunctioning. You are not going “upwards.” Indeed, my parting question to Charity DiPaula-McGrath-Nobody, a.k.a., Richmond Hill’s uber-sore loser, is simply this: just how low can you go?