Speaker silenced: Ontario MPP Rick Nicholls forced to step down as Deputy Speaker
This comes after Nicholls was booted from the Ontario PC caucus for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
Rick Nicholls, the MPP for Chatham-Kent-Leamington in Ontario, continues to pay a price for not getting vaccinated.
On August 19, Nicholls was given an ultimatum by Ontario Premier Doug Ford to get vaccinated by 5:00 p.m. that day or be booted from caucus. Nicholls held a press conference in the afternoon stating that for personal reasons, he would not get the jabs. A few hours later, he became the latest PC MPP to sit as an independent.
At the time, Nicholls stated: “I took the premier at his word that vaccination is a choice and that all Ontarians have a constitutional right to make such a choice. Like almost two million eligible Ontarians, I choose to exercise this autonomy over my own body, while continuing to work hard for the people of Ontario.”
That Nicholls was booted from caucus was bad enough. But in the department of insult to injury, members of the NDP approached House Leader Paul Calandra and said that they’d very much like Nicholls to be banished from the Ontario Legislature permanently, given that he’s now apparently a modern-day Typhoid Mary. It should be noted that Nicholls is fine getting a rapid test for COVID-19 — a condition for entry into the building if one is unvaccinated — but apparently that is not good enough for the New Democrats.
Still, you would think that with the PCs enjoying super-majority status, Calandra would’ve laughed off the requests of the opposition, right? But that was not the case.
Then again, Nicholls suggested that he is persona non grata when it comes to a very powerful influencer at Queen’s Park these days, namely, Kory Teneycke. Teneycke is the co-founder of Rubicon Strategies Inc. Rubicon represents dozens of pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and AstraZeneca, both of which manufacture COVID-19 vaccines. Teneycke was also the campaign manager for the PC Party in 2018 and will apparently resume that role next year. Allegedly, he has the ear of Premier Ford — which might explain why Ford was dead set against vaccine passports for the province in July, only to do a baffling backflip in August when he stated that a vaccine passport program would be a good idea after all.
Of note: shortly after Nicholls announced his resignation as Deputy Speaker, Dr. Charles McVety, President of Canada Christian College in Whitby, Ont., held a press conference in which he alleged that the Ontario government is in a conflict of interest position regarding its relationship with Rubicon and Teneycke. McVety estimates that Pfizer and AstraZeneca have made “hundreds of millions of dollars in Ontario,” thanks to Ontarians getting jabbed. (Rebel News reached out to Teneycke for comment but we have yet to receive a response.)
In any event, Nicholls will continue to serve as the MPP for his riding until June. He does not plan to run as an independent candidate in 2022. All of which is too bad, for Ontario is surely a province that is in desperate need of principled people serving in government.
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