The following is the text of an email the author sent to the Ontario Liberal Party requesting the cancellation of his membership. All views expressed are the author's own.
To whom it may concern,
I am requesting the immediate cancellation of my Ontario Liberal Party membership and wish to be removed from all party mailing lists, and fundraising databases. It is a step I take with the clarity that comes when an organization you once trusted reveals that its principles are, in practice, optional.
My decision flows directly from the party's conduct—and its studied silence—surrounding the Scarborough Southwest nomination, the subsequent appeal, and the culture those events have laid bare.
I was present at a political event where the president of the local federal Liberal riding association, who maintains deep and well-known ties to the Scarborough Southwest Ontario Liberal EDA, was intoxicated and, for more than fifteen minutes, physically pushed me from my chair and touched both a female friend and myself inappropriately. That incident was reported, and the response from the party—whose provincial and federal cousins routinely shield one another—was not a review, not a statement, not even the courtesy of a follow-up question. It was silence. Total institutional silence.
I have since been told, by people who privately came forward with similar experiences, that the cultures of the federal and provincial Liberal organizations in this province are effectively interchangeable—that one hand washes the other, and that grievances are passed between them like a hot stone until they cool and disappear. The candidate the Ontario Liberal Party has now installed in Scarborough Southwest is himself a former senior figure in the federal Liberal apparatus. He moves in the same circles and is protected by the same reflexes.
The SSW nomination meeting—a race decided by nineteen votes, with thirty-four more ballots cast than voters signed in. The arbitration panel, chaired by a pre-selected establishment figure, dismissed this gap as a record-keeping error.
It retroactively accounted for some votes after the fact, declared the remainder harmless, and effectively ruled that in a nineteen-vote election, fourteen unexplained ballots are an acceptable margin of error.
The voter ID rules that campaigns had been told to prepare for were rewritten in real time by a returning officer whose neutrality was an open question. None of this, the panel assured us, compromised the integrity of the process.
Interim Leader John Fraser, whom I have long regarded as a sensible man, appended his name to a statement that said nothing about any of this. He called for unity and spoke of earning trust. But trust is not earned by telling people who witnessed serious irregularities that their concerns have been adjudicated and can now be set aside, or a leader who remains resolutely silent on the behaviour of party officials, on the public record of a nominated candidate, or on a code of conduct that now reads as a work of fiction.
Mr. Fraser has chosen the OLP establishment over the province, the establishment over the grassroots, and a culture of protection over the basic standards Ontarians have every right to expect from those who seek to govern them.
Whether it be the federal or provincial, the Liberal Party's code of conduct exists on paper and nowhere else. It was not enforced when a federal Liberal president, intimately connected to a provincial riding association, sexually assaulted me at a public event. It was not enforced when a nomination candidate's decade-old social media posts—linking to videos described as depicting incestuous sexual assault—surfaced hours before the vote, and the party simply proceeded as though nothing had happened.
This party's overriding message is that certain people are beyond accountability and that the rules are for everyone else.
I can no longer associate myself with an organization that has made itself morally illegible in this way. To remain a member would be to offer a silent endorsement I am not prepared to give. I cannot lend my name or my credibility to a party that has decided, repeatedly, that winning a seat is more important than keeping its word.
Please confirm in writing that my membership has been cancelled and that my information has been removed from all party records. I do not wish to receive any further communications, save for that confirmation.
My very best,
— Will Adams
Editor, The Provincial Times
