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The Ontario Progressive Conservatives have kicked Kitchener MPP Michael Harris out of caucus on allegations he sexually harassed an intern, the party said Monday, two days after he said he’d be leaving politics to deal with a degenerative eye condition.
The party first heard of the allegations Friday, a statement from Tory caucus chair Lisa Thompson said.
“The evidence presented to us included a written complaint from 2013 by a former intern about how she had been passed over for employment. There was also a series of text messages from the same time period, between the young intern and the MPP,” Thompson said. “These text messages were of a sexual nature. They included a discussion of potential part-time employment, as well as a request for her to send him photos, an invitation for her to meet with him late that evening, and reference to something that may have previously taken place in his legislative office.”
The Tories’ secretive provincial nominations committee, which vets candidates who want to carry the party banner into the June election, met on the weekend and overturned Harris’s nomination, Thompson said. And then “a decision has been made to remove Michael Harris, MPP, from the Ontario PC caucus effective immediately.”
That banishes Harris to a back corner of the legislature chamber, with Kanata MPP Jack MacLaren (a former Tory who’s now the lone MPP for the fringe Trillium party, whose offences included telling dirty jokes at a charity fundraiser) and Simcoe MPP Patrick Brown (the former Tory leader, ejected for, well, you know).
Harris was elected in 2011, representing Kitchener-Conestoga, and has been the Tories’ transportation critic. He’s no relation to the former Tory premier from North Bay. That Mike Harris’s son, Mike Harris Jr., just lost a bid for the Tory nomination in Waterloo on the weekend.
The Kitchener Michael Harris had said he was quitting because he needs cornea transplants for a disease called keratoconus, a bulging of the surface of the eye that leads to vision loss and, in severe cases, blindness.
“I have been dealing with this condition for nearly two decades and have been putting off a corneal replacement for quite some time, but I know, deep down, I shouldn’t wait any longer. I need to put my health first,” Harris’s statement on Saturday said.
He didn’t immediately respond to a request to talk about his former party’s claims about his behaviour.
The party moved quickly on the allegations against Harris, though it appears the plan was to let him tell his own story about his departure.
The Tories have previously announced it when they’ve overturned nominations. In February, with Brown out of the leader’s office but a replacement not yet chosen, the committee overturned two nominations (including the one in Ottawa West-Nepean) and announced the decision that evening. In mid-March, in a housecleaning under new leader Doug Ford, the committee ditched four more candidates in one day and sent out a news release saying so at 9 p.m. that night.
But this time the party let three days go by while Harris talked about how reluctantly he was doing the right thing for his health and family before contradicting him and saying actually, no, he couldn’t have run for us anyway. Thompson’s statement — and Harris’s ejection from caucus — apparently only came after reporters at Queen’s Park got wind of Harris’s disqualification as a future candidate and asked Ford’s office about it.
Parties do seem to be taking these problems — of powerful men subjecting less powerful women to unwelcome sexual interest — more seriously than they did, but naming and shaming and exiling creeps, even if their creepiness doesn’t reach the point of criminality, is what these situations demand.
Brown denies the sexual misbehaviour allegations involving young staff that forced him out as party leader but he did openly date a young party worker and Tories now say they’d heard about behaviour unbecoming of a party leader, at best, for years.
The Liberals have had sexual-harassment complaints of their own, the details of which leader Kathleen Wynne has kept secret to, as she’s said, honour the wishes of victims who don’t want their identities revealed. But Niagara MPP Kim Craitor quit abruptly in 2013 and nobody said why until three years later, when Wynne admitted she forced him out after an internal investigation of sexual misconduct (which Craitor, quickly back in politics as a city councillor, has denied).
This winter, New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath suspended her chief of staff Michael Balagus while the party looked into how he failed to stop a handsy finance minister when he was the top aide to the premier of Manitoba. She reinstated him, with an apology saying he understood that he’d failed victims among Manitoba NDP staff.
Some men are still walking around with lit fuses dangling from them. The sooner they go boom for all of us to see and hear, the better.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The party first heard of the allegations Friday, a statement from Tory caucus chair Lisa Thompson said.
“The evidence presented to us included a written complaint from 2013 by a former intern about how she had been passed over for employment. There was also a series of text messages from the same time period, between the young intern and the MPP,” Thompson said. “These text messages were of a sexual nature. They included a discussion of potential part-time employment, as well as a request for her to send him photos, an invitation for her to meet with him late that evening, and reference to something that may have previously taken place in his legislative office.”
The Tories’ secretive provincial nominations committee, which vets candidates who want to carry the party banner into the June election, met on the weekend and overturned Harris’s nomination, Thompson said. And then “a decision has been made to remove Michael Harris, MPP, from the Ontario PC caucus effective immediately.”
That banishes Harris to a back corner of the legislature chamber, with Kanata MPP Jack MacLaren (a former Tory who’s now the lone MPP for the fringe Trillium party, whose offences included telling dirty jokes at a charity fundraiser) and Simcoe MPP Patrick Brown (the former Tory leader, ejected for, well, you know).
Harris was elected in 2011, representing Kitchener-Conestoga, and has been the Tories’ transportation critic. He’s no relation to the former Tory premier from North Bay. That Mike Harris’s son, Mike Harris Jr., just lost a bid for the Tory nomination in Waterloo on the weekend.
The Kitchener Michael Harris had said he was quitting because he needs cornea transplants for a disease called keratoconus, a bulging of the surface of the eye that leads to vision loss and, in severe cases, blindness.
“I have been dealing with this condition for nearly two decades and have been putting off a corneal replacement for quite some time, but I know, deep down, I shouldn’t wait any longer. I need to put my health first,” Harris’s statement on Saturday said.
He didn’t immediately respond to a request to talk about his former party’s claims about his behaviour.
The party moved quickly on the allegations against Harris, though it appears the plan was to let him tell his own story about his departure.
The Tories have previously announced it when they’ve overturned nominations. In February, with Brown out of the leader’s office but a replacement not yet chosen, the committee overturned two nominations (including the one in Ottawa West-Nepean) and announced the decision that evening. In mid-March, in a housecleaning under new leader Doug Ford, the committee ditched four more candidates in one day and sent out a news release saying so at 9 p.m. that night.
But this time the party let three days go by while Harris talked about how reluctantly he was doing the right thing for his health and family before contradicting him and saying actually, no, he couldn’t have run for us anyway. Thompson’s statement — and Harris’s ejection from caucus — apparently only came after reporters at Queen’s Park got wind of Harris’s disqualification as a future candidate and asked Ford’s office about it.
Parties do seem to be taking these problems — of powerful men subjecting less powerful women to unwelcome sexual interest — more seriously than they did, but naming and shaming and exiling creeps, even if their creepiness doesn’t reach the point of criminality, is what these situations demand.
Brown denies the sexual misbehaviour allegations involving young staff that forced him out as party leader but he did openly date a young party worker and Tories now say they’d heard about behaviour unbecoming of a party leader, at best, for years.
The Liberals have had sexual-harassment complaints of their own, the details of which leader Kathleen Wynne has kept secret to, as she’s said, honour the wishes of victims who don’t want their identities revealed. But Niagara MPP Kim Craitor quit abruptly in 2013 and nobody said why until three years later, when Wynne admitted she forced him out after an internal investigation of sexual misconduct (which Craitor, quickly back in politics as a city councillor, has denied).
This winter, New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath suspended her chief of staff Michael Balagus while the party looked into how he failed to stop a handsy finance minister when he was the top aide to the premier of Manitoba. She reinstated him, with an apology saying he understood that he’d failed victims among Manitoba NDP staff.
Some men are still walking around with lit fuses dangling from them. The sooner they go boom for all of us to see and hear, the better.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
