University of Guelph student turned away from Harper rally

The Stephen Harper election campaign gets curiouser and curiouser as a University of Guelph student was turned away from a Harper rally.

Joanna MacDonald, seemingly a nice, average Canadian student with a big smile, pre-registered for a Conservative rally in Guelph.

When she showed up at the Delta, security turned her away.

Why? she asked.

Because she advocated at one time in her past for removing bottled water from campus.

Not the end of the Vietnam war, not ban the bomb or expose the G20.

Joanna didn’t want to save seal pups, or fight for freedom of speech. 

She just thought bottled water was not a good idea.

Well, Joanna, Big Brother is watching in the new utopian Canada.

Foreign looking students with scarves on their heads, girls with green hats and anyone who ever thought about Michael Ignatieff without hate in their hearts is not a true Canadian.

Only true Canadians – blond, blue eyed, Aryan Canadians – will be full citizens in the New Order of Prime Minister Harper.

There will be no media, unless they grin at the PM like a Cheshire cat. There will be no street protests, unless they are against socialism and for unbridled commerce.

Membership in political parties will be restricted to those who look like Stephen Harper, or a few token blacks, browns, and people of other colors.

Joanna, go back to college and take Political Science by Stephen Harper right after you read his Little Blue Book.

The scary thing is that Harper’s obsessive, right wing attitudes make him a hero with diehard Reform Party ex-pats.

Interesting how the Progressive Conservative Party, who are not Fascists, have allowed their ideals to be hijacked for the trade-off of government power.

 

As a young voter looking to learn more about what political parties stand for, Joanna MacDonald was thrilled to learn Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper was coming to town for a campaign rally.

The 21-year-old environmental science student at the University of Guelph immediately went online to the local Conservative candidate’s website and signed up to attend the event.

All she had to do was provide her name, address and email address. Everything looked in order.

But when she arrived Monday at the Delta Guelph Hotel and Conference Centre where Harper was scheduled to speak, her registration in hand, MacDonald was informed she was not welcome.

Why? An unidentified Conservative Party official told her that her name had been “flagged.”

“I was told the RCMP had done a screening and that perhaps my name was affiliated with something on Facebook or the Internet,” MacDonald told the Star. “Something that made me unfit to enter. They wouldn’t say what it was.”

MacDonald says she has never been affiliated with any political party. Nor has she participated in any anti-government or anti-Conservative rallies.

“I was shocked. This had never happened to me before, so I didn’t really know how to deal with it.”

When she pressed officials further, she was asked if she had ever been involved with any on-campus clubs. When MacDonald replied that she had been involved with various environmental groups — including one advocating for the removal of bottled water from the university grounds — she said the official responded, saying: “Well, that’s probably why.”

The only way party officials would have known about what clubs she was associated with, MacDonald said, is if they had searched her name on Google and looked into her background.

Oddly, MacDonald’s friend, Gill Buckle, who is also involved in similar environmental causes, was allowed entry.

“I was baffled,” said Buckle, 21. “Neither of us are politically affiliated, and even if we were, I don’t see how that would be relevant. We just want to make an informed vote. We wanted to hear what each party had to say.”

The Conservative Party has not yet responded to the Star’s request for comment.

MacDonald wasn’t the only University of Guelph student to be caught up in the Conservative Party’s campaign rally security machine. A group of students who assembled in a “flash mob” as Harper’s bus arrived were also turned away from the event.

Just a day before, Conservative organizers at a rally at the University of Western Ontario in London asked student Awish Aslam to leave allegedly because she had posted a photo of herself with Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff on her Facebook page.

The tightly-controlled rallies, in which Harper seldom interacts with regular members of the public who aren’t already vetted by his handlers, have made the Conservatives the target of criticism from the public and other party leaders.

Speaking Tuesday, Ignatieff characterized the prohibition of a young woman from campaign rallies as “un-Canadian.”

“This vision of politics in which all is permitted, including violating the rights of a young Canadian…tells you everything you want to know about why we must defeat Stephen Harper,” he said at a rally.

MacDonald says such “disgusting” tactics only serve to alienate young people from the electoral process, a population eager to learn about how they can make a difference.

“I genuinely wanted to hear what Mr. Harper had to say,” she said. “When you’re not allowed to go to an event, it sends the message that they don’t care about what I have to say, that they don’t care about my vote. That’s a mistake on their part.”

By Stephen Pate, NJN Network