Liberals explain visit to tax evader’s eatery

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This article was published 14/09/2011 (5170 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AS a campaign boo-boo, it might not rate with Stockwell Day’s decision 11 years ago to use Niagara Falls as a backdrop to illustrate concerns about Canada’s brain drain to the United States.

But a missive from Liberal Leader Jon Gerrard’s campaign team outlining his itinerary Tuesday had some scratching their heads.

At the top of the doctor’s campaign menu at 8 a.m. was: ‘Breakfast at Falafel Place, 1101 Corydon (River Heights).’

It was a curious choice, given the restaurant’s co-owner, Ami Hassan, dodged a jail term after being convicted of tax evasion weeks ago. (He was fined $68,000 and ordered to pay all taxes owed.)

Campaign stops are usually well-scripted. Political parties are often looking to score a point when choosing a location. (Note the Conservatives’ decision Tuesday to launch their health-care platform in Health Minister Theresa Oswald’s Seine River riding.)

Liberal spokesman Dave Shorr said Tuesday the party’s central campaign office did not cook up the campaign stop. He directed a reporter to Gerrard’s River Heights campaign manager, Lacey Sanders. “That was a decision that was made wholly out of River Heights (Gerrard’s constituency),” he said.

Sanders said although the breakfast stop was listed on Gerrard’s agenda, the Liberal leader wasn’t there to campaign. “Mainly I chose it because I wanted to go for breakfast with him somewhere in the riding,” she explained.

Asked about the optics of including the stop in a news release, she said: “I guess I hadn’t thought about it in that context.”

In the 2000 federal election campaign, then-Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day blundered during a photo-op at Niagara Falls when he said Canadian jobs were flowing south “just like the Niagara River.”

But the river flows north to Lake Ontario. It was a gaffe that raised concerns Day’s campaign was more about style than substance.

Five years earlier in Manitoba, then-Liberal leader Paul Edwards found himself unexpectedly confronted with tough questions on abortion when he chose to campaign on Corydon Avenue near the Morgentaler abortion clinic.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca