BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a story titled 'Watershed moment': Lehman's departure from city politics opens door in mayor's race,' published Feb. 24.
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As our current mayor exits office for a risky run at a provincial seat, he leaves behind a power vacuum.
As with vacuums, there’s no telling what will fill the void. It's regrettable to see that Barrie finds in that void former two-term councillor and one-term MP Alex Nuttall.
What kind of MP was Mr. Nuttall in his short time in Ottawa? He voted against C-16, hard-fought-for legislation to enshrine trans rights at a federal level. He used his influence and public dollars to rail against an evidence-based application for a life-saving supervised consumption site (SCS). He used those dollars to mail out questionable flyers about an SCS in Barrie and the legalization of cannabis. What did he genuinely accomplish in his time? Perhaps a puff would help us wrap our heads around it.
In 2017, he took up a senior leadership role in Maxime Bernier’s failed campaign to lead the Conservative Party of Canada. That alone should say a lot, but I’d be remiss if I didn't mention, at this time, the irony in what Bernier has come to represent and the events that precipitated a lawsuit from Nuttall toward a critical tweet asking him to denounce white supremacy in 2019.
Following his short-lived retirement to "spend more time with his family," he reprised his campaign leadership work in the failed Peter MacKay run of 2020.
Are you sensing a pattern?
Let’s not forget his tweet about a morning at church where he all but encouraged violence against Indigenous land defenders. A tweet that the church had to distance itself from, and Mr. Nuttall even made a public "apology."
I wonder, given all of this, why on earth would Barrie want a mayor like Alex Nuttall? Would he meet the standard of the city’s Code of Conduct if he were on council?
Mr. Nuttall's record is full of controversial, poor and downright worrying decisions. Does he represent what's best in us? Is that what our growing city needs? I think these are questions we must ask ourselves.
I encourage Mr. Nuttall to do the same before he files those nomination papers in a few weeks.
Brandon Amyot
Barrie
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