High drama hijacks debate
By-election contest features shouting, shoving and police
Sep 11, 2009 04:30 AM
Rob Ferguson
Queen's Park Bureau
Chaos erupted last night at a debate by nine candidates hoping to become the new MPP for St. Paul's in next Thursday's by-election when an independent candidate rebelled after being denied the chance to answer questions from the audience.
The debate was briefly adjourned and interrupted several times as fringe candidate John Turmel got off the stage and rambled around a church auditorium, complaining loudly and repeatedly that he was being bypassed with questions aimed at candidates from mainstream parties.
"Why should I sit like a lump on a log?" Turmel beefed aloud to the crowd after he abandoned the stage in frustration. "This is democracy in Canada?"
He was threatened with ejection several times by the moderator of the debate, organized by the local Town Crier newspaper.
Police were also called and Turmel later returned to the stage and settled down, but only after a shoving match had ensued and nearby audience members feared it might come to blows. One supporter of Progressive Conservative candidate Sue-Ann Levy held back an angry audience member who made a move toward Turmel, an engineer by training who is known in political circles for running in virtually every election he can.
As the debate began, Turmel told an overflow crowd of about 300 at a church hall in the mid-town Toronto riding that he was not so much concerned about taxes the provincial government collects but how "tax money is wasted."
Similar concerns from Levy, New Democrat candidate Julian Heller and others had Liberal hopeful Dr. Eric Hoskins on the defensive over spending scandals at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation and eHealth Ontario.
The Liberals also came under fire for the controversial harmonized sales tax taking effect next July 1.
Premier Dalton McGuinty called the by-election after former Liberal MPP and cabinet minister Michael Bryant, now facing criminal charges in a traffic incident last week, resigned in June.