THE BEST IS YET TO COME!

December 1, 2020 Dear friend, Re: Thank you

Thank you for your support during the Conservative Party leadership race. We were in third place and surging, with the second largest average donation of all candidates, when Party operatives ended our campaign. We weren’t removed from the race because of something I said or wrote. We were removed from the race because we were catching up to Erin O’Toole in polling and donations. With the down ballot support of the majority of Leslyn Lewis and voters, we would have won. Instead, the election was stolen from Conservative Party members by operatives who were trying to design a Red Tory coronation in favour of Erin O’Toole. Below, I explain how it all happened. The Saboteur and the Set Up We had a saboteur on our campaign that my wife, Cambridge MPP Belinda Karahalios, and I, least suspected. We knew him for 10 years and frequently had him over for Christian feasts. Like other political organizers who lead with their Christian faith, he would claim he was in politics in order to fight for “the cause.” In February, I thought of mailing a letter outlining my concerns with Erin O’Toole’s Campaign Chair, Walied Soliman. In 2017, Soliman was the Campaign Chair of the Ontario PC Party when that party decided to sue me to inflict financial harm and shut down my campaigns against their proposed carbon tax and against electoral fraud that was determining PC nominations. It was the first time a political party had sued a private citizen. I won in court. The saboteur on my campaign encouraged me to add to the letter my disagreement with statements in favour of Sharia banking made by Soliman in the Globe and Mail. The saboteur also pushed that the letter be given the title “Say No to Sharia Law. Stop Erin O’Toole.” We mailed the letter in February and didn’t receive any criticism. On March 4th, ignoring the saboteur’s peculiar advice to the contrary, I completed interviews with CTV, CBC, and Rebel News. Based on the positive feedback we received from these appearances, our campaign decided that until the March 25th ballot cut-off, our emails would only feature clips from the three interviews. Two days later, the saboteur suddenly urged me to change course. He advised that we send an email copy of the “Say No to Sharia Law. Stop Erin O’Toole.” letter. I was puzzled by the change in direction but didn’t think much of it. I thought that the worst that could happen was that I would receive some media criticism that I was prepared to rebut. After all, this was the same Conservative Party that in 2014, under Jason Kenney as Immigration Minister, banned the niqab from citizenship ceremonies, and in the 2015 election, campaigned on banning the niqab for public servants. At 10:17am on March 7th, the email was sent - visit https://mailchi.mp/jimkarahalios/law to read it. By the afternoon, Soliman led O’Toole’s team in an orchestrated attack against me on Twitter. Supporting Soliman and O’Toole were , Jason Kenney, and a social justice group called the Urban Alliance on Race Relations. Months later, I learned that the Urban Alliance’s treasurer is Mohammed Hashim. On Twitter, Soliman has referred to Hashim as a friend from highschool. Anthony Furey writing in the Toronto Sun, has described Hashim as an active member of the NDP, and a professional political activist who is committed to “framing a new narrative of Muslims in Canada” and creating a “national political movement.” In 2018, 1 416-409-6387 • JimKarahalios.ca • [email protected] after Faisal Hussain committed a mass shooting in Toronto’s GreekTown on the Danforth, Hashim prepared and distributed a news release to the media on behalf of the Hussain family seemingly trying to explain the horrific murders were the result of Hussain’s “mental health” issues. At the time of the O’Toole team’s attacks against me, I was surprised at how quickly they were coordinated. Soon thereafter, it became clear that I had been set up by being advised to send out the “Say No to Sharia Law. Stop Erin O’Toole” email. Fallout from the Email and Refusing a Lobbyist’s Offer

On March 9th, I had a call with a partner of a lobbying firm run by two individuals who have been involved in Conservative Party politics for decades. Until 2015, the lobbying firm had a third owner - the husband of Justin Trudeau’s current Chief of Staff. More recently, the lobbying firm has expanded its business by representing clients that some conservatives may find curious. In 2019, they represented Huawei Canada Inc., and currently, they represent Gavi - the Vaccine Alliance, co-founded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The two partners of this lobbying firm have longstanding friendships with the most influential members of the 18-person Organizing Committee (the LEOC) that ran the 2020 Conservative leadership, including, Co- Chairs Lisa Raitt (who received 3.34% of the vote in the 2017 Conservative leadership) and Dan Nowlan, and the Chief Returning Officer – longstanding party operative Derek Vanstone. All of these individuals previously worked together running ’s disastrous 2018 Ontario PC Party leadership campaign that I had criticized for her pro-carbon tax position. The lobbyist claimed that I was not going to be allowed on the ballot because most of the party establishment was “against me.” He said the only way I could get on the ballot was by asking his business partner to ask the LEOC to allow me to run, in exchange for my promise to support O’Toole. I thought he was bluffing. When I told him that I was trying to win, he uncharacteristically lost his cool by the possibility and called me a “lunatic” for suggesting it. A Two-Week Fake and Secret “Investigation”

On March 10th, O’Toole filed a complaint with Vanstone calling for my removal from the race. Vanstone ordered that I keep the complaint and his “investigation” secret. He also used O’Toole’s complaint as justification for not providing my campaign with access to the party membership lists. Even without the lists, we met the requirements to get on the ballot anyway, and before Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan. During the two-week “investigation,” the saboteur tried to bully Belinda and I, into having me drop out of the race. But we weren’t quitting. We owed it to our donors and our supporters to keep going. We responded to the defamatory allegations in O’Toole’s complaint. In response, Vanstone tried to have the LEOC disqualify me. When that failed, he unilaterally fined me an additional $100,000, that I would have to raise in seven days, in order to get on the ballot. Vanstone knew that I would have to appeal his decision to the Party’s Appeals Committee (Senator Don Plett, Sam Magnus, Valerie Assouline, and David Connelly), where he had enough votes to disqualify me. On March 20th, in response to my appeal to Vanstone’s fine, the Appeals Committee consulted with Vanstone and disqualified me. The LEOC was also refusing to transfer the donations owed to us in accordance with the rules and which we needed in order to pay our campaign expenses. Without these donations, it would have been impossible to comply with election finance laws that require all campaign expenses be paid from contributions. We had no other choice but to sue. Beating the Conservative Party in Court

In May, we won a gruelling 6-week court case. The judge did not have the jurisdiction to review Vanstone’s fine, but he did rule that if our campaign paid the $100,000 fine within 14 days, I could be added to the

2 416-409-6387 • JimKarahalios.ca • [email protected] ballot. The Party knew I was less than $15,000 away from that amount. The very next day, Senator Plett organized another call of the LEOC and had me disqualified a second time. During the trial, Senator Plett admitted over the phone to a party member that I wasn’t disqualified from the leadership race because of “Islamophobia.” It was clear that even if I had not sent out the “Say No to Sharia Law. Stop Erin O’Toole.” email, Raitt, Nowlan, Vanstone, Plett, and others, were determined to find any reason to keep me off the final ballot because I was trying to win and had a real shot at winning. By that point in the leadership race, O’Toole had hypocritically moved on to defending Derek Sloan’s scripted comments attacking Dr. Theresa Tham by rhetorically asking if she worked for Canada or China. But neither Sloan, nor any other candidate, were ever investigated, or fined, let alone disqualified, even when their comments or emails were far more inflammatory and received far more media criticism, than my one email. Pressured into Temporary Silence

After the second disqualification, I was out of options. In addition, the Party decided to impose Vanstone’s $100,000 fine and a $50,000 deposit. In order to have them release $135,000 of this money, which we now needed to pay our legal bill, I agreed I wouldn’t criticize the Party for the rest of the leadership race. The membership cut-off had passed and continuing in court could have left our campaign unable to pay for an even greater legal bill. As a result, I uncomfortably sat back and watched as millions of dollars were donated to the four remaining candidates, each claiming they were running to win in a race designed for O’Toole. Peter MacKay, the other Red Tory in the race, was the only other candidate trying to win - although he did a poor job of it. Leslyn Lewis did not try to win. Her protest of my removal was reserved to an email. Neither Lewis, nor any other candidate, criticized O’Toole for having me removed from the race. With the exception of a couple of left-wing swipes from MacKay and a little criticism over a commitment to an industrial carbon tax, O’Toole escaped the rest of the campaign without receiving much criticism at all.

After helping O’Toole “win,” Lewis - a Toronto lawyer who was promoted as someone who would lead the Conservative Party to victory in Toronto - was acclaimed as the Conservative candidate in a riding over 100km away, Haldimand-Norfolk. In order to parachute Lewis into this safe seat, two local residents were denied the opportunity to run in the nomination. This was the same method used to hand O’Toole his nomination by acclamation, the first time he ran for the Conservative Party, back in 2012. Party operatives blocked one challenger from running, and forced a third candidate to drop out after the Durham nomination was scheduled on the same day as his wedding. O’Toole has never won an internal party election without having a competitor disqualified from a campaign. Lewis has since praised O’Toole as a champion of “democracy” while O’Toole has claimed to be a champion of “free speech.” Each of these are laughable characterizations.

Leading conservative voices who criticized the Party for removing me from the leadership race were Campaign Life Coalition, Laura Lynn Thompson, Ezra Levant, Andrew Lawton, and Spencer Fernando. Other advocates were quiet because they were helping O’Toole even though his positions are in stark opposition to the policies they claim to support. Our History of Being Persecuted by the “Conservative” Establishment After I was sued and won in 2017, as previously described in this letter, I ran for Ontario PC President in 2018. Doug Ford, some of his government staff, and party staff, deliberately arranged for electoral fraud, in order to stop me and steal the election from over 1000 delegates who each paid $300 to vote. They used photocopied ballots, no voter list, ballot stuffing, and allowed people to vote more than once, in order to count hundreds of extra ballots against me and name a longstanding backroom party operative, Brian Patterson, as Ontario PC Party “President.” Patterson is also a close friend of the partners running the lobbying firm previously described in this letter.

3 A few weeks after my removal from the Conservative leadership, Belinda was ejected from Doug Ford’s PC caucus for voting against his draconian emergency powers legislation - Bill 195. By August, Patterson, filling the role of PC “President” even though he lost the election, made it clear that Belinda would not be allowed to run for the Ontario PC Party in the 2022 provincial election. He then had us, and 17 other PC members, removed from the Cambridge PC board. We had been purged from both “conservative” parties. For 15 years, Belinda and I have volunteered and fulfilled leadership roles in the Conservative Party of Canada and the Ontario PC Party. It wasn’t until we advocated for conservative positions, against electoral fraud in party elections, and became a threat to win, that the establishment targeted us. Moving Forward with the New Blue Party of Ontario

We now know, there are no democratic means of “working from the inside” of the Conservative Party of Canada or the Ontario PC Party. Anyone who holds conservative positions, is not controlled by the lobbyists in charge, and is a threat to win, will be targeted. The establishment will continue to try to manipulate grassroots conservatives by saying “the culture is against conservatives,” or “conservatism can’t win in Canada.” These are all lies. They will also continue to implement the same formula of controlled opposition in leadership races as they have in the past - arranging for candidates to run on a right wing platform, who do not try to win and have no chance of winning, in order to drive down ballot support up to a Red Tory “front runner” who will inevitably betray conservative voters. We have seen this formula time and time again. The “Conservative” establishment doesn’t want any of the major Liberal policies substantively changed or repealed. That is why they keep losing. Unfortunately for the establishment, there is an unprecedented groundswell of grassroots conservative activism across Canada. While Belinda and I are concerned with the current state of provincial and federal politics in Canada, this gives us hope. The establishment has lost control of the conservative narrative and their base and in order to maintain control of the parties they have had to resort to removing candidates from nominations and leaderships, and sometimes even electoral fraud. Belinda and I have decided the best way forward is to form a new provincial party in Ontario. We are currently waiting on Elections Ontario to officially register the New Blue Party of Ontario. In the meantime, as mentioned, I still have an outstanding lawsuit against the Ontario PC Party over the rigged 2018 convention for party president that I still need help with, if you are able and willing. You can donate to my legal fund by completing the enclosed form.

Thank you again for your support. Political challenges don’t compare to the struggles endured by many Canadians as a result of government measures in response to COVID. We hope you will still be able to enjoy a Merry Christmas and blessed New Year. The best is yet to come. Thank you,

Jim Karahalios

Jim Karahalios P.S. Follow us by signing up at jimkarahalios.ca or emailing [email protected] P.P.S. If you’d like to help with a donation to my legal fund, please see the enclosed form. I still have an outstanding lawsuit against the Ontario PC Party that I need help with over the rigged 2018 convention for party president. 4 416-409-6387 • JimKarahalios.ca • [email protected]