Rob Oliphant's Path to Politics + Thoughts From the Hill - March Edition

After a bit of delay, the March edition of Outlooks is now online and on the newsstands. I have two articles in this issue - the Thoughts From the Hill panel, this time on the issue of Uganda, and a profile of Liberal MP Rob Oliphant. I've come to know Oliphant quite well over the past couple of years, and his profile in Outlooks was long overdue, so it was good to finally get to do that.

I posted a brief excerpt from that interview on my Hill Queeries blog a couple of days ago, which generated some reaction, so I wanted to post the full transcript bit here. The issue was when Oliphant said that he was targeted by both the Conservatives and NDP during the last election because of his sexuality. This is what Oliphant had to say during the interview:

"Both the Conservatives and the NDP attempted to use my sexual orientation against me during the election. The Conservatives had targeted letters to various ethnic communities about my so-called “lifestyle,” and they were anonymous – they weren’t acknowledged, but we could tell exactly where they came from. So we confronted them with this, and I registered a complaint about that. The NDP also had a strong verbal campaign in the ethnic communities – particularly the Muslim community – against me as a gay person, at which point I had to go over the riding level to ask them to cease and desist because it was simply dangerous. It wasn’t dangerous for me, as much as it was my concern was that it was a very hateful campaign that was being waged, could cause a young gay Muslim person to suicide, which was my concern. So I did face quite a strong campaign against me from two sides as a gay candidate, and interestingly, neither of them was successful at all. We had a phone call in the campaign office from someone in Leeside who had been canvassed door-to-door by a Conservative, and issues of my so-called “lifestyle” were raised, and this man called and said I guess they thought they could do that because I’m a single man that lives with my mother, and I don’t happen to be gay but there’s no place for that, and I used to vote Conservative and I’m not going to vote for them if they’re going to do that."

Thoughts From the Hill is on page 14, and Rob Oliphant's Path to Politics is on pages 24 and 25. You can download the full issue in .pdf form here.