New Brunswick Education Minister Dominic Cardy says his constituency office was vandalized in August, and believes that the culprits are supporters of the People’s Party of Canada.
He claims it happened on or around August 28, a day after a video shows the minister confronted by a crowd of PPC supporters in Saint John, including leader Maxime Bernier and Saint John-Rothesay candidate Nicholas. Pereira.
READ MORE: Maxime Bernier, party supporters, engage in a heated exchange with the NB education minister
The group expressed dissatisfaction with Cardy’s support for COVID-19 vaccines and restrictions within the school.
Cardy, a member of the New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Party, says the video was just the beginning of a turbulent relationship with those who align with the PPC.
“That caused a flood of hate messages, death threats, attacks on my partner, my staff, the people who work for the department,” Cardy tells Global News.
In a Facebook post on Friday, the minister detailed the vandalism about three weeks after it allegedly happened, he believes after a rally Bernier attended in Fredericton on Aug. 28.
“Apparently some people showed up at my constituency office, threw bricks at the gate of the constituency office, and then left a Bernier flag just to make it very clear who did it,” Cardy says.
He says the bricks, which were written “LEAVE OUR CHILDREN ALONE,” did not break the glass but did leave wear marks.
Three weeks after the alleged incident, scuff marks are still visible on Cardy’s office glass door.
Travis Fortnum / Global News
Global News made several attempts to contact a Popular Party spokesperson, as well as Pereira and even the PPC candidate for New Brunswick Southwest, the location where Cardy’s office is located.
Neither responded to requests for comment on Cardy’s allegations.
Pereira, however, made a Facebook post following Cardy, hinting that the education minister was fabricating his claims.
“Who falls in love the most with this?” Pereira writes.
“If this happened on the date you suggest, August 28thWhy wait until 3 days before the election to publish it? “
Supporters in the post’s comment section asked if Cardy had actually called the police and accused Cardy of throwing the brick himself.
The New Brunswick RCMP confirmed to Global News that it received a related complaint and is investigating.
Global News spoke to a neighboring business owner in the same plaza as the constituency office, who confirmed that the scuff marks on the window have been there for “about three weeks.”
Additionally, when he was in Cardy’s office on Saturday, Global News noted that a second PPC flag had been left.
A neighboring business owner says someone put it up 20 minutes earlier.
“It is their decision how they want to behave,” says Cardy, “but in a democracy, at some point, we have to say that any use of violence is unacceptable.”
He says that he has received numerous explicit death threats, that he has informed public security according to protocol, but that he is not afraid.
“We have a lot of people here who live their lives as keyboard warriors, sitting behind a computer thinking that somehow this is going to change the world,” says Cardy.
“They don’t realize that there are consequences and impacts in the real world.”
Cardy says she’s talking because something has to change.
“We ask why people don’t get involved in politics, why don’t women get involved in politics or people from minority communities … they don’t want to put up with these things,” she says.
The PPC is heading into its second election since its formation without much to lose, no seats in the dissolution of Parliament.
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Reference-globalnews.ca