III. Karim Jivraj

This is the part of the story that I dread.

In some ways this essay should be the easiest one to write. There’s no lengthy exegesis here, no deep meanings to ponder. It’s just a timeline of events, backed by paper trails and witnesses for anyone who wants to delve further. But it’s a story that I never wanted to tell — not least because it makes me look like a complete naïf.

In February 2017, I was invited to a Lunar New Year banquet in Toronto sponsored by the Ontario Progressive Conservative (PC) party. I was starting to consider running for public office, and it seemed like a good opportunity to network and learn about the grassroots political process. It was the first political event I ever attended.

That’s where I met Karim Jivraj. He wasn’t interested in me at first — not until he heard that I’d gone to grad school at Oxford and GWU. He attended the Sorbonne and Cornell, I learned. Jivraj ran for a seat in parliament during the 2015 federal election, and he was planning to run for office again. We talked about our respective political orientations: I explained that my conservative outlook was grounded in ideas about truth, gratitude and humility. He talked about France, immigration, and the poison of cultural relativism.

Jivraj was one of the more engaging and charismatic people I’d met in some time. He was conversant in political philosophy and seemed interested in the life of the mind. And he presented himself as a seasoned political veteran who knew the ins and outs of grassroots politics and campaigning.

Soon after that first meeting, Jivraj invited me to an event he was organizing in downtown Toronto. That’s where he pulled me aside and offered to take me under his wing. He told me he had plans to win a seat in parliament, and had dreams of becoming Prime Minister. “Stick with me,” he said, offering me a job on a then non-existing political campaign. I declined — I didn’t need a job, and I certainly didn’t need to be patronized. Fine, but he still needed me: “You can be my conscience,” he told me.

Man, he had my number. If you want to flatter me, don’t tell me that I’m pretty or smart or funny. Tell me that I’m good. Tell me that I’m capable of redeeming a lost soul and pointing them to a path of virtue. That’s how you get me.

Soon we were having regular conversations on a range of philosophical, social, and political topics. He had been a high school debate champion and was a good intellectual sparring partner: someone with whom you could play devil’s advocate and challenge your thinking. We talked about everything: education, culture, identity, gender, critiques of market fundamentalism — you name it. There was something genuinely fun and interesting about these conversations.

Sometimes our talks veered into deeper questions about how to live. These were the conversations that really interested me. Jivraj’s fundamental approach to life was a source of profound fascination in that it was completely the opposite of my own.

We once traded notes on how childhood experiences of being bullied or ostracized influenced us. For me, being bullied made me a more serious and empathetic person: having experienced that kind of pain, I resolved to never knowingly inflict it on another person. Jivraj thought this was weak. He maintained that the way to respond to a bully is to get vengeance — or, better yet, to get them before they can get you. To illustrate his point he told a story from his childhood in Ontario. A boy was picking on him during a canoe trip at summer camp. Jivraj said his solution was to sneak into the boy’s tent one night and bash him in the face with a Maglite as he slept. He was proud of this story — the kids stopped picking on him.

I tried to persuade him that this was wrong: a person does damage to their own soul when they do harm to another. I maintained that we inhabit a just universe, and that all of us ultimately have to pay for all the good and the bad that we do. Thus, there is no need to make our own justice, or to be on guard against other people. I urged him to read Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, and compared him to the character of Callicles—the unapologetic defender of realpolitik who believed that temperance and magnanimity are signs of weakness, and that justice is where the strong exercise advantage over the weak. Jivraj took that as a compliment.

It wasn’t long before I started to witness him behaving vindictively toward people who had supposedly slighted him. One night in late February 2017 he invited me to attend a local PC party board meeting. This is where the real grassroots political process can be observed. A beautiful and talented young Muslim woman was running to be the new president of the board of directors. For reasons I could not discern, Jivraj was determined to disrupt her bid. Hours before the meeting, he used a pseudonymous email address to send a message to the board of directors viciously disparaging the young woman. She lost the presidency. I expressed my disapproval to Jivraj, calling him out for being needlessly and unjustifiably cruel. I should have done more.

Soon thereafter, Jivraj offered me $500 for background research on a PC party nomination candidate with suspected ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. I contracted the work to a friend with excellent Chinese language research skills and deep knowledge of the UFWD, and he assembled a dossier that showed the candidate was a probable agent of influence for the Chinese government. When presented with the dossier and invoiced for the research, Jivraj simply refused to pay. He said it wasn’t what he wanted, so I paid the $500 out of pocket. Instead of using the information to alert the PC Party, Jivraj helped that person win their nomination. He is now a sitting member of provincial parliament in the Toronto region.

In March 2017, Jivraj told me over the phone that he previously operated a New York-based corporation called Weston Ivy Consulting. The company was something like an academic essay mill that specialized in creating letters of recommendation and admission essays for European applicants to elite U.S. law schools. According to complaints I found online, students paid thousands of Euros up-front for services that were never delivered. The company listed a Manhattan address as its headquarters, and Jivraj ran this corporation using generic, WASP-y pseudonyms. There is almost no paper trail linking Jivraj to this corporation, though US tax filings or corporate registration records would presumably list his name. I also found an internet registrar that showed him as the owner of the German version of the Weston Ivy website, but little else. Bearing in mind that Jivraj is prone to hyperbole, he intimated to me that this scam netted him in excess of $800K.

After he told me about Weston Ivy, he panicked. It was not a secret he intended to divulge, and he seemed nervous that if his link to the company was discovered he could face civil or perhaps criminal charges. Jivraj started accusing me of being a traitor who would use this information to undermine him. “I always do this — I lay my heart on the line and open up to people, and they betray me” — that was the gist of it. He demanded that I prove my friendship and loyalty by telling him something incriminating about myself. Other than an embarrassing punk rock phase in my youth and some run-ins with a foreign, authoritarian government, I’m a pretty straight arrow. This was clearly disappointing to Jivraj: he said he wanted “dirt.”

I ended the call with Jivraj, and immediately got in touch a psychiatrist friend to ask if his behaviour sounded like that of a psychopath. She described the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy, and added that if I was asking the question, he was probably someone I should steer clear of. She was right.

But after a few days, I started to rationalize that Jivraj might be just below the threshold for true psychopathy (a non-professional opinion that I have since revised). I like to believe that all people have agency: we are not passive victims of fate, and each of us makes decisions about how we want to live. Maybe he could choose to be better. Soon we were back to corresponding regularly.

In May of 2017, Jivraj was discovered as the voice behind an anonymous Twitter account, @TeamBlue2018. For many months he had used the account to defame conservative political candidates he didn’t like (e.g. by alleging that female candidates were having romantic affairs with party brass. This was a favourite trope he used to discredit women). After he was found out, he realized he would never have a political career in Ontario.

Jivraj called me asking for advice — specifically, advice on how he could lie his way out of the situation. I told him to own his mistakes, use it as an opportunity for self-reflection, and start living simply and honestly. He agreed with me — or said he did — but he needed to get out of town and start fresh. He knew that I was planning to move back to Western Canada with my family, and he decided to move there as well. When he struggled to find housing or employment in Calgary, I used my connections to line up a job interview at a reputable law firm and arranged for him to sublet a room from an old friend.

Before he left Ontario, Jivraj bought me one of his favourite books, La Défaite de la Pensée. I gave him a copy of the Analects of Confucius, inscribed with a message that he should focus on the improvement of his soul. We parted as friends.

Sometime in August 2017, I resolved to distance myself from Jivraj — slowly and amicably, if possible. There was no real catalyst, but my work was picking up, and realized that I felt better when I wasn’t talking to him.

We remained friendly even as our correspondences became less frequent. But I started to notice that there was a strange quality to many of our conversations: he would ask leading, non-sequitur questions, as though trying to bait me into saying who knows what. Sometimes he would tell me that such-and-such influential person hated me, and ask me to respond. Questions about whether I’d ever committed marital infidelity, or ever broken the law. Separately, he confessed to me that he had a habit of recording his phone calls.

In the fall of 2017, I began seriously explore the possibility of running for provincial office. I had purchased a home in Calgary and was in the process of moving back to Alberta, so I decided to reach out to the leader of the provincial conservative party, Jason Kenney. Kenney was then actively trying to recruit qualified women to run for United Conservative Party (UCP) nominations, and I was among the people who he encouraged to run.

Jivraj was initially supportive: In September 2017 he emailed Jason Kenney to give a laudatory recommendation for me. But as things progressed, he grew increasingly unsettled.

Jivraj always regarded me as a political neophyte (I was), and saw himself as a savvy veteran who was destined for greatness. But just as my political career was starting, his own fortunes were declining. He had burned bridges in Ontario, and was acquiring a bad reputation in Calgary as well.

In January 2018, Jivraj wrote to tell me that he was finding this difficult to bear. He confessed to feeling jealous and resentful, and suggested we could no longer be friends. Very well, I thought.

In March 2018, I saw Jivraj at a United Conservative Party fundraiser in southwest Calgary, and he introduced me to Philip Schuman. Schuman was running for the UCP nomination in Calgary-Glenmore, and we had a pleasant conversation about hitchhiking. I thought he seemed nice.

A week later, Schuman nervously asked me to meet him for coffee. Jivraj told Schuman that I had accused him of making inappropriate sexual advances. This was at the height of the #MeToo movement, and Schuman was understandably concerned that such an allegation could destroy his career. He had been phoning around to his contacts in the party asking for advice, effectively spreading the rumour that I was making unfounded accusations of sexual impropriety.

Alas, I wasn’t. Schuman had nothing to worry about. But I did: if word got around that I make false accusations of sexual harassment, my own nascent political career would be over. No man would meet with me, lest I accuse them of something similar. I think Jivraj understood this.

I eventually confronted Jivraj. He first denied starting the rumour, but later admitted to it. He attributed his behaviour to a combination of alcoholism and jealousy, and promised to stop with his bizarre machinations. I wished him well in getting the help he needed, but also made clear that I did not want him in my life.

Over the next few days he sent me dozens of rude and unsolicited messages accusing me of being a disloyal traitor. I blocked his number.

The next time I saw Jivraj was on April 28, 2018, at a campaign launch for a federal Conservative nomination candidate. He acted friendly towards me, and repeatedly urged me to leave with him to get drinks and “clear the air” (I was nine months pregnant). I repeatedly refused. He grew increasingly belligerent and insistent, not letting me leave the venue, and nearly coming to blows with two men who tried to intervene on my behalf. After he made a lewd comment about my “tits,” I told him he was being inappropriate and left.

A couple days later, Jivraj bought the domain name caylanford.ca.

In July, Jivraj formally launched his campaign to seek the federal conservative party nomination in Calgary-Centre. He emailed to ask me to attend his campaign launch. “I’ve been an asshole to you,” he said. “You’ve been one of the few kind people in my life, and I would very much like for you to be a part of this evening.” I politely declined.

A week later, Jivraj showed up at the Annual General Meeting for the Calgary-Mountain View UCP board. I was a registered candidate for the UCP nomination in Mountain View, and Jivraj decided to run for president of the Mountain View board. During the meeting, Jivraj walked around the room asking attendees if he could add his name to their ballots. One attendee later told me that Jivraj not only wrote his name on ballots, but also voted for himself without permission. He became president of the board.

A person close to Jivraj told me at that time that his purpose in taking over the board was to “gain leverage” over me. Soon, I was hearing from voters in the constituency that Jivraj was claiming I was ineligible to stand as a candidate, and that I should be disqualified from the nomination race.

I was becoming increasingly unnerved by Jivraj’s apparent fixation on me. One evening in September, I sent a message to a mutual acquaintance asking if I had any reason to be worried that Jivraj might have figured out my home address, and whether I should upgrade my security system or get a large dog.

Soon thereafter, there was attempted break & enter at my home when my two children were present. To be clear: I have no idea who was responsible, and this type of physical confrontation does not seem like Jivraj’s style. Still, when police arrived to file a police report, I informed them that I felt threatened by him.

In October, Jivraj convinced several members of the Mountain View board that I had committed “residency fraud” and did not meet the eligibility criteria to run for the UCP nomination (neither is true). He drafted a sensational, accusatory letter to UCP President Janice Harrington asking for an investigation into my eligibility. Jivraj persuaded nine members of the Mountain View board to sign the letter, but left his own name off. Then it was sent to the media.

I received calls from CBC and the Calgary Herald, both of which realized there was no story: the allegations in the letter were easily refuted. PressProgress, lacking an interest in truth, ran the story. They crafted a narrative that I was a parachute candidate from Ontario, that I moved from Ottawa to Calgary at the urging of Jason Kenney, and that I was now being rejected by the party’s grassroots for committing fraud. None of this was true.

(As an aside, I never bothered to publicly respond to PressProgress’ invented narrative about my life, so I’ll do that here. I am from Calgary. I lived in Calgary for 21 years before leaving for grad school. I purchased my home in Calgary with the intention of moving back months before I ever met Jason Kenney. He did not recruit me from Ontario. I was not “parachuted” into Calgary-Mountain View; I chose to run there because I have ties to the area, and I was running in a competitive nomination).

Members of the Mountain View board were understandably upset that the letter was leaked to the press. But when they confronted Jivraj, he feigned ignorance: he claimed to have no knowledge of the letter, and chastised the other directors to uphold their fiduciary duties and avoid bringing the board into disrepute.

Realizing they had been duped, the board began a process to remove Jivraj, and by November he was suspended and removed as a director and president of the board.

Someone then purchased Google ads for searches on my name. The ads labelled me a fraud, a liar, and an “Ottawa bureaucrat,” and directed people to the PressProgress article. One ad contained a fabricated quotation that was wrongly attributed to me. Anyone in Mountain View who searched for my name on Google at the time would have seen these ads at the top of their search results. It is likely that whoever purchased these ads did so in violation of the Alberta Elections Finances and Contributions Disclosures Act and the Elections Act.

As president of the Mountain View board, Jivraj had been given access to a list of all 1400 UCP members in the constituency (only party members can vote in nominations to choose the individual who will represent their party). As the date of my nomination vote drew closer, he created an anonymous email address (mountainviewconservatives@gmail.com), and abused confidential membership data by sending an email to every party member urging them not to vote for me. The email was replete with fabrications, including more invented quotations, accusations of fraud, and attacks on my character and integrity.

On December 6, 2018, I won my nomination with 57% of the vote and over 900 ballots cast.

I should mention something thing here: while Jivraj was doing all this, I never initiated contact with him except to recover the domain name that he purchased. All I wanted — all I have wanted for the past year — was for Jivraj to leave me alone.

By this time, Jivraj was still publicly claiming to be a federal nomination candidate in Calgary Centre. One of his former campaign volunteers estimated that he raised in excess of $40,000 in campaign donations. In the course of his campaign, he routinely misrepresented himself as an international lawyer. He told me and others that he had received a commission as a captain in the Canadian Armed Forces.

It was all lies. He is not in the armed forces. Although he did attend law school abroad, he is not admitted to practice law in any jurisdiction, including Alberta. He wasn’t even a registered nomination candidate.

The CPC nomination vote for Calgary-Centre was called for early 2019, and Jivraj’s name would not be on the ballot. The ruse was finally up, and he turned his attention back to me.

In January 2019, he mined our two-year-old text conversations for material that could be taken out of context and used to derail my election. He used the Christchurch massacre as a cover to pursue a personal vendetta against me, and PressProgress enabled him.

I realized that Jivraj’s campaign of harassment would continue to escalate, and that no one else would stand up to stop him. That was part of the reason I withdrew from the election: I was done just sitting around and waiting to see what he did next.

It is nothing short of astonishing that Jivraj has gone so far in his life harming so many people, and yet never faced public accountability.

I’m sure part of the reason is that Jivraj is remarkably litigious — or pretends to be. He routinely threatens legal action against anyone who might expose him (these are bluffs, but they can be effective). When Jivraj learned that I was talking to a journalist about this story, he began making veiled threats against my family. This is a person who goes through life trying to accumulate “dirt” on people — even his friends and people who wish him well — as an insurance policy so that they can never come after him.

But I suspect the main reason is that most people just have better things to do than hold him accountable. They have jobs and families and friends, and don’t want to get into the mud to deal with a character like Jivraj. That was certainly my reasoning for a long time: it is undignified to do what I am doing now, and I wanted to avoid it.

And then there’s the question about the nature of justice. This was the great meta-argument that animated our entire relationship.

In one of my few email exchanges with Jivraj last summer, I assured him that I had not told anyone about the many outrages that he’d perpetrated, explaining that “I have no desire to be the kind of person who does injury to others.”

By writing this essay and telling the truth about Jivraj, am I not betraying that ethic? I might feel vindicated, and I might warn others so they are not victimized in the future. But have I lost the argument? These are the questions that I’ve been grappling with. I am not sure that I have the answers.