When Doug Ford posed for pictures with an infamous neo-Nazi sympathizer recently, he faced near-universal condemnation.

But one appeal for humanity stood out. There was something in the way a soft-spoken dairy farmer from Northern Ontario rose dramatically in the legislature, imploring Ford to fess up.

His name is John Vanthof. This is his story — and our history.

At the time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Later, I stumbled upon his family’s private story — perhaps a journalistic hunch, possibly Jewish instinct, maybe both.

Now I understand more about why he stood up to Ford, and urged him to stand up for human rights in a way that no one else could.

For Vanthof, it was personal.

A self-described “pasty white guy” with family roots in the old Netherlands Reform Church, he is little-known outside the precincts of Queen’s Park, or the boundaries of his rural riding.

But as I soon discovered, Vanthof can never view the neo-Nazi movement as a mere debating point, nor a chance to score political points. The Holocaust was a turning point in his own family’s life, as it claimed 6 million Jewish lives — including the Jewish neighbours whom Vanthof’s grandfather had desperately tried to shelter from Nazi occupiers.

Others had tried in vain to persuade Ford to do the right thing.

Religious leaders across Ontario — not least local Jewish figures — publicly beseeched the premier to repudiate the photo of him smiling with his arm draped around the white supremacist. Opposition politicians urged Ford to renounce her, while Progressive Conservative MPPs averted their eyes sheepishly.

As a fringe mayoral candidate (no point giving her more publicity here by naming her), she was shamelessly profiting from the premier’s public embrace in the municipal election campaign. Day after day, Ford stubbornly and pugnaciously refused to dissociate himself from her — and lashed out bitterly at his critics.

But Vanthof refused to give up. He couldn’t countenance what he had just heard on the floor of the house after what he had come to know growing up back home.

The normally subdued Vanthof was almost trembling with rage as he watched the premier dance around the question without distancing himself from the fringe candidate — “I repeat, denounce, denounce, anyone who wants to talk hate speech” — and then pivot, bizarrely, to how New Democrats and Liberals waste tax dollars.

Glaring fiercely at Ford, the opposition MPP rose slowly to his feet.

“This shouldn’t be that hard — this is the woman who appeared on a white supremacist podcast and said she ‘salutes’ the neo-Nazi hosts for showing up ‘in hordes’ to a rally in Charlottesville,” Vanthof intoned, urging the premier to denounce her.

“Just keep ’em coming,” Ford taunted, adding for good measure that New Democrats and Liberals are “wasting the taxpayers’ money without any concern whatsoever. That is terrible. That is disrespectful to the taxpayers.”

When I encountered Vanthof in the hallway later that day, his story came tumbling out. In wartime Holland, his grandfather, Johannes, had hidden his Jewish neighbours on their dairy farm, where “they dug a trench underneath where the cows slept.”

But the Jews were eventually discovered, and paid the price for it — as did his own family. The Jews were taken away, never to be seen again, and the Vanthofs “suffered greatly for what they had done.”

He doesn’t know the details because the family wouldn’t talk about it — just that his grandfather died shortly after. But he knows the family never regretted it, because it was the right thing to do.

There are many stories of Holocaust survivors, endowed with a powerful human instinct of self-preservation. But the stories of those who choose to help others are no less remarkable, because they risked self-sacrifice.

“I don’t know if I’m the same man that my grandfather was, but I’ve been given the opportunity to stand up, and that’s what I do.”

Which is why he challenged Ford that day.

“If you don’t stop it, every chance, every chance ...” Vanthof said, his voice trailing off.

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Two days after Vanthof spoke out, echoed by many others, Ford finally did the right thing, dissociating himself by name from the fringe candidate with whom he had cheerfully posed a few days before.

“I don’t think he’s figured out that there’s a time to be a (political) combatant, and there’s a time to be a premier, and to be a leader.”

Perhaps if Ford had known Vanthof’s story, and others like it, he’d have spoken out sooner. And spoken to Vanthof more respectfully, and seriously, on a subject so many people take personally.

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