EDMONTON—Two United Conservative Party candidates who stepped down for expressing white nationalist and Islamophobic views online will not be removed from the party, leader Jason Kenney said Tuesday.

Responding to questions about former Calgary candidates Eva Kiryakos and Caylan Ford, Kenney said it would be impossible for the party to police the views and social media posts of all of its nearly 160,000 members, and suggested that ordinary members can remain in the party as long as they don’t belong to organizations that are “actively promoting hatred.”

“There’s a different approach to candidates who are representing the party on the ballot than there are towards ordinary members,” Kenney said.

“We have a process to identify people who might belong to organizations that are actually militating to promote hatred. I think that’s a different category than old social media postings or private texts.”

Kiryakos stepped down from the Calgary-South East race Sunday after she claimed she learned someone was planning to expose posts she made that promoted Islamophobic and transphobic conspiracy theories.

Days earlier, Ford resigned in Calgary-Mountain View after Facebook messages she sent promoting racist white supremacist talking points were made public by a former party member.

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Irfan Chaudhry, director of MacEwan University’s office of human rights, diversity and equity, said the doubling down on party affiliation and membership shows the party is not taking human rights concerns as seriously as some had hoped.

“It just kind of reaffirms some of the things that are circulating about the party out there, that they don’t really (find) these types of issues around human rights, around equity, around diversity, important,” Chaudhry said.

Kenney said last year the party had a rigorous vetting process to avoid the kind of “bozo eruptions” that helped sink the now-defunct right-wing Wildrose Party in 2012.

In October, Kenney came out against UCP member Adam Strashok, who ran his leadership campaign’s call centre in 2017, after it surfaced that Strashok had posted anti-Semitic comments online and promoted an online store that sells white supremacist memorabilia.

At the time, Kenney said he asked the UCP board to develop a process for screening applicants to block anyone who has expressed hateful or extreme views.

Chaudhry wonders what happened to that promise.

“I don’t think that the party is doing anything, to be quite honest, to showcase candidates and their views on various polarizing issues,” Chaudhry said.

“I think in general, regardless of party, there just needs to be a better threshold or standard put in place, in terms of how people are putting their names forward.”

Kiryakos doubled down on her hateful comments in a video explaining her resignation Sunday. Her comments included a claim of a fake “refugee rape crisis” that was linked from a WordPress blog, and a false claim that allowing transgender people to use the washrooms that align with their gender leads to girls being assaulted by men.

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Ford has remained active on Twitter and has not apologized for remarks that she is “somewhat saddened by the demographic replacement of white peoples in their homelands,” and that “it is unlikely that Western culture will survive without Western peoples,” among other comments promoting white supremacy.

Kenney has condemned Ford’s remarks and said he appreciated Kiryakos stepping down, calling her decision “selfless.”

Both candidates have painted themselves as victims who were taken down unfairly for exercising their freedom of speech, which Chaudhry said is hard to make sense of.

“If you say something hateful or racist or xenophobic or transphobic or homophobic, and then you’re surprised when people call you out on it, I don’t understand how you can play that victim card,” Chaudhry said.

“I just find it really challenging to have people go out there when they get caught for saying something that is essentially othering another group, and then not really understanding why they’re being challenged to defend their views.”

Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt said Kenney wants to stay focused on economic issues, and responding in detail to candidate blunders would play into the NDP’s “trap.”

Bratt said the stream of racist comments is important to look into, though he added that as long as the worst offenders are removed from their candidacy, the revelations likely won’t hurt the party.

“I think there is something there. I think we need to figure out what is it about the UCP that seems to be attracting this,” he said.

“Ultimately the question is: Does any of this matter? … The economy is in such dire straits — are people just so fixated on jobs, getting rid of the carbon tax, issues of the pipeline, that the rest of this stuff doesn’t matter?”

While the UCP has been combing through NDP candidates to dig up dirt from their past, such as Shannon Phillips attending a Northern Gateway pipeline protest in 2013, Bratt said they don’t seem to have applied the same scrutiny to their own members.

“They’ve been combing through NDP candidates. And given some of the bozo eruptions in the past, I would have thought a stronger vetting process would be in existence for their candidates. So I don’t know how it fell through the cracks,” he said.

“I understand how Ford’s fell through the cracks in the sense that these were not public messages, but I don’t understand Kiryakos.”

A UCP spokesperson declined to comment on the party’s vetting process Tuesday, saying in an email that they would let Kenney’s comments stand.

With files from Kieran Leavitt

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