A senior member of Rob Ford’s campaign team says two of the participants in an anti-Ford sit-in outside the mayor’s office are communists.

One of the protesters, John Young, is a doctor. The other, sit-in organizer Chris Caple, is a website designer.

On Twitter, Caple pointedly asked Ford’s press secretary, Amin Massoudi, if he could “let the public know” how Ford had spent his workday after a 9 a.m. campaign press conference. Young then asked how “people like” Massoudi can “just ignore this kind of criticism.”

“How do they live with themselves?” Young said.

Graeme McEachern, the director of Ford’s campaign headquarters and deputy director of field operations, then chimed in.

“We don’t ignore the people, we ignore full-time communist activists like both of you. Have a nice day,” McEachern wrote.

There is no indication that either man is anything close to a communist, but McEachern emphatically stood by his accusation when asked about them by a reporter.

“Chris and John? Their statements and tweets over months lead me to this conclusion,” he wrote in a Twitter message. “Go back for eight months and read everything.”

“Plus they are nasty protesters that personally attack the mayor's staff with vile venom online for months and I felt like rattling their chain,” he wrote.

He added: “To be clear, communist is about the worst insult I can give. I feel that they deserve it for their increasingly insulting manners.”

The “Rob Ford Must Go” protesters have sat outside Ford’s office for 184 consecutive days. McEachern worked in the office before he joined the campaign. He was initially friendly to the protesters, Caple said, but then turned “completely hostile.”

“‘Communist’ just appears to be a generic go-to insult in his mind. Along with ‘activist.’ So ‘full-time communist activist’ is like one of the worst things he can imagine calling somebody, apparently,” Caple said. “Just more Ford-style mindless divisiveness and othering and attempts to deflect and avoid self-awareness.”

Ford, a populist conservative, has himself invoked communism to disparage his opponents. In 2012, he called five centrist and left-leaning councillors “two steps left of Joe Stalin.”

Young made his own historical reference when asked about McEachern’s claim.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“I can say that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party,” he said. “I'm pretty liberal-minded, though.”

He added that he is too self-centred to be a communist.