Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer is not going to win the Oct. 21 election if he’s running scared of Liberal fear-mongering about Islamophobia by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

An indication that’s happening is the party’s recent veto, without explanation, of Salim Mansur from seeking the Conservative nomination in London North Centre.

Distroscale

I’ve known Mansur for 15 years and was his editor when he was a longtime columnist for the Toronto Sun.

He’s a scholar and a gentleman, now retired, after a distinguished career of more than three decades as an associate professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.

He has been a supporter of Canada’s conservative movement through its darkest hours — including the 1993 election when the Progressive Conservative party was reduced to two seats.

He ran for the Canadian Alliance in London West in 2000, losing to the Liberal incumbent, and supported the unite-the-right movement spearheaded by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Mansur’s speeches and published works have appeared widely, including his 2011 award-winning book, Delectable Lie: A liberal repudiation of multiculturalism, for which I wrote one of the cover blurbs, calling Mansur “a brilliant academic and thought-provoking journalist” who “explains what liberal democracy really means, and why the protection of individual rights that lies at its heart is under constant assault from the group think mentality of state-imposed multiculturalism.”

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Born in Calcutta, India, Mansur is a practising Muslim and a fierce critic of radical Islam.

He believes the damage Trudeau and the Liberals are doing to Canada through their support of “the twin forces of globalism and Islamism” must be reversed and that “we must not be intimidated by political correctness to express our hopes and fears for our country.”

“You and I as Conservatives” he wrote during his aborted campaign to win the Tory nomination, “disagree with Justin Trudeau and his Liberals in the manner in which they are ideologically motivated to change Canada, not for the better, nor in keeping true to those values that made our country an exemplar of civility and decency in a much-troubled world.”

He expressed concern in 2012 before Parliament’s committee on citizenship and immigration about “the flow of immigration into Canada from around the world, and in particular the flow from Muslim countries, mean(ing) a pouring in of numbers into a liberal society … from cultures at best non-liberal.”

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

He called this “an unprecedented challenge to liberal societies, such as ours, when there is no demand placed on immigrants any longer to assimilate into the founding liberal values of the country to which they have immigrated.”

Mansur, in my view, would have been an ideal candidate for the Conservatives in Liberal-held London Centre North, because he wasn’t running out of ego or expectation of easy victory. He was running because of his principles.

While there has been no official explanation for why the Conservative party hierarchy disqualified his candidacy, Mansur says he was told by senior party sources that the Scheer campaign was worried his record of speeches and writings would open him to attacks of Islamophobia by the Liberals and it didn’t want Scheer distracted by them.

The Conservative party declined comment when I contacted them about disqualifying Mansur.

Given their rejection, he’d be a natural for Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party.

If that happens, it will be because the Conservative hierarchy lacks all conviction about what it claims are its political principles.