Municipal leaders representing many of the same voters who elected Derek Sloan, MP for Hastings-Lennox and Addington, and Conservative Party leadership candidate, are calling for the MP’s removal from the party after highly questionable allegations he made against Canada’s medical officer of health.

First-term MP Sloan is under extremely heavy fire for a tweet in which he queried whether Canada’s Chief Medical Officer Theresa Tam worked for the Chinese government which has been accused of covering up its alleged mishandling of the outbreak of COVID-19.

The MP and lawyer’s waxing on unfounded allegations coming from Washington, D.C. of a similar nature about China have sparked scores of angry responses from Canadians on his twitter account calling his April 21 tweet “racist” for allegations which included a Facebook video questioning Tam, a long-respected expert in public health, about her role in the World Health Organization.

Sloan did not reply to a phone call made to his personal line Thursday by The Intelligencer seeking comment.

“I have been disgusted by the way that Justin Trudeau and his team has handled the coronavirus pandemic,” Sloan said in his video.

He took aim at the prime minister’s “reliance of advice from Dr. Theresa Tam, we sent an email out today asking: Does she work for Canada or for China? It was Dr. Tam who is on a special panel on the World Health Organization right now. She also parrots their information at every available opportunity,” Sloan said in the video.

In a strongly worded missive on Hastings County letterhead, dated Thursday and sent to Conservative Party of Canada leader Andrew Sheer, Sloan’s comments were condemned by co-signatories Warden Rick Phillips and CAO Jim Pine on behalf of the municipality representing roughly 140,000 people, many of whom live and voted in Sloan’s riding.

“We are writing to you today to express our full and complete disgust with the comments made by your MP Derek Sloan about Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Medical Officer of Health,” stated the letter, obtained by The Intelligencer.

“Mr. Sloan’s comments were cruel, racist and completely unbecoming of a Member of Parliament. Dr. Tam is a great Canadian and has played an integral leadership role in the fight against COVID-19. Her skills as a public health professional are beyond dispute and she should be congratulated for her tireless efforts on all our behalves,” wrote Phillips and Pine.

“As warden and chief administrative officer, we want you and your party to know that we find Mr. Sloan’s opinions offensive and not representative of the residents that we know who call our County home,” the letter stated.

“There is only one course of action your must take as leader of the Conservative Party. You must use all tools at your disposal to show Canadians Mr. Sloan’s racist comments are not representative of your party’s views. If this means expelling him from the Party, so be it.”