CP John Carpay in Calgary in 2012.

Alberta's United Conservative Party Leader has acknowledged party member John Carpay's apology for comparing rainbow flags to swastikas in a speech over the weekend. But Jason Kenney has so far stopped short of revoking Carpay's membership, despite his stated intentions to weed out extremist views in the UCP. On Saturday, Carpay, a Calgary-based lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, delivered a 20-minute speech on the topic of totalitarianism at a Rebel Live conference hosted by The Rebel Media, a far-right website that has been criticized for its stance on white supremacy. He spoke at length about Alberta government Bill 24, which protects students from being outed by teachers if they join a gay-straight alliance. He took special issue with the expectation that schools remove religious language from their policies, calling it "nakedly totalitarian." "This is what communists and Nazis have done," Carpay warns in the video, describing the policies as an "attack on parental rights." But the comments that have garnered the most criticism come at the 14-minute mark.

"How do we defeat today's totalitarianism?" Carpay asks. "Because again, you have to think about the common characteristics. It doesn't matter whether it's a hammer and sickle for communism or whether it's the swastika for Nazi Germany or it's a rainbow flag — the underlying thing is a hostility toward individual freedoms. The underlying thing is a vision where the government is the master." In a statement posted to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms' website, Carpay writes that the speech should be viewed "in its entirety," and that his intention was to ensure that "our latter-day attempts to perfect the rights of any historically wronged community" do not "trammel the rights of others." "I unintentionally drew a broad comparison between the rainbow flag and the flags which bear the symbols of Communism and Nazism," the statement reads. "I should not have done so, and I apologize." I unintentionally drew a broad comparison between the rainbow flag and the flags which bear the symbols of Communism and Nazism.John Carpay, UCP member Carpay is the lawyer behind a lawsuit challenging Alberta's Bill 24. He once argued that gay-straight alliances are "ideological sexual clubs" that provide students with graphic information on gay sex. Kenney — who once compared Carpay to civil-rights activist Rosa Parks at a Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms event in 2017, according to CBC News — acknowledged the Rebel Live comments via Twitter on Monday. "The gay rights movement has worked through legal, democratic means, often to overcome gross violations of basic freedoms by the state," he wrote. "To compare that in any way to genocidal totalitarianism is vile, particularly given the violent persecution of LGBT people under such regimes." He went on to write that the "tendency to trivialize the unique meaning of Nazi and Soviet terror must stop. Genocidal totalitarianism has no relationship to political disagreements in our liberal democracy."

Jeff McIntosh/CP Jason Kenney in Red Deer, Alta., on May 6, 2018.

Amber Bracken/CP Notley during the Alberta NDP Convention in Edmonton on Oct. 28, 2018.