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Premier Doug Ford is too busy “cleaning up a Liberal mess in Ontario” to be alarmed about a Liberal MP’s weekend tweet suggesting Ford be “whacked,” his office says.

Early Saturday morning, Liberal MP Adam Vaughan noted in a tweet that Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government was backing away from plans to cut all-day kindergarten.

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Vaughan suggested the Ford government had initially raised the idea so that residents would become “upset over hurting Kindergarten students instead of being angry over the damage he’s done to University students.”

“Next he will go after young offenders & end ‘free school’ in detention centres,” Vaughan tweeted. “Instead of playing whack-a-mole; Let’s just whack him.”

Later Saturday, he issued an apology, clarifying that he did not actually intend to call for Ford’s assassination. Vaughan, the MP for Spadina-Fort York in Toronto, insisted his tweet — “Let’s just whack him” — was meant merely as a reference to the carnival game whack-a-mole, not the underworld slang for an execution.

“It was never my intent to suggest anyone, anywhere should inflict real physical harm to Premier Ford,” he wrote in a statement. “To those who took offence, I’m sorry.”

Vaughan, a former journalist and cartoonist, said the confusion stemmed from a series of illustrations he had created, transposing Ford’s face on a whack-a-mole game. (He has a history of confronting his political foes in cartoons; as a Toronto city councillor he occasionally caricatured his then chief rival, the premier’s brother, the late mayor Rob Ford.)

But Vaughan said he couldn’t attach his whack-a-mole cartoons to his initial tweet on Saturday morning, leaving his “whack him” comment open to darker interpretations.

“Twitter has a character count,” he said in an email on Sunday to the National Post. “Late in the afternoon it was clear by the tone of the tweets that some were taking my use of whack out of context. Wanted to be clear that there was no intent to advocate political violence.

“Easier to tell a joke on Twitter than explain one.”