Randy Hillier revealed his true colours a long time ago

Editorial by Jeff Green | Nov 10, 2021

On Saturday Randy Hillier put up an apology on his Twitter account. He acknowledge that he should not have tweeted pictures of people who had died, against their families witshes, and made unsubstaintated claims abou their cause of death, all to to support his unsubstantiated claims about how dangerous the COVID-19 vaccination is.

He certainly owed those families an apology, but he had never apologised to anyone before, so it seemd odd.

At a rally in front in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto on Sunday (November 7) Hillier announced that the Peoples Party of Canada (Maxime Bernier's party) has formed a provincial wing which will contest the Ontario election, and that the leader of the PPC-Ontario party was none other than himself, making him a candidate for Premier.

He has not yet shared what the process was whereby he was chosen as leader by a party that did not exist until last week, but that is a detail.

We now know why Hillier apologised for his tweet. It was to appear more Premier- like.

Locally in Lanark-Frontenac- Kingston we now know that he will be running again, as the Purple Party candidate and the party leader.

This, to me, is good news. It will be an opportunity to gauge, finally, Randy Hillier's level of personal support in Lanark and Frontenac Counties.

I would not be surprised if we see Doug Ford himself in the riding for the first time ever, talking about what Randy Hillier stands for.

But Ford's own party provided the provincial stage in the first place

Randy Hillier entered politics in 2002 as one of the founders of The Lanark Landowners Association, and later, the Ontario Landowners Association. Both groups sought media attention constantly, and Post Media, which has now leading the charge against Hillier, was their most ardent supporter.

The Lanark Landowners had homophobic and anti-Indigenous language in their charter. Randy Hillier and the landowners used bully tactics in municipal councils to get their way, and Post Media never called them out over it or even covered those aspects of their activities.

When Randy Hillier decided to enter provincial politics in 2006, the Conservative Party was hesitant. They knew he was a potential liability, but he threatened to form his own party, and the Conservative Party did not want to risk losing a handful of their strongest rural ridings to an upstart party. Lanark Landowner members stacked the local rising association candidate selection meeting, and Hillier was chosen. The party leader at the time, John Tory, then signed his nomination papers.

Even as leader after leader ended up being undermined by him, the party never removed Hillier, until finally when they were in power, Doug Ford and his advisors decided they could afford to kick him. This was in 2019, 13 years after they let him in.

In December of 2019, in an essay about the blockades of train crossings across the country by First Nations activists in support of the Wet'suwet'en in BC, Hillier said that the relation between French and English settlers "who built this country" and the indigenous peoples who were already here when they arrived, had been one of “co-operation, not coercion”. This is news to residential school survivors. In his COVID tweets, he has developed a fondness for equating COVID restictions with Nazi Germany, comparing the requirement to wear a mask in a grocery store with being exterminated in a gas chamber, as Jews, Romany, and Gay people were during the early1940's.

But this is nothing new for Hillier. It is really him being him.

In 2004, the Lanark Landowners staged a deer cull to protest hunting restrictions because local farmers were concerned that the expanding deer population was damaging their crops.

They took a picture of a freshly killed doe, surrounded by hunters, with a one word cutline underneath.

Randy Hillier sent an email with the picture pasted in the message to Leona Dombrowsky, the Minister of the Environment in the McGuinty government, who was also the MPP for Hastings, Frontenac Lennox and Addington at the time.

There was a one word cutline under the photo.

"Leona" it said.

The email was intended to intimidate, and it carried an implicit, if not explicit, threat. It says everything anyone needs to know about what Randy Hillier is all about.

We reported on it at the Frontenac News, as we had reported about the Lanark Landowners charter.

When Hillier ran for office in 2006 and was elected, we asked him about these things, and he gave a shrug for an answer.

When he became our MPP and criticised government policy, we ran articles about his campaigns.

When people had issues with government, we sent them to him, and developed a working relationship with his office in Perth. An opposition politician who is willing to take on the government, or his own party, is someone that a newspaper is often happy to cultivate, and we did that.

We knew all along who he was and what he stood for, but we ignored it, partly because he is the MPP and it is our job to cover provincial politics, but also because he had the trappings of legtimacy and power.

Ultimately, we helped give him the credibility he never did deserve.

The Progressive Conservative Party, whose cowardice gave Randy Hillier a provincial profile, and Post Media who promoted his views to a large audience, also bear their share of responsibility.