Albertans deserve the truth about the 2019 Caylan Ford campaign scandal

A Calgary defamation trial is raising a simple question: Were Albertans ever told the full story?

The Calgary courthouse has, for more than a week now, been the scene of a rather remarkable spectacle: the defamation trial of plaintiff Caylan Ford. Hailed as a star candidate by the United Conservative Party (UCP) in the early months of 2019, party leader Jason Kenney accepted her resignation as a candidate in the face of allegations that she was a racist and white supremacist.

Since that time, Caylan has been fighting to recover her reputation and claw her way back from what she claims were defamatory attacks. The question is whether Albertans will also demand accountability from their representatives, whose actions contributed to the end of the political campaign of an intelligent and highly accomplished woman.

In those early months of 2019, Alberta conservatives were enthusiastic about Caylan’s candidacy as well as the prospect that Kenney was about to take on Rachel Notley’s government. Caylan had won the nomination in the highly competitive riding of Mountain View. She was about to take on the justice minister, Kathleen Ganley.

As a riding, Mountain View is one of the more left-leaning in Calgary. It was certainly winnable for the NDP government. The problem was that it was also very winnable for Caylan, and she was viewed by many as a real threat to Ganley.

However, as it turned out, the biggest impediment to Caylan’s election was not the NDP but a fellow Conservative. Enter Karim Jivraj. According to Caylan’s testimony, Jivraj embarked on a campaign to cause emotional and financial harm by damaging her reputation. In her recounting, Jivraj was described as envious of her success and popularity among Conservatives, who had little time for him.

I had met Caylan a few months earlier, had heard her version of events with Jivraj, and had been told similar accounts by both federal and provincial Conservatives. So when the story broke about Caylan’s alleged racism and white supremacism in March 2019, I was not entirely surprised. The allegations arose from a series of text messages she had exchanged with Jivraj, though the media did not originally disclose his identity or his own behaviour towards her.

What did surprise me was how quickly events moved. Within hours, a barrage of media stories tore her reputation to shreds. Kenney responded quickly, stating, “I condemn the remarks included in the texts that she sent and we will be appointing a new candidate in the Calgary Mountain View constituency.” It is worth noting here that Caylan was eventually successful in obtaining a restraining order against Jivraj in a 2023 decision from King’s Bench Justice Robert Graesser that called him “untrustworthy” and “malicious.”

The story quickly became a political issue. Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi stated, “Someone who expresses thoughts like that—no matter how academic or no matter how fancy a word you use—is not fit to lead a diverse community like this.”

For then-premier Notley and her NDP, facing a stiff challenge to their justice minister in Mountain View, the controversy was politically significant. Notley declared herself “utterly shocked.” She added, “Let me just say this, I personally do not believe that Kenney is racist, but I do believe that the UCP as a party has a problem with racism.”

What was largely absent from the discussion at the time was the situation facing a young, highly educated, internationally experienced woman who said she was the target of a persistent male antagonist. The obvious argument here is that political actors did not know at the time about Jivraj’s behaviour. Or did they?

Here is where I come back into the picture. On that March morning in 2019, after I read the stories circulating in the media, I decided to act. I contacted Alyssa Brandt, one of NDP Health Minister Sarah Hoffman’s two chiefs of staff. I explicitly told her that the NDP should not engage this story. I explained that the real story here was not the texts but the targeted leaking of private conversations to cause harm to a young and accomplished woman. Brandt thanked me and assured me that the information would be passed on.

What I do not know is how far up the chain this information went. I do not know whether it reached Notley’s chief of staff, Nate Rotman. I do not know if it was conveyed to Notley herself before she expressed her shock and contributed to the destruction of a woman’s reputation.

What I do know is that with the settlement between Caylan and the NDP, we will likely not know the role that political actors played in this episode. And with Nenshi now leading the NDP, there is little reason to expect further disclosure about how the controversy unfolded inside political circles.

But here is the problem. This is not merely a private matter. It is a matter of public interest because, in the end, a female candidate for public office, who said she was being harassed by a male antagonist, was removed from a democratic contest. The voters of Mountain View were denied the opportunity to weigh the competing claims and qualifications of the candidates before them.

So while Caylan’s 14-week trial may give us some insight into what was known and when, the settlement means the public may never see the full picture of what happened in 2019. Some will argue that this means the matter should simply be left in the past.

I do not agree. Contemporary Alberta politics, like politics across much of the Western world, has become saturated with allegations that can destroy reputations in a matter of hours. When those allegations prove questionable or incomplete, the public deserves answers.

We should demand accountability from those who so easily level allegations of racism, as well as from any elected representative who benefits from them.

Collin May, a Harvard graduate and lawyer, is a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, an adjunct lecturer with the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, and the former Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission.