Doug Ford’s embrace of preacher Charles McVety should offend us all

Doug Ford’s embrace of a homophobic and Islamophobic preacher is more than a betrayal of Ontario’s gays and Muslims.

It should offend everyone. And everything Ontario stands for.

Charles McVety is a faith healer and hater who wants to grow his own empire of intolerance on Ontario soil. With help from Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government.

McVety is a big fan of Ford, which is his right. But the reciprocal fidelity from Ford is dead wrong.

As the head of the controversial Canada Christian College, McVety is a man of revelations — exposing himself as a Christian charlatan. Now, by embracing McVety’s crusade to channel his brand of hate through a reborn, bona fide university — thanks to legislation introduced by Ford’s government this week at Queen’s Park — the premier is giving his blessings to a preacher of sinful intolerance.

It behooves all Ontarians, of all religious faiths and political persuasions, to tell him so. For this is a question of personal decency and identity, not ideology.

No matter whether you are a Progressive Conservative partisan who happens to be LGBTQ+, or a PC cabinet minister who has embraced a gay family member, or a premier who counts Muslims as his faithful followers. What matters — whether you are one of the above, or none of the above, or all of the above — is that Ontario is for everyone and Canada is for all of us.

Who is this purported emissary of the Lord — and personal friend of Ford — who claims that, “according to Jesus Christ, we have to love Muslims, but we don’t have to love Islam;” who warns that “Islam is not just a religion, it’s a … mandate for a hostile takeover;” who describes same-sex marriage as “a dagger in the heart of man;” who decries sex education as a “militant homosexual agenda;” and who preaches that “homosexuals prey on children.” Pray tell.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council reviewed McVety’s hateful program on the Christian CTS network, finding it made “malevolent, insidious and conspiratorial” remarks about gays. CTS dropped him, a lout in a Christians’ den.

Now, Ford’s government wants to rehabilitate McVety by repurposing and renaming his obscure campus, draping it in a cloak of respectability. Under cover of COVID-19, the Tories propose to rechristen his Canada Christian College as the “Canada University and School of Graduate Theological Studies,” a fully fledged university.

McVety’s institution — which specifies students must “refrain from practices that are biblically condemned” — would also gain legal authority to issue BA and BSc degree programs. That means a Bachelor of Science degree from a university whose primary educator disputes the science of evolution.

The premier’s unsavoury embrace of this preacher turned pedagogue dates to his campaign for the PC leadership in early 2018, when Ford won McVety’s unwavering support on the dubious promise to repeal a sex-ed update introduced by then-premier Kathleen Wynne. Upon winning power, Ford broke that pledge but in a sop to McVety this week, slipped in the consolation prize of a reborn and rebranded university.

Why would Ontario now “validate the hateful, vicious, racist and homophobic rhetoric of Charles McVety?” Wynne wondered in the legislature this week. The NDP’s Catherine Fife bemoaned his “hate speech,” while anti-racism critic Laura Mae Lindo called out his “vile” rhetoric.

Ford falsely claimed McVety’s application had already been approved by the supposedly independent Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB). In fact, the review process has yet to be completed.

Why then is his government trying to rush through — and slip through — legislated changes that enable intolerance at home and diminish our reputation abroad?

When I reached out to the PEQAB for clarification, an official referred me to political staff at the ministry of post-secondary education — which seems like an odd reflex for an independent agency. At the ministry, PC spokesperson Nick Di Cecco emailed a canned statement saying it was all in the hands of the “independent, non-partisan” agency — ah, that would be the PEQAB, which refers all enquiries back to political staff at the ministry (he declined to answer further questions unless I agreed to go off the record, which I refused; he later clarified that the government wants to pass the legislation but won’t proclaim it into law until the panel signs off on it).

So I went back to PEQAB for their independent explanation as to why the government is in such a hurry to pass this legislation validating McVety’s crusade — even before the verdict is in. Vice-chair Alexandre Laurin (who is also head of research at the C.D. Howe Institute) refused comment, referring all questions to the agency’s CEO and director, James Brown, who also declined to answer key questions.

Can a process so convoluted, where both political staff and panel members put the cart before the horse — jumping the gun and then circling the wagons — be truly independent? Depends on who does what next.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, bad temptations, and evil intolerance. What makes Canadian political discourse different from American political disruption is the path to pluralism and tolerance.

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We like to think that Ontario is not America, where Jerry Falwell Jr. — the recently deposed head of Liberty University and heir to America’s immoral Moral Majority — can spew indecency thanks to his political connections in high places. Or is it?

We can only ask. So too must Ford’s fellow Tories, from grassroots party members to ministers sitting around the cabinet table.

To be true to themselves, they must speak truth to power. All who remain silent will be enablers of this travesty of intolerance.