Sabrina Maddeaux sits out CPC nomination race over election integrity

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OTTAWA — Political pundit Sabrina Maddeaux has suspended her campaign for the Conservative Party of Canada’s Greater Toronto Area candidate, saying she has lost confidence in the integrity of the election as the party denies allegations of wrongdoing in the nomination process.

Maddeaux, who previously wrote columns for the National Post, announced in January that she was running for the Conservative nomination in the Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill constituency. She said in an interview that she never expected the nomination process to be easy.

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“I know that any kind of political race, and especially nomination races, can get dirty. There are attacks, there are bumps in the road, but that wasn’t it. I know that sometimes it can even be easy to tip the scales in favor of a candidate. That wasn’t it either,” she said.

“When rules are broken, when voters themselves have concerns about the process by which they express and raise complaints, I cannot in good conscience move forward.”

Maddeaux said that on April 27 and again on April 29, “Norman McDaniel” sent an email with “slander attacks” against her during the race, with an updated membership list that other participants should not have access to.

She said the email had been shared along with her campaign by members she had recently sold membership cards to who had never been a member of the Conservative Party, and was therefore confident their names would not appear on any old membership lists.

Maddeaux described the email, which the National Post has not seen, as a “mischaracterization” of quotes from her work early in her career and claimed she was not a true conservative and would be an “embarrassment” to the party if she voted MPs would be elected.

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She also said that no one on her team had ever heard of anyone named “Norman McDaniel,” so her campaign manager contacted the party to share her concerns. She said her team was able to get the party to confirm that there was no such local member.

“It is of course extremely concerning that an anonymous person, an anonymous entity somehow had access to an updated membership list that no candidate should have yet, because no candidate had been given the green light at that point,” she said.

In an email, Conservative Party spokeswoman Sarah Fischer said Maddeaux’s claims were “completely false” and that the party had received similar complaints about Maddeaux’s campaign using lists to which she did not have access may. In an interview with the National Post, Maddeaux denied the accusation.

“The Conservative Party received a complaint as part of its election campaign that emails were being distributed to members of the riding highlighting things that Ms. Maddeaux has written and said in the past,” Fischer wrote.

“It is common for the party to receive complaints from nomination candidates about its competitors alleging misconduct and the use of lists.”

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Maddeaux said members of the riding have complained to her campaign, to the party, sometimes even to Elections Canada and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, saying they felt their privacy had been compromised.

Shortly after those emails were sent, she said volunteers from one of her competitors showed up at the doors of the same members she had recruited and recited essentially the same attack lines contained in the anonymous letter.

Four other people were vying for the nomination in the riding: former Conservative MP Costas Menegakis, Rachel Gilliland, Carmine Perrelli and Yun Liu. Maddeaux would not reveal whose campaign she believed was involved in creating the email.

She said her campaign had submitted all evidence to the party over the past nearly two weeks, but that despite repeated attempts, she had not been given any feedback on next steps or given “any indication that the matter was actually being taken seriously.” .

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On Thursday morning, Maddeaux posted a video on X announcing her decision to suspend her campaign.

“Being true to my values, why I entered this race in the first place, and my track record of standing up for what’s right leaves me with no other choice. It comes down to this: I no longer have confidence in the integrity of this election,” she said in the video.

Maddeaux said in an interview that she did not regret her entry into politics despite the bitter end.

“I entered the race for the right reasons,” she said. “Obviously it didn’t go the way I expected and that’s pretty heartbreaking. But I’m still glad I did it because I believe it’s important to participate in our democracy. And if you want to see change, you should be a part of it on some level.”

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