Communist property redistributed

The Communist Party of Canada recovered stolen campaign signs from Montreal police, Friday. Communist party candidate in Westmount Ville-Marie Bill Sloan had put up signs criticizing Canada’s support of Israel, and describing the nation as an “apartheid” state. Last week Sloan said many of these signs were torn down and stolen, an action he described as “massive sign theft.”
But Sloan’s opponents weren’t too happy with the signs to begin with.
Marc Garneau, the riding’s Liberal candidate, released a statement last week in which he denounced the messages printed on Sloan’s posters and called for their immediate removal.
The CPC’s signs began disappearing from lampposts along Sainte Catherine Street shortly after Garneau’s statement was released to the media.
The Quebec Israel Committee also found the posters offensive. Executive director Luciano De Negro described the posters’ slogans as “mere rantings of a fringe group.”
“It’s an extreme and reactionary action from a discredited party,” he said. “They’re just trying to propagate hateful impressions of Israel.”
The Canadian Jewish Congress accused the communist signs of violating Canada’s election law, filing a complaint with Elections Canada.
Gilles Paquin, spokesperson for Elections Canada, said campaign signs containing propaganda or slanderous and hateful slogans are illegal.
“If a candidate thinks somebody else’s signs are heinous, they can complain,” he said, adding, “but remember that it’s quite normal for one candidate to criticize another during an election, especially this late in the campaign.”
Daniel Saykaly, one of the directors of the group Palestinian and Jewish Unity said he looked over the Electoral Act with Sloan. “The signs appear perfectly to conform with the requirements,” he said.
“They must be legal,” he said, “since the city of Westmount has offered to repost the signs that were found.”
Sloan and Saykaly, said the real illegal activity in all this is the theft of the signs.
“It’s illegal to take them down,” said Saykaly. “Especially since clearly the effort was to remove the signs, not to conform to electoral law.”
Sloan filed a police report and contacted election officials, but moving forward in the case without any evidence or witnesses will prove difficult.
Olivier Lapointe, a media relations agent with Montreal police said, “It’s too hard to start a criminal investigation without any information. Nobody saw it happen, no one knows exactly what time it happened, and there’s no physical identification of a suspect.”
Lapointe said the sign theft is stealing. “If police saw the perpetrators, they would have made an arrest on the spot,” he said.
The Communist Party of Canada, Westmount-Ville-Marie’s second most popular communist party, plans to repost the recovered signs.
Sloan received 69 votes in the last federal election, the Marxist-Leninist Party candidate received 94.