Anti-lockdown leader volunteering for mayoral campaign

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This article was published 16/08/2022 (815 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A mayoral candidate is defending a campaign volunteer who was front and centre of the COVID-19 anti-lockdown movement in Manitoba.

Don Woodstock was joined by Patrick Allard at a campaign announcement Wednesday morning, where Woodstock unveiled his housing plan for the city’s core.

Allard, 39, was a leading critic of Manitoba’s COVID-19 public health restrictions, and is set to stand trial next week for repeatedly violating those orders.

Allard has been volunteering with the campaign for around a month, Woodstock confirmed Wednesday.

Woodstock said he supports Allard’s right to protest and accepted him as a volunteer, as long as “he keeps his rhetoric out of my campaign.”

“For me, that’s his view, his opinion, he’s entitled to it,” he said.

Woodstock said he does not hold the same COVID-19 views as Allard.

“I have to go into people’s homes for my business, I am double-vaxxed and so is my wife, I had to wear a mask,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that I’m gonna hate the next person who says, ‘I don’t want to wear masks.’ That’s his prerogative, he has a right to it and so it should be. And let him fight it in court, and he has a right to fight it in court.”

“There is no connection between our views on lockdowns and what (Woodstock is) doing in his mayoral campaign,” Allard said in a message to the Free Press Wednesday. “I think he is the best choice for the city…”

Allard ran unsuccessfully as an independent in the provincial Fort Whyte byelection in March, losing by a landslide to Progressive Conservative Obby Khan.

While Woodstock said he’ll defend Allard’s stance on COVID-19, he stopped short of other controversial issues Allard has been accused of holding.

Allard threw his support behind the far-right People’s Party of Canada, a party favoured by xenophobic groups in Canada.

A video shared on social media from The Forks on Canada Day includes him saying, “You can help heal the next generation, so maybe, in 20 years from now, we’ll see more red and white and not as much orange and rainbow,” referring to flag colours representing the Every Child Matters movement and LGBTTQ+ people.

Woodstock said does not support bigotry and plans to ask Allard about his views.

“If he has those views… that he thinks negatively of gay people, and he thinks negatively of certain races of people, then I’ll tell him humbly, nicely, ‘Patrick, I can’t have those views around me,’” Woodstock said.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca