My response to @Ham6Karin

I can appreciate your feelings on my posts about Ward One candidate Wasim Jarrah.  You called them shameless and discrediting and said that I was doing so only to prop up another candidate.

I am sorry to say that you are wrong on all three accounts.

Election campaigns are long and arduous.  During this time, candidates are weighed and measured against their platforms and qualifications.  All except one candidate in each race will come up short.

Running in a election is not for the feint of heart.

I don't know how closely you follow Newmarket Town Hall but we have a Mayor and Council that like to keep secrets.  (If you want an example of their secretiveness, read the www.shrinkslessorsquare.ca blog post from today).

This Mayor and Council will readily convene to a closed door meeting when things get too hot politically and prefer to decide contentious issues with back room deals.  That's how we ended up with losing Glenway at the OMB, how the soccer loan got done, and a myriad of other bad deals (most of those, I suspect, we'll never know about but we're surely paying them with our tax dollars).

Months ago, when I first reported on Wasim Jarrah's ill-advised drive to the airport, he didn't address the issue saying, "Yes it was me" or "No it isn't".  Instead, he went to Google and had my blog deleted.  In time it was proven that everything I wrote about him was correct, as he admitted to the facts earlier this week on Toronto radio.  (I'll never know what he said to Google to have my blog taken down but I have a hard time listening to him defend free speech after the censorship he imposed on my blog).

Because of this, voters can predict what Wasim Jarrah's behaviour will be if he's elected to represent Ward 1 and the next Soccer Club bail out lands on the table.  Can you tell me honestly that he can be trusted to keep similarly shady deals in the public domain?

But I am a person who believes in second chances so I decided to test Wasim Jarrah again, this time with the controversial tweets he made about Iraq.

I noticed those tweets as soon as he made them and thought "Oh boy, he's in trouble", but nobody questioned him at that time.

So when the opportunity arose, I decided to challenge him on them.

You are right when you say that everyone has the right to an opinion and frankly I respect those willing to stand by their convictions even when the public sentiment goes against them, (which is why I respect the Ward 6 councillor so much).

Clearly Wasim Jarrah buckled under my challenge.  He deleted his tweets within seconds of me raising them as an issue.  He did not respond as to why he felt Stephen Harper was blood thirsty, or why John Baird is a vampire.  He simply tried to make the problem go away by pretending these tweets never existed.

That's a big red flag for me.  I've seen our Mayor and Council employ the same "disappearing act" with contentious issues.  When faced with their own record, they did everything they could to clam up and hide.

You know what I am speaking of Karin,  It doesn't go unnoticed that you very eloquently explained what was wrong with the US foreign policy within a the context of a 140 character tweet.  Why couldn't Wasim Jarrah do the same?  Why did he simply delete the tweets as opposed to explaining his point of view.  And what can voters expect he'll do if elected to Council and he gets called upon to make a principled decision?

I never met the man but perhaps Wasim Jarrah is a very nice man.  He is likely a very good volunteer and I am sure he loves his family and they love him too.

But is he any different from the today's crop of Gruesome-Twosome bloq councillors that we currently have "representing" us?  No, because his actions over these past few months show us that he behaves in exactly the same manner as they do.

So you are entitled to believe that I am harsh, shameless and nasty.  I prefer to think that by exposing his behaviour, I have given Newmarket Ward 1 voters a clear insight to the man who wants to represent them.

And the process of vetting candidates is exactly the reason why we have election campaigns.