SUDBURY - Jason LaFace is angry about a lot of things — a point made abundantly clear in recent videos and written posts the Ontario Party candidate for Sudbury has posted to social media.
According to LaFace, Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ community members are “nut bars.” He also uses these groups to exemplify extremists who “use a fake-demic to attack our kids. For years, you’ve been going after our kids with your public health unit.”
The connection is unclear.
Contrary to LaFace’s assertion, leading medical experts throughout the world agree that the global COVID-19 pandemic is real. The World Health Organization estimates the death toll at more than 6.2 million people. The local death toll is 149.
LaFace, a central organizer of the Northern Ontario leg of the so-called Freedom Convoy to Ottawa earlier this year in opposition to COVID-related mandates, blamed Black Lives Matter activists for problems that arose in Ottawa when the convoy arrived.
Sudbury.com asked LaFace to provide evidence for this and the other numerous claims he has made on social media, but he declined to do so.
Instead of answering any of the long list of questions emailed to him, LaFace cautioned party leader Derek Sloan against paying attention to Sudbury.com, which he claims is a “typical left-wing radical media outlet” that is “operated by members of ANTIFA” and has “done nothing but attack all of us.”
He later took to Facebook to complain publicly about Sudbury.com’s work on this story. The news organization is “nothing more than members of ANTIFA who run hit pieces on the Freedom Movement,” he wrote. “This is why we need anti-propaganda laws and maybe start adding criminal law to the mix in terms of how reporters ethically report journalism.”
LaFace has a history of opposing the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2020, The Sudbury Star reported that LaFace had issued a Facebook threat to paint over a Black Lives Matter mural on Elgin Street, which drew the attention of the Greater Sudbury Police Service.
There’s much more to LaFace’s recent online activity that also warrants fact checks. Supervised consumption sites are “profiteering off the backs of addicts” and killing people, he said – a point he also made at length during an Ontario Party event earlier this year, when Sloan stopped by Sudbury for a campaign visit.
“It kills people, the crime rates shoot up, the overdoses don’t come down, nothing changes, it actually gets worse, the issues get worse by 200 to 400 per cent,” he said during the campaign event, citing an Alberta report on supervised consumption sites as his evidence.
This report is presumably “Impact: A socio-economic review of supervised consumption sites in Alberta,” a much-criticized 2020 report by the United Conservative Party-appointed Supervised Consumption Services Review Committee. The report cites no deaths on site, but an increase in both crime and deaths around supervised consumption sites in that province.
An article in the peer-reviewed Harm Reduction Journal by St. Mary’s University (Halifax) Criminology professor James D. Livingston refutes the Alberta report, noting, “To date, peer-reviewed research has found no evidence linking supervised consumptions sites to increased crime.”
“Many of the Report’s findings are incongruent with the evidence contained with the body of peer-reviewed research examining the effectiveness of SCSs for almost two decades,” according to Livingston.
“The magnitude of methodological flaws in the Report undermine the validity of its criminological claims and raise significant issues with the soundness of its conclusions.”
Public Health Sudbury & Districts chief medical officer of health Dr. Penny Sutcliffe defended supervised consumption sites last year as a “critical component of a comprehensive strategy to deal with drugs,” and the downtown Sudbury site recently received federal approval.
The start of one of LaFace’s most recent videos begins with him singing, “I’m a $310-million-dollar-man, oh yeah,” in reference to his status as a defendant in a class-action lawsuit that targets organizers and participants in the Freedom Convoy to Ottawa.
LaFace was a central organizer for the Northern Ontario leg of the convoy, which tied up a dozen blocks of downtown Ottawa for several days earlier this year. Their presence resulted in businesses shuttering and caused distress among area residents who endured sleepless nights as a result of semi-trucks honking their horns.
“Good luck with that, you ain’t going to get a dime from us, you won’t get a penny, and not one of us will serve time in jail, either,” LaFace said.
Fellow convoy organizers and class-action lawsuit defendants Tamara Lich and Patrick King have already spent time in jail.
If he could do it all over again, LaFace said that he would still participate in the convoy to continue “standing up for the rights and liberties of Canadians.”
“If I could do it over, oh man, trust me, there would be some things I’d change to make sure those cops never did nothing to any one of us.” He did not clarify what he meant by this ambiguous statement.
The convoy’s intent in going to Ottawa, he added, was “to get Justin Trudeau arrested and put in jail … and call an election.”
A short while later and within the same video, LaFace refutes this previous statement when he says, “Am I trying to overthrow the government? I am not.”
LaFace also accuses local politicians of not caring about Canadian citizens as much as they do foreign residents. In response to a link to a CBC story about international students in Sudbury living in cramped accommodations (a three-bedroom house was converted into space for 14, it was reported), LaFace lamented that “Canadians do not matter to local politicians,” and “only act on it if it affects special interest groups.”
Critical of Greater Sudbury city council and municipal staff, whom he considers “irresponsible” and said “need to be babysat,” LaFace also takes aim at the area he’s striving to represent at Queen’s Park by calling it a “shithole.”
The full context of his “shithole” statement was: “Think about this for a second, Sudbury. We have the biggest mines in the world, and look at our shithole. Seriously, we’re the biggest mines in the world, and look about our town falling apart.”
In a separate post targetting people who are transgender, LaFace writes: “The extreme, neo communist left insists by any means necessary that everyone bend to their will. Centralized management of the economy, rampant cultural marxism with transgender 7 year olds, men competing in women's sports, taxes for the weather, destruction of the middle class, confiscation of firearms, abolition of free speech and expression. Personally, I would quite seriously rather die than live in the world they envision.”During Sloan’s visit earlier this month, LaFace claimed that everything people read about him online is “all lies.”
More recently, he said this week that he doesn’t care what people have to say about him.
“I don’t give a shit,” he said in a recent video. “Our entire country’s been attacked by left-wing idiots. They’re nuts.”
Earlier this week, LaFace appeared to care a great deal about what Sudbury.com had to say. He denied he was served a legal document related to the Freedom Convoy class-action lawsuit, so Sudbury.com obtained a signed affidavit through class-action lawsuit lawyer Paul Champ. This document affirmed that LaFace was served at his Levack home on May 14 at 8:40 p.m.
LaFace issued Sudbury.com the following email in response to being confronted with this information and the allegation that he was not being truthful: “I was not served and who the f–k are you to state I wasn'? (sic) Cuz some low life gave u a note? F–k off Tyler and moving forward Sudbury dot c-m can go f–k yourselves ya little bitches … Cuz all you f–ks do is run hit pieces ... Bunch of antifa c–ts.”
In one of his recent videos, LaFace said that rather than criticize him, people should follow his lead and take the high ground.
“I don’t go looking out to start bashing people because I don’t agree with their opinion or whatever. I don’t do that.”
Sudbury.com has reached out to Ontario Party headquarters to get their reaction to LaFace’s recent online activity, but have not received a response. In a post on his Facebook page, LaFace states Sloan “knows about everything bud, i made sure of it.”
However, LaFace’s recent online comments don’t appear to stray too far from those shared during the party’s campaign event in Sudbury earlier this month, where Sloan pledged to fight for “Faith, family and freedom.”
He argued against vaccine mandates, which he referred to as “medical tyranny,” and legislation that outlaws discrimination against people who are transgender.
Sloan said he opposes “indoctrinating concepts like radical gender ideology and critical race theory.”
Critical race theory is an intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists that examines the intersection of race, society and law. It is not part of the school curriculum.
The World Economic Forum “wants to merge humans with machines,” Sloan claimed. “It’s easier to control people when they have this kind of apparatus.”
World Economic Forum executive chair Klaus Schwab did comment about microchipping humans in 2016, and wrote an article about it the previous year, but did so while highlighting its potential benefits and risks. LaFace takes a swipe at Schwab and a handful of others in a recent Facebook post he shared. It includes the words, “Your enemy is not in Russia,” alongside images of Schwab, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada Theresa Tam and other perceived threats.
Advance voting for this year’s provincial election is underway. Ballots can also be cast on the June 2 election day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Voters can determine their voting location by plugging in their postal code here.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
