Sask. NDP leader demands MP resign over ‘whore’ comment

The leader of the Saskatchewan NDP is calling for Tory MP Tom Lukiwski to resign after he appeared to refer to provincial candidate Karen Purdy as “an NDP whore.”

“This is an absolutely disgusting attack on a woman in politics,” Cam Broten wrote in a letter Thursday to interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose.

“It is unbecoming of a Member of Parliament, and it is clear evidence that Mr. Lukiwski did not learn any lessons from the last major controversy in which he was involved, when a videotape showed him making hateful, homophobic comments.”

Broten said Thursday that if Lukiwski didn’t resign, he should at least be demoted.

“It is my hope that you will take this issue seriously, demonstrate that it is completely unacceptable, and remove Mr. Lukiwski from the Conservative caucus,” he wrote to Ambrose.

Yahoo Canada News has reached out to Ambrose for comment.

The dispute is over a comment caught on video in which Lukiwski (Moose Jaw-Lake Centre-Lanigan) encourages the audience to support his provincial counterpart in Saskatchewan’s April 4 election.

Greg Lawrence, the MLA for Moose Jaw Wakamow and a member of the governing Saskatchewan Party, is set to face Purdy.

“Greg is in a tough riding – make no mistake about it,” Lukiwski says in the video, which journalist Mickey Djuric posted on her blog. “But he deserves to be re-elected. This is a very important election provincially. We’ve got to get Greg back elected. He’s too important of an MLA to let go down to an NDP [whore] just because of a bad boundary.”

The video surfaced Thursday after the journalist who captured the footage said she had resigned in protest over her employer’s decision not to publish her story.

“I choose personal integrity and strong ethics over deception and censorship,” Djuric wrote in a blog post. “After much heart-felt thinking, I have chosen to resign this morning from the Moose Jaw Times-Herald, as a journalist. The MJTH management staff has made an editorial decision that I strongly disagreed with.”

Lukiwski was not immediately available for comment, but he told CBC News on Thursday, “I did not say ‘whore.’ I said ‘horde,’ as in NDP gang.”

Purdy says he did.

“There is no doubt in my mind that he said ‘whore,’” she told reporters Thursday, adding she’d listened to the audio twice.

Purdy said she was “disappointed” an MP would speak that way and called on Lukiwski to apologize and resign.

“If he’s saying this about me, what’s he saying about other women? I think he should resign. I’m not confident that he can represent us adequately, and I think we all deserve an apology.”

Djuric said she was assured earlier this month that the MJTH would publish her story but on Tuesday the publication “unexpectedly and surprisingly changed their mind.”

She says she stands by her reporting.

“I think he is changing his story,” she told Yahoo Canada News on Thursday.

Djuric said when she spoke to Lukiwski on Monday he said he had not seen the video but denied saying “whore” and said he would “apologize unreservedly” if he’d misspoken.

He then called her back a short time later and said his campaign manager had heard the word as “hordes.”

“He said, ‘Yeah, as in, beat back the NDP hordes,’” Djuric said.

“Now I see him saying he said ‘horde,’ not ‘hordes’ — it’s not lining up for me.”

It’s not the first time Lukiwski has been in hot water for comments caught on tape.

“There’s A’s and there’s B’s. The A’s are guys like me, the B’s are homosexual faggots with dirt under their fingernails that transmit diseases,” he is heard saying in a video released by the provincial NDP in 2008. Lukiwski apologized for the remarks, which were made in 1991, and said he would “spend the rest of my career and my life trying to make up for those shameful comments.”