REGINA – Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski has denied calling a provincial NDP candidate an “NDP whore” in a video that surfaced Thursday.
Tom Lukiwski, the recently re-elected MP for Regina-Lumsden-Lake Centre, was delivering an election night victory speech when Mickey Djuric, who was reporting for the Moose Jaw Times-Herald, captured the video.
In it, he mentions the upcoming provincial election, and asks people to support Saskatchewan Party MLA, Greg Lawrence, who represents Moose Jaw Wakamow.
“This is a very important election we have got to get Greg back elected,” Lukiwski appears to say in the video. “He’s too important of an MLA to let go down to an NDP” — here Lukiwski says either “whore” or “horde” —”just because of a bad boundary.”
Lukiwski has denied using the word “whore” insisting that he said “horde.”
“At no point did I use any sort of profanity to describe the NDP,” he said in a statement. “I have reached out to the NDP candidate, Ms. Purdy, to assure her that no such insult was ever used nor intended.”
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Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose said in a statement that she had spoken with Lukiwski, adding that it was “very difficult to determine what was said” in the video.
“Mr. Lukiwski strongly denies that he used the word in question,” Ambrose said. “Let me be clear. If derogatory language had been used, any member of Caucus would have already been removed. I have accepted Mr. Lukiwski’s explanation in regards to these comments.”
In April, the NDP party nominated Karen Purdy in the Moose Jaw Wakamow riding for the next provincial election. Purdy, a nurse at the Moose Jaw Union Hospital, said she listened to the video twice and doesn’t have any doubt about what was said.
“I was aghast. I listened to it twice and then I was disappointed, really disappointed,” Purdy told reporters Thursday afternoon. “There is no doubt in my mind that he said whore. It doesn’t fit in context with saying hordes. So I am not sure where he is going with that.”
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Like Purdy, Djuric, the former reporter who captured the video, is adamant Lukiwski said “whore,” going so far as to resign from the newspaper after, she says, the editorial team refused to publish it.
Djuric said the first time she heard the recording she “gasped” and asked several other colleagues in her newsroom to listen to the video.
“I say, ‘I’m going to play a video for you tell me what you hear. I don’t want to tell you what word I’m hearing,” Djuric told reporters. “I play the video and a couple of others gasped and ‘Oh my god he said NDP whore.’”
She said she approached her managing editor of the paper with the story and after weeks of reporting said the story was killed over fears of “being sued” and worried that some people might hear the word “horde.”
“They said they think nine out of 10 people will here whore but they are worried about the one out of 10 who hear hordes,” she said.
Djuric defended her decision to resign from the Times-Herald over its “dishonest and unethical” decision to withhold the story.
Craig Slater, managing editor of the Moose Jaw Times-Herald, told Global News that hearing Lukiswki’s side of the story there was “concern” about what word was used.
“We went back after we had heard from Tom and watched it dozens of times and there is some concern there,” Slater said. “With the slightest element of doubt there’s always a ‘let’s push pause on this.”
Lukiwski is no stranger to controversy over comments he’s made on camera. A video which surfaced in 2008 showed Lukiwski clowning for a camera in 1991 allegedly using homophobic and hateful language.
Lukiwski appears in the video saying: “There’s A’s and there’s B’s. The A’s are guys like me, the B’s are homosexual faggots with dirt on their fingernails that transmit diseases.”
He later apologized for the comments saying he was “truly, truly sorry.”
“I’m ashamed for the comments. If I could take those comments back, I would. I would give anything in the world to take those comments back,” he said in a statement in 2008.
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