Guelph’s Green Party candidate Steve Dyck is on the defensive after a post from his personal Facebook page supporting the 9/11 truther movement came to light this week.
The video link shared by Dyck in December 2015 was created by “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.” It argues 7 World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition on Sept. 11, 2001, after months of planning.
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“I have been trying to ignore this for many years,” Dyck wrote in the post. “I am concerned we will not see the end to violence in Syria, Iraq, Paris, and around the world until we look closer to home.”
A statement from Dyck’s team provided to Global News on Wednesday said he regrets the post and has since taken it down.
“Mr. Dyck has confirmed that he is not a 9/11 truther and this was a one-time post made purely out of intellectual curiosity,” campaign manager Brandy Davis said. “We are satisfied with his answer and view the matter as closed.”
Supporters of the 9/11 truth movement dispute the commonly accepted account that Al-Qaeda terrorists crashed airliners into the Pentagon and New York’s World Trade Center towers, which collapsed as a result of the crashes. World Trade Center 7, a building adjacent to the twin towers, was also damaged and collapsed.
The group suggests a cover-up by the United States government. Some of the truth organizations assert that there is evidence that individuals within the government may have been either responsible for or knowingly complicit in the attacks.
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Dyck became the Green Party’s candidate in the 2019 federal election in what party leader Elizabeth May herself described as one of the most “hotly contested” nomination votes in the party’s history.
He previously ran unsuccessfully for the Green Party of Ontario in the 2011 provincial election.
Dyck is running against Liberal incumbent Lloyd Longfield, the NDP’s Aisha Jahangir and Conservative Party candidate Ashish Sachan.
With files from Global’s Richard Zussman