A Conservative MP accused Liberals of wanting to “normalize sexual activity with children” during a Zoom meeting with a university student group, according to a recording of the call released Friday.
Ontario MP Cheryl Gallant made the allegations, which the Liberals described as a promotion of “deranged conspiracy theories,” during a virtual meeting earlier this month with the Queen’s University Conservative Association.
Video recordings of the call, which were posted Friday afternoon by Liberal MP Jennifer O’Connell, showed Gallant accusing all but of a handful of Liberals of being “radicals” who want “all illicit drugs to be legal.”
“They want anything goes in every aspect of life. They want to normalize sexual activity with children,” added Gallant.
The Liberals have since painted Gallant’s comments as “disgusting and dangerous lies.”
“This fear mongering poses a threat to our democracy,” read a tweet from O’Connell, which included the video of the call.
Both Gallant and the Conservative party have not responded to Global News’ requests for comment on the matter.
In a statement obtained by The Canadian Press however, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole accused the Liberals of posting the video in order to distract from their failures in delivering promised shipments of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“Canadians have other priorities and so do I,” said O’Toole in a statement late Friday, according to CP.
In a longer recording of the meeting posted to YouTube, Gallant said that the “radical” ideologies of progressives left the university campuses and moved to the mainstream, and that campus conservatives acted as an “early warning system” against the emerging threats of “cultural Marxists who’ve taken over every university administration that I’m aware of.”
Gallant then said that the “progressives and socialists” were quickly moving to put their agenda in place after silencing “the conservative society at every level.”
That agenda, according to her, has been in the works since the start of the pandemic and will be perpetrated by the government and the “elites”
“The elites call it the Great Reset or Build Back Better or Green New Deal. The names change but the goal remains the same: more power for the powerful and less freedom for everyone else,” said Gallant.
Mentions of the “Great Reset” were first spread amid the meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2020, who then called for a plan to reduce social inequality after the pandemic.
The term has now become mainstay in the vocabularies of conspiracy theorists, who refer to it as a global plot to implement a new socialist world order in place of the current capitalist one. The theory has also been commonly peddled among many far-right groups and members linked to that of QAnon.
In an interview with Global News, O’Connell warned of the danger of proliferating such theories, saying that one should only look to the U.S. in which political disinformation spread by former U.S. president Donald Trump led to violent insurrection at the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6.
“I mean, obviously members all can comment, you know — no matter the party they represent, their communities — and they might have differences of opinions and I totally think that’s fair and respectable, but this is not political discourse, these are pretty disgusting conspiracy theories,” said O’Connell.
“At what point do we as Canadians want political discourse that actually has some lines drawn, and I think that’s a serious question that needs to be addressed after this.”
According to the Canadian Press, Gallant, in a statement Friday, said her comments on Liberals choosing to lower the age of consent “were taken out of context,” but did not address any of the other statements she made during the meeting.