Tony Clement

A remorseful and somewhat defiant Clement returns to Parliament Hill

 

Tony Clement is not ruling out running again in the upcoming federal election in October, despite repeated calls for his resignation.

“I’ll make a decision. People have been very patient and I want to thank them for that, but I’m not at that point of deciding that yet,” said Clement, who continues to be the Member of Parliament for Parry Sound-Muskoka.

“I’m very remorseful about what I did in my personal life. It was a personal issue. I know there was this talk about national security, but that’s completely wrong. There was no national security issue with this. I was the one who reported it to the RCMP and the RCMP were on my side. They saw me as the victim and they were acting on behalf of me to seek the arrest of the blackmailers,” noted Clement.

The embattled MP said he’s been laying low while working on himself and his relationship with his family. Clement resigned from key parliamentary positions last November, following revelations that he was being blackmailed by two men he had been sexting with, believing them to be a woman. It was also learned that the incident was not an isolated one, but part of a pattern of inappropriate online behaviour that Clement had been engaging in. Those revelations led to Clement being asked to resign from the Conservative Party caucus.

“I obviously had a severe personal crisis that culminated in the issue that had me resign from caucus. I very much regret that. I have a lot of remorse and I apologize for the behaviour that caused that,” said Clement, who has since spent most of his time working in the riding and only returned to Parliament to sit as an independent representative for Parry Sound-Muskoka last month.

“I wasn’t in Ottawa in November and December and January. I did my riding work out of my constituency office—made sure my offices were open, attended local events, had meetings with small business leaders in the riding, had meetings with constituents who had issues in the riding… so I did that constituency work, but I also tended to my mental wellness,” said Clement. He said the time to recover and seek counselling has served him well. “It really helped. It really put me on the right track. I’ve turned away from the activity that caused so much trouble and so I feel good about that. I feel like I’m the person I was before. The husband I was. The father I was…”

Clement admitted to being “quite anxious” about returning to Parliament in February, not knowing what to expect and how people would react. “I did want to get back to my office in Ottawa and I did want to be in Parliament because that’s part of the job, too.”

Clement said when he returned he found the majority of MPs and others to be “welcoming and forgiving.”

“They said basically what hundreds of people in Muskoka and Parry Sound had been saying to me in the interim, which is: ‘You made a mistake. You did something wrong but you owned up to it and we’ve all made mistakes in our personal lives so you’re no different from the rest of us and it’s important that you move on.'” Clement said he was relieved to hear such messages both from constituents and colleagues on Parliament Hill. “That’s what I had hoped, that people would give me some grace, give me some compassion and give me some empathy.”

While Clement is still a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party of Canada, he said not being part of the party caucus has taken some getting used to.

“It does give you a lot more freedom, there’s no question about it,” he said. “It’s a new thing for me obviously but yeah, I’m going to take advantage of it if there’s an issue that I think I can be more aligned with the public point of view [on] in the riding that isn’t necessarily completely consistent with the Conservative position, then I’d take a look at that obviously. I don’t feel bound by a caucus that I’m not a part of, right? So in that sense, I do have that flexibility but it’s [on] a case by case basis.”

Clement said he not only feels as though he’s back on track but said his experience has humbled him and also changed the attitude of many of those he interacts with in the riding. In his opinion, people open up to him now much more than they did before.

“Maybe before they saw me kind of on a pedestal, like somebody different from them, somebody higher than them—now I‘m just one of them. I’m clearly off the pedestal, so they talk to me about some of their personal issues because they know I can empathize, right?” said Clement. “I went through a personal crisis so people just tell me about their personal crises that have happened in their lives so I think it not only makes me a better MP, but generally a better person.”

Asked if his wife has asked him to leave politics, Clement responded: “She’s been incredible throughout this whole crisis and we’re working our issues out. I’m not sure I want to get into excruciating detail but no, we’re working these things out. She loves me, I love her and we’ll work these things out,” he reiterated.

In the meantime, Clement said it’s business as usual. He will continue working on behalf of his constituents both in Ottawa and locally.

The federal election takes place on October 21, 2019.

Don’t miss out on Doppler! Sign up for our free newsletter here.

Join the discussion:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

All comments are moderated. Please ensure you include both your first and last name and abide by our community guidelines. Submissions that do not include the commenter's full name or that do not abide by our community guidelines will not be published.

4 Comments

  1. Karen Wehrstein says:

    Shorter Tony: “I’m the real victim here! Getting caught was such a trauma, poor me, everyone should love me! Me me me!”

  2. Gord Danks says:

    Tony makes what he did sound like he got caught for speeding, pleaded guilty,paid his fine and promised that he will obey the speed limit now. Do you wonder if he hadn’t been caught would he still be speeding?

  3. Justin Case says:

    Humiliated the very Party he was raised into, humiliated his family and community that he represented, and has a persona of arrogance to the effect that non of that really matters. Double lives have consequences.

  4. Rob Millman says:

    I cannot believe that Mr. Clement is still deciding whether to run as an Independent in the fall election. I assume that he has court appearances in the offing (some as a witness; some as a defendant). His wife was just launching her career as a writer; with an excellent first offering. One can only imagine her devastation, and its effect on this choice. A little time and a little counselling is certainly insufficient to heal her wounds; and their children must be very open-minded if they have simply accepted their father’s indiscretions.
    .
    Furthermore, exactly how useful will he be as an Independent? Will he still be bringing Fednor grants to the area? And proposed motions/bills from a back-bencher carry virtually zero authority. Also, I feel that Mr. Clement put himself on a pedestal: He was certainly never as accessible as Norm Miller. He somehow even manages to put a positive spin on this debacle; by asserting how he reported the situation directly to the RCMP (after he was blackmailed for his peccadilloes).
    .
    He has simply been an MP for too long and cannot accept that he’s past his best-before date. Yes, we’ve all made mistakes; and yes, I believe that national security was never threatened. BUT, we are not all MP’s who ran, in part, on family values. If it would likely take us at least a year to “put Humpty Dumpty back together again”; why does Mr. Clement feel that he can produce a omelette after mere months?