Conservative candidate warns of Liberal brothels [VIDEO]

Oakville Conservative MP Terence Young warned of Liberal brothels and marijuana stores at an all-candidates debate last week if people voted for the Liberal Party.

“Do you want communities in Oakville that are quiet and safe,” the Ontario Tory asked a large crowd at the Oakville debate on October 7, “where our largest investment, our homes, retain their value as they do now?

“Or communities where a federal Liberal government mandates legally protected brothels with madams and all that goes with that? Because the Liberals have promised to legalize the selling of women in Canada.”

Members in the audience can be heard hooting at the remarks, while the moderator calls for order.

YouTube video of Oakville candidates' debate. Young begins talking about Liberal brothels near the end at 2:20:20

The clip surfaced on Facebook Tuesday after the popular site, Meanwhile in Canada posted it, and is quickly going viral.

Young told the crowd the Liberals also mandates marijuana stores, “like in Vancouver, where there are more illegal marijuana stores than Starbucks.”

Young warned that one day most of us plan to sell our homes and asked, “What family would invest their life savings in a home near a marijuana store, a brothel or a drug injection site?”

Laughter ripples through the crowd at this point, causing the moderator to once again call for order.

He went on to describe Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a "brilliant economist" and not a "back-slapping, baby-kissing" kind of politician, but a "serious man in a serious job."

'Liberal brothels' appears to come from a resolution to protect sex workers

This is not the first time Tories have raised the spectre of “Liberal brothels.” According to the Huffington Post, Conservative MP Jason Kenney told News 1130 in September that Liberal leader Justin Trudeau “also wants to force communities to accept brothels,” and see marijuana sold in convenience stores.

Kenney is the MP for Calgary Southeast and was the Minister of National Defense and Minister for Multiculturalism.

Added Kenney, “ We don’t think the values of most Canadians are to have 18-year-olds buy marijuana at convenience stores and then reselling it to 16-year-olds in a back parking lot.”

The idea of Liberal brothels appears to come from a Canadian Press story in January that reported the British Columbia wing of the federal Liberal party was proposing a resolution for the party’s next national convention on sex trade workers.

The resolution was aimed at “ensuring sex trade workers are legally able to run a ‘safe and successful business,’ which would be licenced to safeguard employees, employers and clients and taxed just like ‘any other commercial enterprise,’” the story reported.

In their national platform for the election, the Liberals are proposing to legalize, regulate and restrict access to marijuana. The party argues that current system of prohibition doesn’t work and fails to prevent youth from using the drug while leaving too many Canadians with criminal records for possession of small amounts.

The Liberals would remove marijuana consumption and incidental possession from the Criminal Code, while enacting stronger laws to more severely punish those who provide it to minors, among other things.

The Liberals’ national platform does not appear to contain anything about brothels.

Young worked on marijuana report

On his web page, Young sums up his achievements while in office as an MP. Among them, he cites, “While on the Standing Committee on Health, I spent weeks studying the health effects of marijuana, particularly amongst our youth. The result is a shocking report on this supposedly harmless drug.”

The report, titled "Marijuana’s Health Risks and Harms," drew fire in mid-June from Vancouver East MP, Libby Davies, who said its title showed “the bias of the Conservative majority members on the committee, who unilaterally set the scope for the study to match their partisan, preconceived beliefs about marijuana.”

Davies said the report underscored the need for an evidence-based approach to studying marijuana from a health perspective.

In the House of Commons debate over the report, Davies said from “day one, the study and the report were very suspect because they were actually not based on evidence and a scientific approach in terms of how we should be conducting studies by standing committees of Parliament.”

Young is seeking his third term in the riding of Oakville. The Liberal candidate is the former president and CEO of Halton Healthcare Services, John Oliver, in the hotly contested riding, which has seen signs of both parties vandalized.

Che Marville is running for the NDP, while the Greens are fielding David Doel.

Liberal MP Bonnie Brown held the riding from 1993 to 2008 before Young defeated her. According to Global News, the riding is home to a high number of administrative and management jobs and the average salary is $67,032, the highest in Ontario outside of Toronto.

The race in Oakville is tight, with ThreeHundredEight.com showing Oliver leading with 46.3 per cent of the vote to Young’s 40.2 per cent.