King-Vaughan Conservative candidate says he won't resign over Facebook posts

Konstantin Toubis says Russian-language articles he posted links to do not represent his own opinion

Yorkregion.com
Sept. 11, 2015
By Tim Kelly

King-Vaughan Conservative candidate Konstantin Toubis says he won’t resign after it was revealed he reposted links to Russian-language articles via Facebook that include derogatory comments about women and homosexuals.

Toubis, a Russian immigrant who has lived in Vaughan for the past 17 years, said in an interview he only reposted the articles because he found them “ridiculous” and said they don’t represent his own opinion.

The four posts appeared between July 2014 and March this year. At least three came after Toubis received the King-Vaughan Conservative nomination.

The articles those posts link to include some vulgar references to women among them:

• "If you catch your girlfriend with a woman, you have the right to silently undress and join them."
• "A man never raises his hand to a woman ... There are other body parts to raise for a woman."

There is also a reference to homosexuals in another post he linked to:

* A mentally healthy man "likes full female hips. Fans of bony behinds are infantile and irresponsible souls." The blog adds "this is also a sign of a latent homosexual."

Toubis said the reposted articles are, “not who I am, I’m a married man with children, it’s not my opinion, the article, yes, it was reposted on my wall ... you’re going to read articles in your newspaper and you’re going to find some bad articles about some person, does it mean that you are the same bad person?”

He added that he shut down his Facebook page last night “because they (media) just build a story out of nothing.”

And he blamed PressProgress, a media project of the left-leaning Broadbent Institute, which produced and ran the initial story on the reposted pieces.

He said, “that was NDP Ed Broadbent. I know it was a specific attack and that’s what they found an article on my wall from this institution and nobody called me and asked my opinion on that article. They just made the story out of something they found on my (Facebook) wall.”

Asked if he had been asked to resign by Conservative Party headquarters over the Facebook posts, Toubis said, “No.”