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Jim and Belinda Karahalios.Jim Karahalios / YouTube

CAMBRIDGE, Ontario, October 23, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — A husband-and-wife team consisting of a lawyer who was prevented from running as leader of the federal Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) and an independent member of provincial Parliament (MPP) in Ontario announced they are forming a new provincial party called New Blue Ontario.

Socially conservative MPP for Cambridge Belinda Karahalios, along with her husband Jim Karahalios, announced that they have been given the green light from Elections Ontario to form their new party.

The pair announced the news on YouTube Thanksgiving Monday, saying a new party is needed in Ontario as an alternative to the “corrupt” Ontario Progressive Conservative (P.C.) party under Ontario premier Doug Ford.

“People have reached out to us, said, ‘You can’t stop. You gotta run again, Belinda. You guys need to, together, not give up, and so that’s the solution: creating a new party in Ontario, because the Ontario P.C. party, there’s no democracy inside of it to fix things up,” said Jim Karahalios in the YouTube announcement of New Blue on October 11.  

In their video announcement, Jim asked Belinda if there was “any hope on fixing the party from the inside” to which she said a firm “no.”

“No, and that’s the thing. So, people keep saying — so, if we had a different leader, that it would be different, but the party is so far gone, it’s so corrupt, that it doesn’t matter who the leader is. It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to change,” said Belinda to her husband, Jim.

LifeSiteNews reached out to Belinda and Jim to ask them about their new party, but they were unable to provide a comment in time for this report’s deadline.

Belinda Karahalios was kicked out of the Ontario P.C. Party in the summer of 2020 for voting against a COVID-19 recovery bill introduced by the Ford government.

Her husband, Jim Karahalios, was twice disqualified from running in the CPC leadership race in the spring of 2020 upon rulings of the CPC’s Leadership Election Organizing Committee (LEOC).

Karahalios’s lawyers said the party had disqualified him “as a result of a complaint filed by the Erin O’Toole campaign requesting his disqualification.”

O’Toole, who identifies as pro-abortion, won the CPC leadership race in a close contest in August

The pair’s YouTube video also touched on the internal politics of the CPC and the Ontario P.C. party, seeing Jim Karahalios give insight into what he called the “corruption” of “stuffing ballots” within the Ontario P.C. Party.

The announcement of New Blue caught the attention of People’s Party of Canada Leader and former CPC M.P. Maxime Bernier on social media.

“Watch this discussion between @jimkarahaliosand @KarahaliosPC if you want to know more about the corruption within the @CPC_HQ during their recent leadership race. Nothing has changed. Update from Belinda and Jim,” wrote Bernier on Twitter.

In their YouTube message, the Karahalioses said there is “no way” Belinda can run again for the Ontario P.C. party, which left them with no other option but to start a new provincial party.

“There’s no way for you to run the P.C. nomination, so there’s really no other option for — not only for us, but for voters in Ontario who believe in grassroots democracy, who believe that the parties should not all be agreeing with each other on every major policy, and who want to deliver a platform of defending the taxpayer, not destroying small businesses, protecting places of worship,” said Jim Karahalios.

“And so, we’ve got no other option to help but to start a new party, so it’s the New Blue Party of Ontario for us moving forward.”

To be registered as an official party, the married couple is looking for 1,000 signatures from Ontario residents who are of voting age.

Jim Karahalios said in his YouTube message that another option would be to work with existing “smaller parties” in Ontario to “speed up the process.”

Belinda and Jim are asking those interested in helping them out to visit their website, where one can fill out an Elections Ontario “Petition to Register a Political Party” form, which, when filled, can be scanned and emailed back to [email protected]