Green Party candidate out of the race after anti-Muslim social media post surfaces

The Green Party has turfed one of its Ontario candidates over an old social media post in which he spoke about sending a pig carcass to Muslims.

Erik Schomann, who was the party's candidate in Simcoe North, posted a photo of himself helping to roast a pig, with the caption: "We sent the leftovers to Denmark in support of the protesters of the Muhammad comic."

It's not clear when the photo was posted — it's now dated 1983 — but the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist with a bomb in 2005 caused widespread global outrage.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims issued a news release urging Green Party Leader Elizabeth May to dump Schomann from the race.

"While we greatly cherish the free speech rights of all Canadians, when you start promising to mail pieces of a pig carcass, you can no longer stand with the integrity and moral commitment that all those who wish to be elected must have," NCCM's Executive Director Mustafa Farooq said in a statement.

The NCCM news release said sending a pig carcass is a commonplace tactic for intimidating Muslims, noting that a pig's head was left outside the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec a year before the mosque was the scene of a gun attack that claimed six lives.

The Green Party responded swiftly, issuing its own statement saying the party had accepted Schomann's resignation. 

"The Green Party has zero tolerance for sexism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia or hate speech of any kind," the statement reads.