It wasn’t the start Liberal hopeful Randy Rinaldo likely wanted after he became the candidate for the Burnaby-Lougheed riding.
But a few days after comments he made on Twitter a number of years back resurfaced, he appears to have owned them and has apologized.
Rinaldo told the NOW he doesn’t blame people if they were offended by his tweets, adding he had no excuses for the offensive comments.
Two separate tweets dating back to 2012 got the most attention:
“@Ujjaldosanjh the Roma people are destroying my Italy you need to do your homework mr dosanjh, Gypseys=rape pillage steal.”
“@pattibachus @cknw Child poverty is a cultural problem not a system problem, many people out there shouldn’t be having kids #irresponsible.”
Rinaldo said in the four years since he made the statements, he’s gotten married, become a dad and served as a riding president for the Liberals.
On the latter, the now 33-year-old said he has a better understanding of the inner workings of government and how policy is set.
“Hot-headed tweets like that are not going to get any message across,” he said.
Also noting that he grew up in the social media age, Rinaldo said he hopes his situation won’t deter young people from entering politics because of what they might have said in the past. He pointed to past elections where candidates have had to step aside because of their past on social media.
“If we don’t get some youth in government to represent our needs, we’re not going to have any representation,” he said.
When voters head to the polls next May, Rinaldo is confident voters won’t be looking at his past tweets but instead concentrating on the record of the parties.
“No one’s going to lose sleep at night over a tweet made four years ago, but they are going to lose sleep at night if they don’t have a job and their taxes are going up and we go into deficit and have a downturn like we had in the ’90s,” Rinaldo said, taking a jab at the NDP who were in power in the province during the decade.
The realtor by day said he decided to run to give the Burnaby-Lougheed riding a seat at the government table.
“We’re performing so well, and I get to join this team, how could I have said no?” he said.
The NDP’s Jane Shin won the riding in 2013, beating out the Liberal challenger by more than 700 votes.
