Randy Hillier


Randy Alexander Hillier is a Canadian politician who served as a member of provincial parliament in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 2007-2022. Hillier represented the riding of Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston as an independent MPP from 2019 to 2022. This riding contains much of the dissolved riding of Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, which he represented from 2007 to 2018. Hillier was initially elected as a Progressive Conservative Party MPP, remaining a member until he was removed in 2019. Despite announcing that he would run for election under the banner of the Ontario First Party in November 2021, Hillier announced in March 2022 that he would not seek re-election.
Hillier was a candidate in the 2009 PC leadership election and the interim leadership election in 2014. He has formerly served as the PC critic for the Attorney General, Labour, Northern Development, and Mines and Forestry in the legislature. Hillier was removed from the PC Party by Premier Doug Ford in 2019 after making disrespectful comments to parents of children with autism. He has been outspoken against the use of facemasks, vaccines, and lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. He spent extensive time at the "Freedom Convoy", encouraging people to flood police phone lines during the clearance of protesters, and is currently on bail following nine charges related to his activity around the protest.
He sat as an independent MPP until the dissolution of Parliament on 3 May 2022. As of August 2022, Hillier provides landscaping and excavation services.

Background

Hillier was a licensed construction electrician with a diploma in electrical engineering technology from Algonquin College and former employee of the Canadian federal government. He lives near Perth, Ontario.

Property rights activism

Prior to serving as an MPP, in 2003, Hillier co-founded and served as the first president of the Lanark Landowners' Association. He then assisted in creation of local landowner groups in other parts of Ontario, modelled on the Lanark Landowners. In 2006, he became the first president of the 15,000-member Ontario Landowners Association, an umbrella group for these groups. The OLA was formed "...to preserve and protect the rights of property owners and to enshrine property rights within the Constitution of Canada and the laws of the Province of Ontario."
Under Hillier's leadership, the landowners' groups initially engaged in acts of civil disobedience, including blocking highways, barricading government offices, staging illegal deer hunts, and publicly breaking laws that the landowners regarded as unjust.
Hillier has explained the illegal actions of the landowners as follows:
In 2007, when he was seeking election to the provincial legislature, Hillier was challenged to justify his participation four years earlier in an illegal deer hunt. He responded by stating,
As well as acts of civil disobedience, the landowners conducted demonstrations at Queen's Park and Parliament Hill. Hillier's ability to attract media notice through the use of attention-grabbing rhetoric and tactics prompted one television commentator to describe him as "Don Cherry in plaid and rubber boots." On one occasion in 2006, Hillier was arrested and detained for trespassing during a protest at a water quality meeting in Cornwall.
After the creation of the OLA in 2006, acts of civil disobedience were replaced by attempts to influence the political system by more traditional means. Landowner-endorsed candidates ran for municipal office in many rural municipalities in the 2006 Ontario municipal elections. Hillier and other members of the OLA began to appear as witnesses before parliamentary hearings into issues affecting rural areas.
Hillier resigned as president of the OLA in 2007 in order to run for a seat in the provincial legislature.

Perspective as an MPP

Hillier was elected to the provincial legislature in 2007. In October 2014, Hillier referred to members of the Lanark Landowners' Association as "nutbars," claiming "hen I was there I tried to keep a distance from the fringe elements and the nutbars, if I can put it that way." The practice adopted by Landowners Associations of seeking original Crown patents for their land "has been, quite frankly, a problem for me as an MPP," Hillier said. "People are following this advice and not getting building permits, and then when the building inspectors visit them they’re phoning me as their MPP and seeking my assistance."

Editorialist

Hillier is the author of numerous editorials on a wide range of policy issues. Between 2003 and 2010, he contributed 11 articles to Le Québécois Libre, a bilingual libertarian online journal that was published in Montreal until 2010.
Beginning in 2006, Hillier was co-publisher and co-editor of the OLA's official organ, The Landowner magazine which is published bi-monthly. Hillier used to publish an editorial in each issue of The Landowner.

Political career

2007 election campaign

In January 2007, Hillier resigned as president of the OLA to seek the Progressive Conservative nomination in Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington in the upcoming provincial election. Some members of the party suggested that Hillier's activist past made him an unsuitable candidate, and the Toronto Star speculated that the party might disqualify him. Scott Reid, the federal MP for Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, responded that he would be "very disappointed" if Hillier were prevented from running, adding "I can't think of anything more dangerous to our prospects ". On 5 May, Hillier won a three-way nomination against Jay Brennan and Brent Cameron. He was elected MPP for the riding on 10 October 2007, capturing 40.58 per cent of the vote and defeating Liberal candidate Ian Wilson by 820 votes.
During the election campaign, some observers questioned Hillier's fitness for elected office, given his history of civil disobedience. But this history won him some admirers as well. Similarly, his willingness to take contrarian positions earned him approval as well as opposition. Shortly after this meeting, the Citizen's editorial board endorsed Hillier. An editorial in the paper advised voters to "ake a chance on Randy Hillier" and stated that "the landowners'-rights activist is doing the right thing by running for the legislature and trying to change the system he's been battling for so very long."

2007–2009: Early career as a Member of Provincial Parliament

Following the 2007 election, Hillier was appointed his party's critic for rural affairs.
However, it became increasingly clear that Hillier was unhappy with the leadership of PC leader John Tory. In March 2008, an article in the Ottawa Citizen reported that Hillier was considering leaving the Progressive Conservative caucus and joining the small Reform Party of Ontario. Hillier brushed aside this rumour as "void of fact."

2009: Ontario PC leadership candidate

In early March 2009, John Tory resigned as leader of the Ontario PCs. On 30 March, Hillier announced his candidacy in the leadership race to succeed Tory. Few observers thought Hillier had a realistic chance of winning, but some media commentators speculated that he might fill the role of kingmaker.
Lacking in high-profile endorsements, Hillier instead focused his leadership bid on a series of policy announcements. These included:
  • Allowing Ontarians to vote to elect their senators;
  • Enacting a law, which he proposed to call the Freedom of Association and Conscience Act, which would allow health care professionals and other government-paid individuals to refuse to provide services to which, for religious or moral reasons, they were personally opposed ;
  • Abolishing the Ontario Human Rights Commission and allowing all legal proceedings under the province's Human Rights Code to be dealt with in the regular court system.
  • Allowing the sale of beer and wine in corner stores;
  • Restoration of the spring bear hunt;
  • Ending the closed shop in unionized workplaces;
  • Reverse the ban on the cosmetic use of pesticides;
  • abolition of the province's property tax assessment agency ;
  • Increasing the speed limit on Ontario highways;
  • Allowing the de-amalgamation of municipalities which had been forcibly amalgamated in the 1990s;
  • Cracking down on the aboriginal occupations in places like Caledonia.
Hillier placed fourth in the September 2009 leadership vote, with just under 10 per cent of the vote. However, the initial vote-count showed no clear leader among the other three candidates: Tim Hudak had won 33.9 per cent, Frank Klees had 29.9 per cent, and Christine Elliott had 26.4 per cent. Because the election was structured as a preferential vote, the ballots cast by Hillier supporters were then redistributed among the other candidates. This system meant that Hillier's prior public endorsement of Tim Hudak as his own second choice for leader was important: two-thirds of the second-preference votes of Hillier supporters went to Hudak, doubling his lead over Klees.

2009–present: Political career after the leadership election

Following the election, Tim Hudak appointed Hillier as the party's critic for Labour, and for Northern Development, Mines and Forestry in the provincial legislature.
Regarding Hillier's support of Jack MacLaren, former Ontario Landowners Association President, to challenge sitting MPP Norm Sterling at the Annual General Meeting of the Carleton-Mississippi Mills Ontario Progressive Conservative Party Riding Association, the Globe and Mail described Hillier as a "shrewd political operator"
Prior to the 2011 provincial election, Randy Hillier and federal counterpart Scott Reid introduced motions to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario and the federal House of Commons, respectively, to enshrine property rights for Ontarians in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.