| Jim Karahalios | |
| Office1: | Leader of the New Blue Party of Ontario |
| President1: | Belinda Karahalios |
| Term Start1: | October 12, 2020 |
| Predecessor1: | Position established |
| Birth Name: | Dimitrios Karahalios |
| Birth Place: | Ontario, Canada |
| Party: | New Blue |
| Otherparty: | Progressive Conservative (until 2020) |
| Spouse: | Belinda Karahalios[1] |
| Children: | 1 |
Jim Karahalios is a Canadian politician and lawyer who ran as the New Blue candidate for Kitchener—Conestoga in the 2022 Ontario general election.[2] He is the co-founder and leader of the New Blue Party.
In late 2017, Karahalios was sued by the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in retaliation for Karahalios's founding the activist groups "Axe The Carbon Tax" (opposing the party's pro-carbon tax position)[3] and "Take Back Our PC Party" (challenging the party's acceptance of nominations that resulted in allegations of electoral fraud).[4] Karahalios won the lawsuit when Superior Court Justice Paul Perell wrote a decision against the party ruling the lawsuit was a "strategic lawsuit against public participation” intended to stifle dissent.
On March 1, 2018, Karahalios received an apology from interim leader of the PC Party, Vic Fedeli.[5] Robert Benzie, Queen's Park Bureau Chief of the Toronto Star, described Karahalios with the following:
Karahalios was instrumental in exposing problems at Tory candidate nomination elections, the policy-making process and other abuses of the party constitution... Karahalios, a Cambridge corporate lawyer, has emerged as a conscience of the PC party. His crusade against Brown’s embrace of a carbon tax has been embraced by all the leadership hopefuls in the March 10 PC leadership contest.[5]Nine days later, on March 10, 2018, Doug Ford was elected as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. His leadership campaign platform, and those of the other three candidates in the race, embraced the themes of Karahalios's "Axe the Carbon Tax" and "Take Back Our PC Party" campaigns.[6] [7] [8]
In November 2018, Karahalios ran for the presidency of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party and later filed a lawsuit against the party after his defeat, alleging the election process was manipulated, election rules were breached and that ballot boxes were allegedly stuffed in order to elect his competitor, Brian Patterson, who was endorsed by Doug Ford.[9]
In January 2020, Karahalios announced he was running in the 2020 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election. By March 19, 2020, he was the third candidate in the race to raise the $300,000 in donations and 3,000 endorsement signatures the party required to have his name added to the ballot. On March 20, 2020, the party disqualified Karahalios from the race due to accusations of anti-Islamic bigotry over a mass-distributed letter targeting Erin O'Toole's campaign chair Walied Soliman, a Toronto corporate lawyer who is Muslim. The letter accused O’Toole of promoting Sharia law by having Soliman on his campaign.[10]
On May 20, 2020, Superior Court Justice Paul Perell quashed the party’s initial disqualification of Karahalios because the decision was made by a subcommittee that didn’t have the authority to do so. However, the decision left open the possibility of the party’s 18-member leadership election organizing committee (LEOC) taking up the matter and choosing to disqualify Karahalios through the proper means, which it did a few days later.[11]
In August 2022, Karahalios registered to run for Cambridge City Council in the 2022 municipal elections, running for Ward 5 Councilor. Karahalios was unsuccessful, receiving 21% of the vote and finishing third.
On October 12, 2020, Jim and Belinda Karahalios released a video announcing that they were forming a new political party, claiming that the Ontario PC Party was beyond redemption. Stating that there "is no party in the Ontario legislature defending the taxpayer, defending small business, defending places of worship, promoting freedom, promoting democracy or fighting political corruption."[12] [13]
On January 7, 2021, the New Blue Party was officially registered by Elections Ontario. Karahalios stated that the party would focus on supporting the taxpayer, places of worship and small business.[14]
He is married to Belinda Karahalios, a former member of the Ontario Provincial Parliament for Cambridge.[15]
| 2022 Cambridge Municipal Election: Ward 5 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Vote | % | |
| Sheri Roberts | 1,550 | 38.33 | |
| Amanda Maxwell | 1,208 | 29.87 | |
| Jim Karahalios | 859 | 21.24 | |
| Naeem Awan | 271 | 6.70 | |
| Mark D. Fisher | 156 | 3.86 | |