VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) - NPA mayoral candidate
Suzanne Anton has apologized to two Filipino families after using their daughters' faces on one of her campaign brochures without their parents' consent.
Clifford Belgica's five-year-old daughter and his six-year-old cousin got their pictures snapped with Anton at a cultural event. He and his uncle discovered on Saturday that their daughters' pics had been used on a campaign leaflet distributed door to door.
Anton phoned Belgica on Sunday to apologize and promised to stop distributing the flyers, but Belgica is still not impressed.
"She was quite dismissive. She didn't own up to it," he says. "It's still her decision... She said, you know, 'this was done by one of my people, we didn't publish a lot.'
"She was saying, 'oh, I'm sorry,' but she wasn't even saying that it was her decision, which is, of course, that's not true. That's her decision, right? Everything goes through her, so that's the reason I told her... we're going legally on this."
Belgica says his outrage isn't politically fuelled and he would have been just as upset if his daughter's photo had appeared in any other publication distributed to the public without his consent.
He plans to file complaints with the BC
Privacy Commissioner and
Vancouver elections office, and is also looking into taking legal action.