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Billionaire tech executive Elon Musk cast the upcoming presidential election in dire terms during an appearance with Donald Trump, calling the Republican presidential nominee the only candidate “to preserve democracy in America.”

The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla who also purchased X, Musk joined Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday at the site where the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. Musk said “this will be the last election” if Trump doesn’t win. Wearing a cap with the “Make America Great Again” slogan of Trump’s campaign, Musk appeared to acknowledge the foreboding nature of his remarks.

“As you can see I am not just MAGA — I am Dark MAGA,” he said.

It was the first time that Musk joined one of Trump’s rallies and was evidence of their growing alliance in the final stretch of the presidential election. Musk created a super political action committee supporting the Republican nominee and it has been spending heavily on get-out-the-vote efforts. Trump has said he would tap Musk to lead a government efficiency commission if he regains the White House.

Trump joined Musk in August for a rare public conversation on X, a friendly chat that spanned more than two hours. In it, the former president largely focused on the July assassination attempt, illegal immigration and his plans to cut government regulations.

Before a large crowd Saturday, Musk sought to portray Trump as a champion of free speech, arguing that Democrats want “to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively.” Musk went on to criticize a California effort to ban voter ID requirements.

The event took place at the same property where a gunman’s bullets grazed Trump’s right ear and killed a Trump supporter, Corey Comperatore. The shooting left multiple others injured.

Several members of Comperatore’s family, as well as other attendees and first responders from the July rally, returned to the site on Saturday. Also appearing with the former president were his running mate Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance, son Eric Trump, daughter-in-law and RNC co-chair Lara Trump, along with Pennsylvania lawmakers and sheriffs.

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Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP

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The story has been corrected to reflect that Elon Musk said Democrats “want to take away your right to vote, effectively,” not “fight to vote, effectively.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

MONTREAL – Raquel Ohnona Look wipes back tears when her eyes fall on the plaque in honour of her son Alexandre, affixed to a bench in a suburban Montreal green space that was recently renamed for him.

“Forever in our hearts. Our hero,” it reads above his name and the dates of his birth and death — Sept. 10, 1990, to Oct. 7, 2023.

Alexandre Look, a 33-year-old Montreal native, was among the concertgoers who were murdered a year ago Monday at the Supernova music festival during a brutal assault on Israel carried out by Hamas militants. He is among at least eight people, either Canadian citizens or with ties to Canada, who died during the Oct. 7 attacks.

“It’s been a tough year. It’s a new reality. Our family dynamic changed,” Ohnona Look said in an interview last week, just before Rosh Hashanah. “Obviously he was such a huge persona, and we will never be the same people as we were before Oct. 7.”

The day was every parent’s worst nightmare, as Ohnona Look and her husband, Alain, bore witness to their son’s final moments from their Montreal home. They were on a video call with Alexandre as the Hamas assault unfolded and he huddled in a shelter with about 30 other concertgoers.

His mother heard the gunfire and dropped the phone in shock. His father picked it up to try to understand what was happening. When he heard the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar,” he knew their son was gone.

Ohnona Look says a year later, the emotions come in waves. “It’s a hole in the heart. It’s anger. It’s trauma, because, you know, having a child murdered, and you’re on the phone … it’s something you don’t come back from.”

She spent long hours during the past year trying to learn the circumstances around her son’s death, speaking to survivors who were in the bunker.

“He was a hero that day,” she says she learned. “He sacrificed his life. He put himself in the front of the shelter where they were hiding,” She says survivors described her son trying to keep up their spirits while the terror attack unfolded around them.

He did the same for his mother during their video call, trying to keep her comforted, asking about holiday meals and keeping his tone upbeat. She even heard him trying to reason with the attackers. “But you can’t reason with monsters,” she says.

In a recent meeting with a first responder who attended to Look’s body, she was able to fill in some gaps that had been haunting her. The first responder said Look was found on top of two people he had tried to protect at the front of the shelter, and he had taken most of the gunshots and grenades. Many survived hiding farther back in the shelter.

“But we know that’s Alex, and he would have done that 100 times over,” she says. “He was always led by his fearless, gigantic heart. That’s how he lived his life.”

She says Look was a born salesman who spoke six languages. He had been most recently living in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, selling cosmetics. He was in Israel on holiday.

After his death, the Look family moved from a nearby Montreal borough back to Côte-St-Luc, a predominantly Jewish suburb where the newly renamed Alexandre Look Place is located. It is next to the Jewish high school he attended and near the synagogue where his father prays every morning.

The community grieved with the family and still does. During an interview with The Canadian Press, at least a dozen people, some of them strangers, stopped to offer hugs, condolences and wishes for a Happy New Year.

Now she wants to ensure that those who were killed on Oct. 7 aren’t forgotten — the victims she calls the “Nova Angels” from the music festival as well as those murdered in their kibbutzes.

They include Judih Weinstein Haggai, 70, who held Canadian, Israeli and American citizenships. She died on Oct. 7 while out for a walk with her husband near the Nir Oz kibbutz, which sits less than three kilometres from the Gaza Strip. Their bodies were being held in Gaza and have not been recovered, their daughter has said.

Vivian Silver, 74, died at the Be’eri kibbutz where she lived, which also sits near the border with Gaza. For weeks, officials initially believed the Winnipeg-born woman had been taken into Gaza, but her body was identified in mid-November.

Others found dead immediately after the attack included Look and another Canadian, Ben Mizrachi, 22, of Vancouver.

Hamas also killed dual Israeli Canadian nationals Netta Epstein, 21; Shir Georgy, 22; and Adi Vital-Kaploun, 33. Tiferet Lapidot, 22, an Israeli whose family was from Canada, was also at the music festival and found dead days later.

The emotions remain raw, but Ohnona Look says she’s in “warrior mode” in a fight against rising antisemitism and to speak for those still missing.

“I’m doing what my son would want me to do,” Ohnona Look says. “I’m the voice for all the forgotten ones, the hostages that still remain … even if there is only bodies, we need their bodies back.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 6, 2024.

VANCOUVER – The calculus of predicting an election and identifying its key battlegrounds is complex enough in any race, but observers of the British Columbia poll this month are facing a pair of unknown quantities that make the maths even more confounding.

Those are the significant redistribution that has added six ridings to the electoral map, and the collapse of the Opposition BC United party, formerly the BC Liberals, coupled with the rise of the upstart B.C. Conservatives as the NDP’s main challenger.

Kennedy Stewart, Vancouver’s former mayor who also sat in Parliament in Ottawa for the NDP from 2011 to 2018, said those factors make the Oct. 19 election tough to call.

“Ordinarily, in a race where it has familiar parties with familiar ridings, familiar boundaries, it’s a lot easier to predict what’s going to happen,” said Stewart.

“But those two main things — the boundary changes and the total upheaval on the centre-right — make this a very difficult election to predict.”

Mike McDonald was chief of staff for BC Liberal premier Christy Clark and is co-host of the Hotel Pacifico podcast on the province’s political scene. He said there are “always a few ridings that surprise you” but this year’s realignment of both ridings and parties adds even more volatility.

Even so, both McDonald and Stewart say some areas will face scrutiny for their ability to turn the race. These include seats that swung into NDP hands in 2020 on the back of a 14 per cent gap with the Liberals in the overall popular vote.

McDonald said a gap that wide created a “wave” pushing the NDP over the finish line in ridings that are not traditionally left-leaning, including districts in Fraser Valley communities such as Langley, Abbotsford and Chilliwack.

The NDP took five of seven ridings in those communities in 2020.

“In this election, the public polls are telling us it’s going to be much tighter, at least so far,” McDonald said of the popular vote. “And so, if we were single-digit margin on the popular vote provincewide — say, less than five per cent difference — then you’re going to see a lot of those NDP seats that were won in 2020 fall by the wayside.”

The question then turns to how far such a Conservative wave in the Fraser Valley might push into Metro Vancouver, McDonald said.

He pointed to the importance of Langley-Willowbrook, which includes the city of Langley, as a riding that had seen a trend of younger families moving in from bigger communities in the Lower Mainland.

“That riding is in question,” he said. “It’s gone federal Liberal in some recent elections, and it went NDP last time, of course. So a riding like Langley-Willowbrook might be where the NDP start to push back and resist the Conservative momentum.”

Stewart said attention should also be on deep urban ridings, historically places where the NDP has done well against centre-right parties.

He said that trend may not hold given what he described as the NDP’s shift toward the centre on issues such as the carbon tax and involuntary care for drug users and the mentally ill. Such policies could be designed to fend off the right but may lower voter enthusiasm among the NDP’s base, he said.

“I think that all adds up to say that even in traditional areas that would be safe for the NDP like Vancouver, you’re going to see some ridings that would be in play for the Conservatives that may not have been in play in the past,” Stewart said.

“So for example, areas like Vancouver-Little Mountain that’s had a significant boundary change, you may see that being a tighter race than you would normally see. You would see Langara, even (NDP Leader David Eby’s) own riding of Point Grey, which has gone back and forth between the centre-right and the NDP, probably in play as well.”

Stewart said he was also looking at ridings where the BC Green Party has traditionally been strong, watching how the NDP’s shift to the centre especially on issues such as the carbon tax would play out.

He noted the Greens face challenges as leader Sonia Furstenau switches ridings to face NDP cabinet member Grace Lore in Victoria-Beacon Hill.

Her deputy, Adam Olsen, has decided against running in Saanich North and the Islands, leaving no incumbent Greens defending their seats.

“I thought this wasn’t going to be great for the Greens,” Stewart said. “However, with the NDP kind of shifting to the right … I think it really does open an opportunity for the Greens to pick up disaffected NDP voters.”

McDonald said the Greens’ best shot at retaining a seat at the legislature may be West Vancouver-Sea to Sky, where their candidate Jeremy Valeriote lost to the BC Liberals’ Jordan Sturdy by 60 votes in 2020.

Valeriote returns to contest the riding but Sturdy isn’t running. Instead, Valeriote faces two other high-profile candidates — Order of B.C. recipient Yuri Fulmer for the Conservatives and former Union of BC Municipalities president Jen Ford for the NDP.

“That region has changed a lot,” McDonald said. “The Sea-to-Sky corridor is a bigger part of the population there (in the riding) than the West Vancouver part, so that one will be very unpredictable and I think that will definitely be one to watch.”

McDonald said he also foresees fierce competitions in traditional battlegrounds in Maple Ridge, Coquitlam-Burke Mountain, Courtenay-Comox and Skeena, as well as communities with demographic changes such as Surrey and Richmond.

He isn’t optimistic for the group of former BC United incumbents now running as Independents against Conservatives in traditionally centre-right settings.

“I think where the independent candidates will make the biggest impact are in ridings where the NDP have a chance of winning, and a strong Independent may dilute the Conservative vote and help elect an NDP MLA,” McDonald said, citing Vernon-Lumby as an example.

There, Lumby mayor and former BC United candidate Kevin Acton is running as an Independent against incumbent NDP candidate Harwinder Sandhu and the Conservatives’ Dennis Giesbrecht.

Incumbents running as Independents, such as Mike Bernier in Peace River South, Dan Davies in Peace River North, Tom Shypitka in Kootenay-Rockies, Coralee Oakes in Prince George-North Cariboo and Karin Kirkpatrick in West Vancouver-Capilano, will find re-election tough, said McDonald.

“In British Columbia’s history, it’s very hard for an Independent to win an election. It’s only happened a handful of times,” he said

But a strong candidate and local campaigning matter too, when margins between parties are slim.

“It’s winning the little local-issue battles, riding by riding. In 2017, that one riding, Courtenay-Comox, decided the fate of who governs B.C.,” he said, referring to the narrow win by the NDP’s Ronna-Rae Leonard that ultimately helped the NDP’s John Horgan become premier.

“So many things could have happened differently in that election to turn that riding the other way.

“That’s a good thing about elections. They should be unpredictable to some degree, because it’s up to voters decide at the end of the day.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 6, 2024.