Conservative party pulls attack ad showing black man walking over Trudeau tweet

The Conservative party pulled an attack ad from its Twitter feed Tuesday that depicted a black man carrying a suitcase walking over a tweet from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The tweet is rolled out as a carpet entering a broken fence, and the words "faith" and "diversity" are visible.

The Tories have argued that a Trudeau tweet from January 2017 is partly to blame for an influx of asylum seekers crossing into Canada from the United States.

Conservative party spokesman Cory Hann says the ad was axed because the situation at the border is not about any one group of people.

Hann says the image, which shows an actual person "illegally" crossing over the Canadian border, was originally used by a number of media outlets with stories about the surge in asylum seekers.

The full photo shows the man with a group of people carrying suitcases in Quebec, while the edited image used by the Conservative party singled out one man.

A headline on a column in the Financial Post by Diane Francis is superimposed on the image. It says, "Trudeau's holier-than-thou tweet causes migrant crisis now he needs to fix what he started."

Conservative MP and deputy leader Lisa Raittsaid she was glad the Tweet was deleted.

"It detracted from the very serious issue that we have before us, which is this isn't about semantics andthis isn't about what happens inmemes on Twitter. This is about a very serious issue of border control and of ensuring people have resources to be dealt with appropriately,compassionatelyand fairly," she said Wednesday.

In an opinion piece published Tuesday, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen accused the Tories of "peddling false information to stoke fear" and called it "ridiculous" that they blame the flow of asylum seekers on Trudeau's tweet.