Social-media gaffes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/09/2015 (3690 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Another day on the election campaign. Another candidate in trouble for saying something controversial.

With the emergence of social media and their elephant-like ability to never forget anything you say, every election has seen candidates dropping right, left and centre.

No party is immune, so any party or supporters who express glee when someone else’s candidate goes under the bus should duck, because their glass house is about the shatter.

At least eight candidates (four Conservative, and two each for the NDP and the Liberals) have been dropped, six since the election began. Several more have been forced to apologize and explain unsavoury comments and got to stay.

Their offences include social-media comments that are sexist, racist or just plain rude. Many involve profanity. The most famous of this year’s group of dropouts is surely Conservative Jerry Bance, whose outing as the man in a CBC Marketplace sting show on shady contractors showed video of him peeing in a mug in a client’s kitchen where he was supposed to be fixing the dishwasher.

Bance’s indiscretion turned Twitter upside down Sunday night and saw more than 26,000 tweets with the hashtag #peegate in just 24 hours.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper dropped Bance as the Conservative candidate in Scarborough-Rouge Park before noon on Monday.

There really is just no coming back from that.

At least three more are under the microscope as you read this, including Liberal Joy Davies who resigned Thursday after saying smoking pot while pregnant makes babies smarter. Another Liberal, Chris Brown, who says an alcohol addiction resulting from the drunk-driving death of his partner led him to say hateful things about women online, and a Conservative from Toronto, Konstantin Toubis, who posted misogynistic comments in Russian on Facebook. It is easy to see why parties often dump these candidates faster than Donald Trump can insult someone.

They are a distraction and take party leaders off their message, and thus far most of these candidates have not been ones likely to actually win. Parties aren’t going to risk public perception for people with little hope of getting elected in the first place.

Sometimes a sincere apology is enough to save the candidate’s bacon.

The NDP gave Nova Scotia candidate Morgan Wheeldon 30 minutes to decide to step down or be fired after comments he made on Facebook in 2004 during a debate about Israel surfaced. He refused to apologize and insists his comments were taken out of context and that he himself was not saying Israel engaged in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians but that you could come to that conclusion depending on what sources you read.

Matthew Rowlinson is still the NDP candidate in London West even though a 2008 letter to a campus paper that he signed surfaced. The letter also accused Israel of ethnic cleansing. But Rowlinson apologized and said he regretted ever signing that letter, which he indicated was actually written by someone else. So the lesson here, kids, is if you want to run for office in Canada, you can say controversial stuff as long as you’re prepared to change your mind and pretend you have had a conversion on the road to running for office. If you stand up for yourself, be gone.

Such appears to be the case for NDP communications director Shawn Dearn, who was outed this week as having told the former pope to go “F” himself on Twitter after ex-pope Benedict made a comment about gay equality.

When the partisan attacks began, Dearn took to Twitter again, deleted the offensive tweets and apologized.

“Some tweets that predated my current role were offensive and do not reflect my views.”

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It’s hard to believe Dearn suddenly thinks the ex-pope was correct in his assertion gay equality is a violation of the natural order of things, so what views did the tweet not reflect? Or is it just that fear of hurting his party’s chances at the polls means he will pretend he’s changed his mind? Dearn should have apologized for telling the retired pope to go “F” himself. Such comments are simply inexcusable. But his apology would have made more sense if he had stated he used inappropriate language to express himself but he still believes Benedict was wrong to say what he did.

What is disheartening about these situations is not really just that these candidates hold some of these views and happily told the world about them before they were running for office. What’s disheartening is how quickly some people seem willing to shove aside their belief systems for political gain.

Mia Rabson is the parliamentary bureau chief for the Winnipeg Free Press.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @mrabson