Candidate selection imperfect; that’s OK

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/10/2015 (3624 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This campaign has been remarkable in a number of ways, but is perhaps most notable as the Campaign of the Embarrassing Candidate. The number of candidates who have had embarrassing past statements revealed and been subsequently dumped by their parties is higher than in previous campaigns, and is likely to rise.

Social media is surely to blame, as many of the offending comments have been previously published online and forgotten, archived for party operatives or pyjama-clad bloggers to unearth years later.

Commentators have opined that the parties have failed to adequately vet their candidates beforehand. If only the parties had dug more deeply into their own candidates’ pasts, the argument goes, these embarrassing episodes could have been avoided.

This argument underestimates the extent of the challenge: the parties would have had to examine thousands of nomination candidates’ social-media posts over dozens of online platforms going back a decade. To say this is infeasible is an understatement.

In the face of such a challenge, the party leaders may wish they, like some European party leaders, could handpick a list of candidates. Or, as former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi did, audition potential candidates in front of a television camera to see how they appeared.

Canadian leaders don’t, for good reason. Canada is big and diverse, so it has almost always made sense for party leaders to leave candidate selection to constituency members. The idea is that residents of the constituency of Vaudreuil-Soulanges, for example, are best suited to select a candidate who can both win and properly represent the community.

They may identify a bright, young town councillor as a potential candidate, whereas that person would never show up on the radar of a party leader in Ottawa who could have trouble locating Vaudreuil-Soulanges on a map.

So while examples of party leaders using their power to override local candidates or “parachute” in their favoured candidates receive media coverage, the vast majority of candidates who have run for national office throughout Canadian history were selected by local members in often intense nomination races.

The benefit of this has been that most MPs have truly been representatives of their home communities. There is no doubt MPs represent all the different corners of the country. And the notion of geographic constituency representation seems to be ingrained in the Canadian psyche: thus the often visceral reaction to the news that candidates or MPs live outside of their constituencies.

Party leaders therefore face a new paradox: locally selected MPs are democratic assets but provide leaders with vetting challenges. Leaders are stuck with a truly geographically diverse team of candidates. But some, if not many, of those candidates now have a social-media past that may explode during an election, throwing the party’s campaign into disarray.

One way to address this paradox is for voters to first, relax and, second, respect the decentralization of the process of candidate selection. As a resident of Winnipeg South, my concern is assessing the party candidates in my constituency and voting on that basis. The candidates selected to run in Vaudreuil-Soulanges are really none of my business. Why would they be?

That means leaving messy local decisions for local voters to sort out rather than intruding into other communities’ affairs. Has a party nominated a kook in Vaudreuil-Soulanges? Then that’s a matter for local voters to decide.

Most important, we should not pretend party leaders are responsible for every social-media post ever made by every candidate running under their banner. Further, the claim that party leaders have an obligation to strike such candidates is not reflective of the reality of how Canadian parties are organized.

The logic of that organization — decentralized candidate selection — has been good for Canada in a multitude of ways. This arrangement should not be further compromised by assigning blame where it is not deserved.

Royce Koop is an associate political science professor at the University of Manitoba.