Dumping Sloan will have consequences

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/01/2021 (1901 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Conservative MP, former leadership contender and social-conservative darling Derek Sloan is once again in hot water. It turns out that Sloan’s failed leadership campaign accepted a $131 contribution from Paul Fromm, a notorious white supremacist and far-right political activist.

The revelation of this contribution came at a bad time for leader Erin O’Toole, who just a few days prior went out of his way to denounce the barely organized MAGA hoodlums who stormed the U.S. Capitol in support of former president Donald Trump. There is “no place for the far right” in the Conservative party, O’Toole argued. Fromm’s contribution may have short-circuited O’Toole’s narrative, so the Tory leader responded decisively.

“Derek Sloan’s acceptance of a donation from a well-known white supremacist is far worse than a gross error of judgment or failure of due diligence,” he thundered via press release.

O’Toole followed up by asking Conservative MPs to give Sloan the boot. On Wednesday, they did just that. O’Toole has also said he will block Sloan’s nomination in future elections, making it impossible for the maverick MP to run as a Conservative candidate. Sloan’s career as a Conservative politician is, barring a remarkable unforeseen event, over.

Naturally, Sloan did not take this sitting down. Instead, he argued that the response was unfair since he was being held to a higher standard than the party itself. Sloan is not incorrect: Fromm’s donation was accepted by his leadership campaign, but the party itself received a portion of the contribution. If the well-funded Conservative party was incapable of flagging Fromm’s contribution, is it really reasonable to have expected Sloan’s no-hope leadership campaign to have done so?

As it turns out, Fromm made the task of catching him even more difficult by contributing under the name “Frederick P. Fromm.” He previously tried to purchase a membership during the 2017 leadership race to support candidate Kellie Leitch, but a sharp-eyed party official caught on and Fromm was given a thumbs down.

Now, it appears Fromm is currently a party member, undercutting O’Toole’s condemnation of Sloan and further embarrassing the party.

All this drama-of-the-moment obscures a bigger issue: given O’Toole’s actions, are we now going to hold both parties and candidates accountable for the views of all their donors?

I hope not. Besides being logistically impossible, doing so will invite a new brand of “gotcha” politics as both parties and thinly disguised partisan actors dig into the backgrounds of party donors searching for unsavoury characters. Indeed, several Conservative MPs privately expressed reservations about O’Toole’s actions, not because of any great love for Sloan, who has never met a cow pie he hasn’t stepped in. Rather, these MPs are concerned because they have no idea who has contributed money to their campaigns in the past and are worried about their names appearing in headlines because people like Fromm may at some point have chipped in $131 to help get them re-elected.

As it stands, anyone who puts their name forward to run for public office can expect to have everything they’ve ever posted on social media dug up and spread out for all to see. The first few weeks of every election campaign in this country now consists almost entirely of these sordid spectacles. Parties invest substantial resources into finding potentially embarrassing posts ahead of time, but cannot reasonably hope to do so exhaustively.

Has this development enriched our democracy? Hardly; rather, it has cheapened politics in this country, reducing election campaigns to a series of “gotcha” moments characterized by embarrassed ex-candidates running past TV cameras. Do we now really want to hold candidates and parties responsible for the views of every person who donates money to them?

Of course, one can hardly blame O’Toole for wanting to seize the moment and be done with Sloan. The maverick Tory MP has, since the leadership race, seemed intent on embarrassing his leader while remaining blissfully unaware that the axe would eventually fall.

I would prefer that Sloan’s fate be determined by voters in his Ontario riding, not by his party leader. We need more room for mavericks and for open disagreement within Canadian parties. But the reality of Canadian politics is that no MP can expect to test the leader’s patience to the extent Sloan has without receiving a response.

Sloan, now that he has been jettisoned from the Conservative caucus, sits as an Independent MP. But he might well hook up with Maxime Bernier’s nascent People’s Party, which was given a shellacking by Canadians in the last election when the party failed to win a single seat (including Bernier’s). Sloan would provide Bernier with a parliamentary toehold and an Ottawa spokesperson, adding some much-needed wind to the party’s sails.

Conservative MPs might want to consult their history books to see what happens when their party is confronted by a right-wing challenger party, as it was in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Royce Koop is head of the political studies department at the University of Manitoba.