Chris Selley: Some candidates deserve to be cancelled

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By some accounts, cancel culture and political correctness in general are on the wane after many years in the ascendency. Perhaps that explains in part how Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie has gotten away with keeping on a candidate whose cretinous pensées on social media seem like more than ample cause for defenestration.

By “gotten away with” I don’t mean Crombie is likely to perform well in Thursday’s election (barring now-almost-unfathomable developments, it’s a race with the NDP for distant second). Rather, that the media didn’t seem as interested as in years past. It’s not as though there was lots of other hot controversy to cover in this somnambulant campaign. And Crombie’s defence was almost as noteworthily weird as the naughty tweets: She implied it was almost offside for the Progressive Conservatives to highlight her candidates’ past remarks.

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“If they want to sling mud, if Doug Ford has something to say to me, he should have the balls to say it to my face,” she said. Weird.

One can still get fired from Team Bonnie. Viresh Bansal, the Liberal candidate in Oshawa, walked the plank for a response on X to federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh on the topic of alleged Indian involvement in the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C. in 2023.

“You can thank India for cleaning trash people,” Bansal wrote. He then suggested Singh ask his “gay friend Justin Trudeau to do the same.”

You almost have to admire the efficiency. Just when you might be thinking, well, Nijjar maybe wasn’t the nicest guy in the world, Bansal goes ahead and calls the prime minister a homosexual as if there is something wrong with being gay.

The same fate has not befallen Brian Hamilton, the Liberal candidate in Thunder Bay—Superior North, for his equally astonishing social-media content. A decade or so ago, Hamilton had an unfortunate habit of publicly downplaying sexual violence.

You’ll never guess what this tweet was meant to defend: “Forty years ago people were spiking drinks with Spanish fly. Fifty years ago they were spraying beaches with DDT. Let it go.”

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He was downplaying the sexual-assault allegations against Bill Cosby. Accepting purely for the sake of argument that drugging and raping women was de rigueur in the 1960s and 1970s, some of Cosby’s alleged crimes occurred far more recently than that.

Hamilton also zoomed to Jian Ghomeshi’s defence — or rather, worse, to the defence of Ghomeshi’s behaviour with women. “I miss (him) even if he is an ass-slapping lady-choker,” Hamilton wrote. “His peculiarities don’t neutralize his genius.”

One of the unfortunate aspects of political cancellations is that there isn’t one standard of behaviour. It’s riding-specific

Later he observed that the CBC radio show Q without Ghomeshi was “like a flower without the pedals (sic). A wind without the chill. A date without a kiss.”

Wait for it.

“Or a date without the slap/choke.”

If I led a political party, I would cancel that guy like a CBC police procedural. Or I would at least insist he defend himself better than he would end up doing. “More than a decade ago I made several comments online that were uninformed and insensitive,” Hamilton wrote by way of apology.

“Uninformed”? About what?

“My choice of words was repugnant,” he continued.

Well, yes. But the words were much less a problem than the sentiments they conveyed..

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“I have long since grown,” Hamilton assured us.

He looks roughly 50 years old today. Should someone who was a roughly 40-year-old then have that much growing left to do?

One of the unfortunate aspects of political cancellations is that there isn’t one standard of behaviour. It’s riding-specific. Bansal is out and Hamilton is still in to a huge extent because the Liberals have no shot in Oshawa, which is a PC/NDP swing riding, but a pretty decent shot of retaking Thunder Bay—Superior North, which the NDP nicked from them in 2022 after 23 years.

And that raises a fundamental question, surely. Being able to nominate candidates in every riding province-wide is usually seen as a sort of minimum standard for a serious party. But naturally the best candidates are unlikely to donate their bodies to the cause in no-hope ridings. Almost by definition, parties are dealing with minor-league talent — and too often, thereafter, their minor-league senses of humour, major-league bad opinions or just general flakiness.

To wit: The NDP nominated Natasha Doyle-Merrick in the no-hope riding of Eglinton—Lawrence only to watch her drop out sooner than split the anti-PC vote. It’s “a clear two-party contest between Liberals and Conservatives,” she explained, apparently not having noticed before.

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There’s a practical reason to run a full slate of candidates: Parties meeting certain very generous criteria enjoy a public subsidy of 63.6 cents per vote cast for their candidates. Not running a candidate in Oshawa last time around would have cost the Liberals around $2,400 in subsidy — not much, you wouldn’t think, but the clearly flawed Liberal candidate-vetting process wouldn’t get any better without that $2,400.

That’s not the whole explanation. There’s no per-vote subsidy at the federal level, praise be to Stephen Harper for that. Bimbo and himbo eruptions still occur regularly among federal candidates. But the subsidy does provide a perverse incentive to nominate whoever might be willing and hope for the best.

Having promised to end Ontario’s per-vote subsidy while running for the party leadership, Doug Ford learned to love them in government. It’s not too late for him to change his mind back. To some extent, it might save parties from themselves.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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