From orgasm prank calls to Auschwitz wisecracks - 12 candidates in Canada’s election have been dumped for social media gaffes
If aspiring Canadian politicians learn just one lesson over the course of the country’s ongoing election campaign, it should probably be that what you post online can come back to haunt you.
In the course of the country’s longest election campaign in modern history, social media gaffes have landed some two dozen candidates from all major political parties in hot water.
Twelve of them have been dropped by their respective parties for saying something inappropriate, offensive or just plain bizarre on social media, leaving campaigns in damage control and scrambling to fill candidacies in all 338 political ridings before the nomination cut-off early this week.
Some political casualties were caused by Twitter spats, like the ones that sank Alberta standard-bearer Ala Buzreba, 21, when tweets from her teenage years surfaced in which she had told one commenter to “go blow your brains out” and another that their “mother should have used that coat hanger”.
Buzreba subsequently apologised , but she was dropped as a candidate by the centrist Liberal Party.
Then there was Toronto Conservative candidate Tim Dutaud, who was quickly dispatched after YouTube videos surfaced where, under the alter ego “Unicaller,” Dutaud made prank calls mocking special needs people and pretending to have an orgasm while on the phone with a female pharmacist.
And Ontario New Democrat hopeful Alex Johnstone made headlines when her excuse for an attempted penis-related wisecrack about Auschwitz on Facebook was that she had never heard of the infamous Nazi concentration camp. She remains with the party.
That the campaigns have been caught off-guard by the controversies has raised questions about just how seriously they vet people running for elected office.
WATCH: Tim Dutaud's "hilarious" crank call
Crisis management expert Allan Bonner said Canadian political parties had been overwhelmed by the sheer number of potential candidates - upwards of a thousand - whose backgrounds need reviewing.
“Politics outside of America is run by volunteer armies,” he said.
“Yes, all Canadian parties have the resources to devote to candidates in the ridings they thought they’d win or important ridings, but you eventually get to the end of your resources."
In most cases, parties have depended on a superficial search of a hopeful’s social media history. Most of the postings which are currently causing headaches for the campaigns have been uncovered by bloggers, such as the team behind the satirical website, True North Times.
Site editor-in-chief Max Seltzer said digging up dirt was time-consuming for the young staff but relatively simple.
“It’s surprising what people post that’s entirely publicly available and that no one had checked,” he said.
In September, the website launched an exposé of online comments made by nine candidates over the course of nine days, including Johnstone’s Auschwitz post.
One of them was Stefan Jonasson, a Unitarian Universalist minister who was running for the left-leaning New Democrats until he was ousted by the party over a Facebook comment comparing orthodox Jews to the Taliban. Jonasson accused the website of “misrepresenting others."
“They have shown themselves to be malevolent, immature, and irresponsible. And I don’t believe it’s an innocent exercise. I think there is a willfulness to this,” he said.
But Seltzer said the intention of the project was not to have candidates disqualified but to highlight comments they felt “tell us a bit about their personality” and to get voters to take a closer look at the candidates they are considering sending to Parliament.
In the Canadian political system - as in the UK - voters cast a ballot for local candidates and not directly for the party leader.
“We thought that investigating local candidates in further depth and trying to actually get a sense of the type of person they are would be something that adds value to the Canadian system,” Seltzer said.
