UCP’s top official kept busy playing whack-a-bozo

If some days you think you’ve got a tough, thankless job, just be grateful you don’t have one of the toughest, most thankless jobs in the province: executive director of the United Conservative Party.

The position is held by Janice Harrington, a veteran of Alberta conservative politics, whose job these days includes playing whack-a-mole with wannabe UCP candidates who have a propensity for spouting disturbing and/or ridiculous comments on social media.

It’s Harrington’s job to inform the members they are free to run for elected office — just not under the UCP banner.

Harrington’s most recent letter, dated Aug. 14, is to businessman Jerry Molnar, who had spent five months campaigning to be the UCP candidate in the riding of Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland.

Her letter to Molnar is a master class in understatement. She starts by pointing out that when Molnar applied to be a candidate, he told party officials he merely used Facebook to “enjoy political debates with my friends.”

But when the party dug into his social media postings, it “unearthed” what Harrington said were “a number of questionable posts.”

They include, but are not limited to: “Repeatedly calling the now-former premier of Ontario, who is openly gay, a ‘tranny.’”

And stating that unions are “pure evil” and “we really should ban all unions.”

Molnar’s defence was the posts were limited to a private Facebook page shared only with a few friends.

Harrington was having none of it.

“We strongly disagree with the view that comments on one’s personal page should be ignored,” she wrote.

“We would not let a candidate for the NDP off the hook for an offensive comment simply because it was said on his or her personal Facebook.”

That should have been that.

But Molnar is not going away quietly. He has posted a lengthy Facebook response where he is alternately defiant and apologetic. He accuses the UCP of taking his posts out of context, but also admits, “I was young, naive and just stupid” when using the pejorative term “tranny” to describe former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne.

“I wish to apologize to everyone that my post offended.”

He has hinted at legal action against the UCP and declared of the party’s decision to boot him from the nomination race, “this process has not been democratic at all.”

What Molnar doesn’t appreciate is that the UCP, like all political parties, is not a democracy, but a private club. Within some broad regulations set by Elections Alberta, parties are free to set their own rules, determine who can be members and choose party candidates for elections.

And what Molnar doesn’t seem to grasp is that his social-media posts are not proof of an innocent “cheesy sense of humour,” but are evidence of a bozo eruption that would be used by the NDP to cause, in the words of Harrington, “serious reputational harm” to the UCP and its members.

UCP Leader Jason Kenney has stated clearly he has zero tolerance for bozo eruptions.

It feels like Harrington has been playing whack-a-bozo so aggressively, she might need an ice pack for her arm.

Interestingly, though, the party is sticking by Randy Kerr, its newly nominated candidate in Calgary-Beddington.

Kerr has repeatedly used social media to link to web pages and blogs that, in his own words, “exposes global warming for the hoax we’ve always known it to be.”

Harrington said Kerr is entitled to “his personal opinion.”

Except that the robust science of man-made global warming is not a matter of “personal opinion.”

Kerr’s comments are an echo of the-science-isn’t-settled-on-climate-change bozo eruption that helped sink the Wildrose campaign in the 2012 provincial election.

The NDP is gleefully jumping on candidate Kerr’s posts — as well as those of non-candidate Molnar and others in the UCP — to paint the party as a home to intolerant and ignorant views.

That’s guaranteed to make Harrington’s tough job even tougher.