Time for a new candidate

Gaffe-prone Calgary MPRob Anders is at it again, this time suggesting NDP Leader Tom Mulcair hastened the death of his predecessor, Jack Layton.

“Mr. Mulcair was making it quite obvious that if Jack wasn’t well enough to fight the campaign and fight the election, that he should step aside,” Anders said in an interview published by the website iPolitics. “Because of that, Mr. Layton put his life at risk to go into the national election, and fight it, and did obviously an amazing job considering his state of health, and that he did that partly because of the arm-twisting behind the scenes by Mulcair and then subsequently died.”

Anders’ cynical observation has been justifiably con- demned by, well, pretty much everyone. What’s unfortunate is that Anders keeps getting noticed for all the wrong reasons: voting against making Nelson Mandela an honorary Canadian citizen, appearing to fall asleep in the Commons and at a Veterans Affairs committee meeting, and comparing the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the 1936 Games held in Berlin when Germany was under Nazi rule.

Despite his penchant for blunders, miraculously, Anders keeps getting the Tory nomination in the Calgary-West riding and has been sent to Ottawa six times. Here’s hoping the Conservative constituency association welcomes a strong challenger to Anders’ legacy of stinkers and puts a new name on the ballot in 2015.