In the internet age, all political candidates have moved into glass houses
By refusing this week to jettison Jaime Battiste, the Liberal candidate in Sydney-Victoria, N.S., Justin Trudeau almost looked like he was finally throwing in the towel on the feminist, progressive persona he deployed to such effect leading up to 2015.
After electoral reform, after SNC-Lavalin, after “thank you for your donation” (his immortal quip to First Nations protesters demanding safe drinking water), after blackface, who’s going to buy it? And after all that, who the heck is he at this point to call out one of his candidates for some social media misconduct?
“We recognize that Jaime Battiste … took responsibility for his actions and has apologized,” Trudeau told reporters on Sunday.
This boilerplate belies the genuinely eye-watering posts the Toronto Sun unearthed, however. In one Battiste bemoaned his failure to attract a woman who would do his “cleaning, folding (and) cooking”; in another he mused that he could “accidentally sexually assault a cougar… twice.” “Why do I assume every skinny Aboriginal girl is on crystal meth or pills?” he asked aloud. (Battiste is Mi’kmaq.)
These weren’t youthful ejaculations. Battiste was in his 30s when he made these “crude jokes,” as he described them, which he thought were “funny at the time.” The time was 2012 and 2013. He had a law degree from Dalhousie University. Never mind the optics of keeping someone like him on your slate; are you really sure you want someone capable of such massive errors in judgment in your caucus? They’ll cross that bridge if necessary, presumably. In the meantime, what matters is safeguarding a Cape Breton seat that’s been Liberal for 20 years. It’s a bad, potentially campaign-altering look.
“The first week of the Liberal campaign just died with shame,” former Stephen Harper spokesman Andrew MacDougall tweeted on Sunday, at the news Battiste was staying on the ballot.
He was referring to the daily release of dirt against Conservative candidates who would be in the day’s news, which (with the media’s acquiescence) allowed them to control the day-to-day agenda right out of the gate. One day it was Rachel Wilson (YorkCentre) on abortion, the next Ghada Melek (Mississauaga-Streetsville) over some allegedly Islamophobic social media posts, the next Justina McCaffrey (Kelowna) over her friendship with Faith Goldy. Such moral rectitude would look totally ridiculous now, surely, even by the Liberals’ lofty standards of tolerating looking ridiculous.
When there were a few people entering politics who had searchable records of their entire lives available to opposition research departments, it was safe to lob grenades as the parties came across them. But among the generation coming into its prime in Canadian politics right now, there are many more than a few such people. At some point, surely, the parties are going to approach some kind of mutually assured destruction scenario.
As a class of Canadians, you might hope future politicians would develop some sense of discretion at a relatively early age. But you would also reasonably expect them to be more likely than average to run their mouths on platforms like Twitter. Young partisans are not known for introspection. Hell, even some of the most experienced politicians in this country are capable of astonishing blunders, jaw-dropping credulousness and downright cruelty when you put them in front of a keyboard. Imagine what their younger selves would have been like.
It’s not that we should offer some kind of blanket amnesty for things would-be MPs did and said more than X years ago or before the age of Y (certainly not if Y is greater than, say, 18). It’s good that people running for public office have to own their records and explain their missteps and apologize to those they have harmed. But the endless frenzy over who walks the plank and who doesn’t is an ugly byproduct of that healthy instinct. Even deeply flawed people can do a lot of good. If they are willing and able to explain their mistakes to voters’ satisfaction, they should not be disqualified for having unwisely lived their lives as an open book.