Experience, not address, makes MPP

In a world laced up tighter than a baseball, made small by technology and trade, voters only take it on the chin by insisting their candidates for elected office come off as home bodies.

As we’ve seen in the London West byelection, where a wannabe politician lives — or hasn’t, if they’re not a riding lifer — can blow up on a candidate at bat faster than an R.A. Dickey knuckleball. That’s despite the fact Ontario has no riding residency requirement.

Ken Coran, the London West Liberal candidate, already had a huge hill to climb before his Day 1 campaign stumble over where he’s lived became a byelection flashpoint.

The former head of the Ontario public high school teachers’ union, Coran had fought the Liberals’ wage-freezing law for teachers, only to suddenly pop up as rookie Premier Kathleen Wynne’s hand-picked star candidate in London West. That’s a walking, talking flip-flop by any definition.

Worse for Coran, there was no teacher-style preparation time for his surprise candidacy. Within hours of his nomination, Wynne called five byelections for Aug. 1, including in London West. Coran would have to school up on his own time, like everyone else.

Coran was adamant he’s lived in the riding since 1991, but last year told a reporter he’d lived in Toronto for nearly half the past decade. It was that inconsistency, an early credibility gap, that thrust Coran’s residency on the radar — but only after he opened that door himself.

That takes us back to the point: Wannabe politicians feel compelled to tell us they’re grounded in one place, because they think that’s what we want to hear. That’s odd, because the opposite is true in our own lives. Canadians move often. Others may live in one place, but work in another. Even if they stay put, many have no choice but to engage the world daily through technology. And, yet, we want home bodies in politics?

Just once, wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear a candidate say they have the added perspective of having moved around the country, even the world? Maybe they haven’t lived in the same place their whole life, but who cares? Ridings aren’t that different, at least not in suburban southern Ontario, and as long as they’re a quick study on what makes a riding tick, does it matter how long a candidate has hung their hat there?

We’re not talking the local city council here. It’s in civic government, with its uber-local focus, where deep tap roots make sense. But federal and provincial politics, where the issues are far wider, is no place for someone whose pitch is they’re a “lifelong” anything.

It helps to have a tourism minister who’s actually travelled a bit, doesn’t it? Not one, as Ontario famously once did, who’d never flown and couldn’t find his own way to the legislature in Toronto the first time he went.

Most of us don’t want parachute candidates to represent us.

But there’s a world of difference between someone who’s been around the block, but lived in a riding only a short while, and, say, the Ottawa bar waitress who spent the last federal election in Vegas, but won a Quebec seat for the NDP without ever visiting the riding.

You can’t raise a family, run a business or have a career anymore without leaving home, often for good. But check the fine print on candidate pamphlets, and that’s not what you see. Instead, it’s their riding ties — the longer, the better.

On his, Coran says he was a local high school teacher for 25 years and counts himself a 40-year member of “the London community.”

Those are great stats for a ward council seat, but they mean less in the big leagues of provincial politics.