It’s inevitable that the election of Ruth Ellen Brosseau in absentia would be a cause for amusement, but Lorne Gunter makes a good case that we should cut her a bit of slack:
It is common practice across the country to dig up candidates wherever they can be found and plead with them to let their names stand in ridings where a party has no chance of winning. (Or almost no chance. Ms. Brosseau’s case proves there is never NO chance of winning.)
In a past life, when I used to be a devoted Liberal party worker in Alberta, during the height of the National Energy Program, we used to use this tactic all the time: Get some campus Liberal club member to let him- or herself be nominated in a rural riding where the Tory candidate was going to capture 80% of the vote anyway, just so the party could claim it had run a candidate in all X number of ridings in the country.
On this count, I’m willing to grant Ms. Brosseau a pass, as this is what every small party faces every election: the need to get as many names on to the ballot as possible. It’s tough enough for minor parties to get any press coverage, but it’s much harder if you are only running a corporal’s guard of candidates in the election.
That being said, however, even in the days when we only ran paper candidates (no signs, no brochures, no active campaigning), the candidate was at least in the riding during the election. She should have either cancelled her trip, postponed it, or declined the nomination if she couldn’t do either.
One NDP supporter in Ms. Brosseau’s new riding asked the other day whether he and his fellow voters where victims of some sort of scam. No, sir, not victims — participants.
Who votes for someone who was never seen in the riding during the election, someone who doesn’t live anywhere near the riding, doesn’t articulate any policies and doesn’t even speak French all that well, but who is seeking to represent a constituency in which over 90% of the residents list their at-home language as French?
It’s clear the voters of Berthier-Maskinongé were so eager to vote NDP — as were so many Quebec voters — that they didn’t care who the local candidate was, which is appropriate in this case, because the local candidate didn’t care either. Ms. Brosseau was doing a favour for a friend at NDP headquarters in Ottawa, now she’s going to have to uproot her life for the next four years and go be the MP for a riding where the voters know no more about her than she knows about them.
I wrote about the allegations of fraud in the nomination papers here.
