GAFFES ABOUND IN CAMPAIGNS

If nothing else, the slumbering federal election campaign has proven
that none of the parties has a monopoly on incompetent, insensitive
or just plain dumb behaviour.

It's hard to rank the parties in terms of which has made the worst
mistakes, but the NDP's stunning loss of two candidates in the same
number of days over the same issue - marijuana use - has to be placed
near the top.

Have the NDP strategists even heard of Google? Were they unable to do
any background checks on the two candidates - Dana Larsen in West
Vancouver-Sunshine Coast and Kirk Tousaw in Vancouver-Quadra - that
were sufficient enough to reveal the parts of their past that have
now come back to haunt them?

Larsen's prior involvement in a company selling seeds for illegal
plants and Tousaw's appearance in online videos showing him smoking
marijuana and advocating its use sealed their doom.

It seems the NDP brass was well aware of both candidates' positions
on the issue of marijuana use, yet didn't seem to realize the
potential negative fallout of their history (perhaps it was party
leader Jack Layton's own appearance on PotTv that clouded their thinking).

One mistake is perhaps understandable, but two of this magnitude?
Come on - the B.C. NDP campaign is responsible for running a measly
36 candidates, which is less than half the number that will run in
the provincial campaign. The party can't keep a handle on 36 people?

But let's not let the other parties off easy either. The Greens have
also lost a candidate in B.C. - John Shavluk in Newton-North Delta -
who was forced to resign on the eve of the election campaign for
making anti-Semitic remarks in an online forum in 2006.

Again, this was an example of past behaviour catching up with a
candidate and again raises the question of why the Greens didn't do a
better background check on him.

The Liberals have also lost a candidate - Stephane Bedard in Quebec
City - who mused aloud how the army should have used deadly force in
the Oka standoff with the Mohawks in Quebec years ago. Out he went -
but again, his original comments were made years ago. Is the Google
search function just not working for political parties these days?

The Conservative gaffes have been greater in number. They too have
lost a candidate in Ontario, again for making stupid comments on his
personal blog.

The party's communications director was suspended after making a
disparaging comment about a fallen Canadian soldier's father who was
critical of Harper's plan to pull out of Afghanistan by 2011. The
party had to pull an ad (the notorious "pooping Puffin") from its
website that was deemed distasteful.

The party's agriculture minister Gerry Ritz has been under fire for
making jokes about the sliced meat scandal, and about how he hoped
the Liberals' agriculture critic was one of the victims of the
listeriosis outbreak in Prince Edward Island.

For now, though, the polls suggest the majority of voters still
aren't paying much attention to this campaign and therefore all those
gaffes may be getting lots of coverage from the media but are not
resonating with people - yet.

But woe to any party that keeps making mistakes when the people
they're trying to woo for support do wake up and start noticing
things. That's when lost candidates and moronic statements can really hurt.