PARTIES DUMB AND DUMBER

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.

So far, however, their collective bumbling doesn't seem to be having
an impact on the people they're trying to reach.

It's difficult 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 ever 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.

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?

It's unclear whether these embarrassments will cost the NDP critical
votes, although I doubt they impress swing voters sitting on the
fence, wondering whether to vote Liberal or NDP to keep Stephen
Harper's Conservatives from forming a majority.

The NDP has long had trouble trying to place itself on the same level
as the Conservatives or the Liberals, and amateurish embarrassments
like these ones make the party seem more like the Green Party in terms
of organization.

But let's not let the other parties off easy. 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 Shavluk.

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.

The Conservative gaffes have been greater in number. They 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 PM 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.

For now, though, the polls suggest the majority of voters still aren't
paying much attention to this campaign and 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.

- - Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global BC. His column
appears Fridays.