Maybe They Should All Resign

Today the Liberals are calling for the resignation of another NDP candidate. The candidate's crime was calling someone a bad name on Facebook.

On Thursday the NDP said a conservative candidate should resign for connecting immigrants with crime.

On Wednesday the Liberals dumped one of their candidates for some seriously nutty comments about the September 11 attacks on the US.

As of now there have been 8 candidates that have quit or been fired since the campaign begun. Some of the incidents were extreme, but many of the incidents are for old quotes from the distant past. Two of the dismissed candidates made comments nearly 20 years ago about conflicts with natives in Quebec. I'm almost too young to remember the Oka standoff with natives, but I know the military was involved and I can imagine people would have made some heated comments that they would like to take back later. The comments were surely wrong, and the candidates should never have said them, I'm sure now they wish they didn't.

But here's the thing, people say stupid things. Some people say a lot of stupid things. Politicians get to be quoted when they stupid things, and today with blogs like this one we all have the power to create a permanent record of the stupid things we may say. Saying something stupid should not disqualify you from public office - If it did it would only be a short matter of time until almost every politician was booted from office. The only ones left would be some hangers-on that haven't ever said or done anything significant, and I don't think these are the people we want to run our country.

I say unless there has been an actual crime committed, let them run. Voters are more than capable of deciding if they want someone who has controversial opinions to represent them.