Social media gaffes claim another candidate in Canadian election

By Allison Lampert
MONTREAL, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Social media claimed another
victim on Wednesday in Canada's federal election campaign as the
centrist Liberal Party dumped a candidate and denounced online
remarks he made that suggested the country's national police
force was the Canadian Gestapo.
Alberta candidate Chris Austin, who was removed for having
views that were "irreconcilable" with the party's values, is the
latest would-be politician who has had a career derailed by the
democratization of the vetting process via the Internet.
"Now we're vetting in public," said Fenwick McKelvey, a
communications professor at Montreal's Concordia University who
has been studying Internet use and political campaigns in Canada
since 2006.
"Members of the public who are politically active can
investigate a candidate's entire history," he noted.
The Liberal Party's decision to remove Austin after his
comments were circulated on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) comes a day after the rival
Conservative Party dumped a Newfoundland candidate for making
sexually explicit and racist comments on social media.

Dale was the seventh Conservative candidate to be dropped by
the party for various gaffes, according to punditsguide.ca, an
online database of federal election statistics. With Austin, the
Liberal party has dropped five candidates, with the NDP losing
another two, the site said in a tweet.
"In the past we went through the garbage in our driveways.
Now we're going through the garbage online," said Mitch Joel,
president of Mirum, a global digital marketing agency.
But McKelvey said the explosion of social media use in
modern elections has also raised concerns over whether certain
candidates are being targeted by political rivals under the
anonymity of the Internet, or are being unfairly attacked for
remarks made in their youth.
He pointed to one blogger who targets the Conservatives by
digging up their candidates' online history.
In Canada's mostly French-language province of Quebec, an
18-year-old candidate for the separatist Bloc Quebecois was
ridiculed in August for online remarks about wanting her "cell,
a penis and lots of chips" in the event of a nuclear disaster.
The Bloc decided not to remove the candidate, VirJiny
Provost, in part to show other young adults that an embarrassing
online remark from the past should not derail a political
career, party spokesman Dominic Vallieres said.
"What she said was something that was awkward maybe, but it
wasn't racist or misogynist," Vallieres said. "This is a new
generation of young people who have no filter on social media."