In House Panel: dysfunction from within?

This week, our In House panelists Rosemary Barton, host of CBC News Network's Power & Politics, and Andrew Coyne, columnist for Post Media and the National Post, discuss derailed campaigns, social media gaffes and the upcoming debate on the economy.

Is there dysfunction inside the Conservative campaign?

AC: Usually the best read is your own body language, and clearly the Tories are feeling the heat, feeling discomfort about where their campaign is going. Whether the campaign itself is the problem is sometimes overstated, though. People place a great deal of faith in, 'Oh, if only we had better ads or a clever strategy', and I don't think those things are substitutes for 'what is the substance of what you're offering?'

RB: It's never good news when there's information coming from within your own team. It's the kind of thing that can knock people off their game, and it's symptomatic of a bigger problem — maybe they went into this thinking there was one message they wanted to deliver to Canadians, and either the message isn't resonating, or the message isn't clear enough, or the message needs to change.

Do parties need to better vet their candidates' social media histories?

AC: I don't agree with the proposition that they do need to vet the candidates as closely as everyone's suggesting. People are now getting tossed out for minor slips, silly goofs, or for just having different opinions. I think the root cause of this is the subsuming of the candidate and the MP in the leader, and in the leader's office and the leader's image. 

The argument is, 'we can't allow this person to taint the leader's image', that somehow the leader is personally responsible for every stray opinion that every candidate has. They're not the personal chattel of the leader. That's crazy, and it's anti-democratic and anti-parliamentarian.

RB: I disagree. I think you have to be accountable for your own words and actions. When you decide to put your name out there, you have to take responsibility for things you said in the past, and how they match with what you're saying now. Has it gone a little overboard? Maybe. I think the Conservatives dealt the best with this situation. They dumped [the candidates] right away. It took Justin Trudeau all day to decide he was going to get rid of Joy Davies. I think you're better to be decisive rather than waffling on whether you want to keep the person.

The economic debate on Sept. 17 — who's got the most at stake?

RB: There's an awful lot of scrutiny on Tom Mulcair. I think there are a lot of difficult questions for Mr. Mulcair on how on earth he's going to have this balanced budget with all these big promises. I think maybe he's put himself in a bit of a corner. 

AC: Justin Trudeau — I think people still have a lot of concerns about how firm a grasp he has on the economy. And for the longest time, the economy was viewed as Stephen Harper's strong suit and that's not clear anymore. It's a very well-timed debate on a very important topic.