There are mixed emotions when people who have said nasty things about you paint themselves into a very difficult corner. Babel’s Whigs have got themselves in trouble. It is trouble entirely of their creation but trouble none the less.
As was explained in a recent posting in Babel-on-the-Bay, the people running the Ontario Liberal Party Association in Babel remind us more of historical Whigs than modern Liberals. These people seem to want to run the Babel organization as some sort of pocket borough. Pocket boroughs were lampooned by W.S. Gilbert and set to the music of Arthur Sullivan in their 19th Century operettas. In a pocket borough, the decisions on who would be the local member were made by the gentry in the borough and the peasants supported the decision.
It is all a matter of control. To maintain such control today, all you have to do is keep the party organization to a small group, make all the decisions behind closed doors and tell nobody anything, unless you cannot help it.
When the incumbent Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) announced in January that she was not running for re-election this October, it surprised almost nobody who follows things political in Babel. In a normal electoral district organization that should have kicked off an open effort by a committee of the association executive seeking qualified candidates for the office.
It should not be necessary but sometimes this search committee needs to be reminded that it is not their job to choose the candidate. Their job is to encourage as many qualified candidates as possible to seek the nomination. It is always desired that there be a very large, enthusiastic, exciting and contested event to give a good kick-off for the newly chosen candidate for the party.
But Whigs do not work that way. They chose to announce that they had found a candidate. They then closed ranks around the candidate and the rank and file of the party heard nothing more. In a period when you would expect the candidate(s) to be making sure they meet the existing members and they might even sign up some new members, nothing happened.
All thoughts of a nomination meeting were put on hold when a federal election was called. Federal Liberal party supporters are usually excellent prospects for support of Provincial Liberal hopefuls and the federal people were a bit surprised when they did not see the prospective provincial candidate during the federal campaign. (In fact, the Whigs of Babel never did show up to help their federal cousins but we will save that story for another time.)
It was not until more than a month after the federal election that it was announced that the prospective candidate had been ill and would not be able to contest a nomination meeting. Under normal circumstances, you would extend your sympathy to the prospective candidate—at least send a get-well card—and other prospects would have slightly less competition. Life would go on.
But not in Babel. The Whigs had not done their job. There were no other prospects. Despite attempts in the media to blame someone other than themselves, the Whigs had to admit the problem. They now have to openly look for prospective candidates. They have lost control.
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