OTTAWA – With less than a month to go until the federal election, candidates for the Conservative Party of Canada have been shocked and dismayed to learn that the things they post and share on public-facing social media platforms are indeed visible to the public.
“I assume X is basically a diary, and that’s why it’s called X now, because everything gets exed away,” said one Conservative candidate who would only go on the record if they could be quoted anonymously, before sharing everything they said here on their public X account.
“If people could actually read all of the crazy shit I post and share, oh my god, my career would be over,” said the sitting MP.
Two candidates were dropped by the Conservatives this week for posts they made or shared on social media, another candidate was dropped for comments made on a podcast, and a fourth candidate was dropped for unknown reasons. Since they were running as a Conservative, it’s possible the party assumed there was something problematic going on and it was better to just dump them before some bizarre remark they made supporting public hangings or violent authoritarian purges came to light.
“With the advent of social media, it’s been hard for the Conservatives to find candidates who haven’t said anything horrifying online,” said Tracy Alberni, the head of the political sciences faculty at McMaster University. “We call it their Cyber-Batshit Score (C-BS), and almost no Conservative politician born after 1970 has a C-BS of zero.”
“In contrast, the Liberals have only had to drop two candidates this week. While some Liberals do share the Conservative glee at the thought of violence happening to their political opponents, Liberal politicians as a whole don’t tend to believe in and post the same insane online conspiracy theories that trip up so many Conservatives. Probably because Liberal politicians don’t tend to believe in anything at all.”
At press time, the Conservatives were demanding that the federal election be moved up because if it goes on for four more weeks, they might not have any candidates left.
