ALW's Thoughts on Ousters

Aaron Lee Wudrick has some good thoughts on the ousters...

Warner - "No candidate in a byelection should be permitted to run around promoting policies that the CPC had no intention of including in a general election platform." Hear hear! If your ideas don't line up with the platform, how on earth can you run under the banner?

Barr - "Apparently he hadn’t been the most active candidate in the pre-writ period and had a number of his campaign team quit out of frustration." Amm, if members of the team are tossing in the towel right before a possible election, wouldn't that raise the alarm? (besides... the scuttlebutt I hear out of Ottawa is that a bunch of candidates have ramped up their campaigning as a result of Barr's ouster... interesting...)

UPDATE: How's that for timing? Right after I posted this, I got this e-mail from an inside source... (and no, I'm NOT the inside source, despite what some anonymous commenters may think)

"We have all heard the news about Brent being removed as the CPC Guelph candidate. We have seen, read and heard in the news one and only one viewpoint of why it happened.

Obviously there is a great deal of confidential and Private information that I can not disclose, but what I can say is that the decision to remove Brent was preceded by several months of intense effort to have our candidate fulfill his obligations to the Party and the EDA.

Hard decisions such as removal of a candidate are not knee jerk reactions, they only occur after all avenues at resolving the situation have been exhausted. This was in no way a heavy handed blind decision by Ottawa."

That would seem to confirm some of Aaron's thoughts, don't you think?

UPDATE II: More interesting stuff in today's National Post...

Grassroots complaints cited for Conservative candidates' rejections
Chris Wattie, National Post
Published: Friday, November 02, 2007

The Conservative party rejected two candidates in Ontario ridings as a result of complaints from the party's grassroots, not interference from the top, the head of the party's national council said yesterday.

Don Plett, the president of the 18-member council, said Mark Warner, the former Tory candidate in Toronto Centre, and Brent Barr, who was to have run for the party in Guelph, were disqualified this week after the party held hearings into complaints from their riding associations, local party members and concerns raised by the Conservatives' national campaign office.

He would not provide details of the complaints, citing privacy agreements, but said there were separate complaints about Mr. Warner and Mr. Barr's candidacy. "There were issues that were raised by their riding associations and by our political operations [national campaign organizers]," he said.

"There were issues with both candidates -- that's all I can say about that."