{"id":20120,"date":"2018-03-14T15:33:02","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T19:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=20120"},"modified":"2018-03-14T15:33:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T19:33:02","slug":"politics-as-usual-shambolic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/politics-as-usual-shambolic\/","title":{"rendered":"POLITICS AS USUAL: Shambolic"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Alison Collins-Mrakas<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shambolic. That\u2019s my new favourite word. It is a lovely made up word that is exquisitely appropriate for describing situations that move from farce to shambles and back again. So, I will use this new term to describe what transpired at this past weekend\u2019s PC leadership contest.
\nIt was \u2013 in a word \u2013 shambolic.
\nWhere to begin? The leadership race was an embarrassing mess from start to ignominious end. Its start should have been a clue about how it would end. The now former leader Patrick Brown\u2019s unseemly departure, then re-entry, then departure was an embarrassing sideshow that hogged all the media oxygen for weeks. The story was about him and not the \u201crace\u201d. The other contenders had to duke it out on the margins to get some air-time. Imagine that \u2013 the bombastic Ford, reduced to carping from the sidelines for literally weeks.
\nThen there was the fiasco with the actual voting process. Online voting has been around for a decade now. It\u2019s been used in a variety of jurisdictions and contexts. It is not complicated. And yet\u2026This voting process was unnecessarily complicated. To start there was the fact that one needed a verification code to access step one of the voting process. Yet, thousands and thousands of registered party members did not get this magical verification code in the mail. And they needed it to vote. (It was all a bit Willy-Wonka-esque with folks waiting for their golden ticket\u2026but I digress). So they could not proceed to step two \u2013 uploading personal information in order to get yet another PIN that would allow you to vote.
\nI understand that there were considerable concerns about the veracity of membership numbers, so that may have played a part in the verification code debacle, but based on personal anecdotes, there were many longtime members who didn\u2019t get this magical code, so I\u2019m not sure why the mail of out the verification codes went so poorly.
\nIf media reports are to be believed, anywhere from 20 \u2013 30 percent of registered party members did not get a chance to vote. That is astonishing. This isn\u2019t a case of folks not showing up to vote, this is a case of folks not being able to vote at all.
\nThe spin from the party notwithstanding, it doesn\u2019t matter that the numbers that did manage to vote were the largest in years, it matters that a sizeable portion of your members did not get to have their voices heard as to who should be their leader.And that is a big problem no matter how you spin it.
\nAnd then there was the big reveal itself.
\nThe Leader was supposed to be announced at 3pm Saturday to a convention hall full of excited members. Well, the hour came and went and came and went and came and went. The folks on CP24 were running out of things to say to fill the dead air. They took to filming the \u201cmost famous hallway in Markham\u201d for hours on end in the hopes that something would happen.
\nAnd then something did happen. The party brass comes out to announce\u2026that everyone should go home because they need the room for a body building contest. I am not making this up. The room erupted in boos and angry gesticulations\u2026good golly, hardly the way to demonstrate leadership and command.
\n As I said\u2026Shambolic<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alison Collins-Mrakas Shambolic. That\u2019s my new favourite word. It is a lovely made up word that is exquisitely appropriate for describing situations that move from farce to shambles and back again. So, I will use this new term to describe what transpired at this past weekend\u2019s PC leadership contest. It was \u2013 in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5ew","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-20 14:47:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}