How the Conservatives got stuck with Gerry Bance

By now everybody knows the Gerry Bance story, a now-former Conservative candidate in Scarborough - Rouge Park who was caught on film urinating in a coffee cup a couple of years ago when he worked as an appliance repairman. The obvious question is how could such a man end up as a candidate for higher office. As a resident of the Scarborough – Rouge Park riding, let me shed some light on the matter.

I attended the Conservative nomination meeting, which was held this spring, in order to support my favoured candidate, Paul Egli, a retired and distinguished businessman. In the contested nomination flight, Egli sold about three hundred memberships and felt pretty good about himself. In contrast, Bance sold over a thousand memberships and most of them showed up that night to vote for him. Egli was buried. The attendance at nomination meeting was bigger than at any nomination meeting I have ever attended – by an order of magnitude.

Gerry Bance, you see, is that character that should be familiar to anybody who has ever been involved in riding-level politics: the ethnic fixer, somebody who wields mysterious power over the people in his own ethnic community. In a democracy where the guiding principle is one man, one vote, somebody who can mobilize a thousand voters out to a nomination meeting is a powerful man indeed. Gerry Bance is (or was) such a man in the Tamil community.

At this point one can ask what’s wrong with that. In the strict legalistic sense, nothing. Bance followed the rules. His only sin was playing the game better than his opponent. As well, it is often argued that a contested nomination battle - with both sides selling memberships - is good for the health of a riding association. It is also often argued that ethnic outreach is also a good thing. These two assertions are correct, but we should not let this blind us to some questionable tactics that these two goals enable. For instance, how good is it for the health of the riding association to allow one-time members to determine the nomination? By allowing such a practice, the riding association concedes one of its most important decision – the nomination of its candidate - to unknowns whose allegiance to conservative principles is, to say the least, tangential. Disenfranchising your core support hardly boosts morale – or results in judicious decision-making.

For all the Liberals out there who might be reading this, I want to caution you against too much smugness. This sort of politics is relatively new to the Conservative Party. It blossomed with the ethnic outreach Harper has done in the past ten years. In contrast, such tactics have been going on in the Liberal party since time immemorial. A great example was the March 6, 2004 nomination vote in Hamilton East – Stoney Creek. Newly elected Liberal Party leader, Paul Martin was trying to oust Sheila Copps from the party. Both sides resorted to ethnic mobilization tactics. The resulting voter turnout was so huge (2,804 to 2,491) that even our dimwitted political reporters noticed. An alternate headline for this post could have been ‘Liberal tactics come to the Conservatives’.

So, if such tactics are more entrenched in the Liberal party, why does it seem to hurt the Conservatives the most? That is an excellent question. As a partial answer, it is interesting to note that the CBC made this video in 2012. The CBC website noted that the CBC only became aware of the identity of Gerry Bance from a tip sent to them just this Sunday night. Really? Bance was a failed Conservative candidate in 2006 and 2008. He was nominated again in May of this year. So, they only found out about it in the middle of a Federal Election? A cynic might wonder if they knew about it all along and were sitting on it until the most politically opportune moment to influence the vote. If the opposition parties had done this, that’s fair game. That’s how politics is played. But the CBC is a publicly funded broadcaster that has a legally mandated duty to be objective and impartial. They are not a private broadcaster who can slant their news anyway they want.

So, what should the Party do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future? My solution is to raise the Party’s membership fee to $50. At $10, it is entirely too cheap. At $50, you still enable candidates in contested nomination fights to recruit new members and it is still possible for the grass-roots to wrestle boards when the sclerotic old guard needs to go. But by raising the membership fee so that it is no longer insignificant, you also inhibit backroom mechanics from making a complete mockery of the democratic process. 

Comments

[Don Morris]

Instead of raising the Party membership fee,which would make it financially difficult for many Seniors on a small pension, why not simply make it a rule that members have to have been members for at least two years before the election?

Everybody who has ever worked in an EDA knows of the dirty politics played with ethnic communities, but no one does anything about it,as THEY intend to use the same tactics if possible next time around.

Two years paid membership paid yearly before you can vote,or you don't vote.

[Cincinnatus]

Hi Don:

That's another option. The main thing, a $10 membership with only a two-week membership requirement is too low a bar for voting.

[james]

I find it hard to believe the CBC sat on this dirt. You would think they would have used it last election or the one before that. What's different about this cycle that makes it more juicy?

[Cincinnatus]

Hi James:

The difference is they didn't have it the last time Bance ran for office, which was in 2008. The vide was made in 2012. The next time Bance ran again was now. He was nominated in the spring.

[Stan]

HARPER IS A POOR JUDGE OF CHARACTER. HE IS A LIGHTWEIGHT SuRROUNDED BY LIGHTWEIGHTS

[Cincinnatus]

Dear Stan:

I agree that this reflects poorly on the Conservative Party as a whole, but you must acknowledge, Bance was not chosen by Harper. He was chosen at a huge nomination meeting, where over one thousand of his supporters came out to vote for him. Are you saying that Harper should have overridden their votes?

And would you then call him a dictator for overriding the will of the voters? Or worse, a racist (because the vast majority of Bance's voters were Indian)?

[D'Arcy McGee]

Interesting article. Conservatives normally have a solid vetting process, in order to "weed out" undesirable candidates. It would seem in this case, the vetting was not as rigorous, given that he had been a candidate on 2 other occasions.
Furthermore, given that this riding, like Toronto Danforth, was not likely winable, there may have been less scrutiny.
Lastly, interesting to note the strategy he employed, was similar to that used by Patrick Brown to win the P.C. Party leadership

[Cincinnatus]

Good points D'Arcy.

With regard to Scarborough - Rouge Park, if the poll-level results are the same this time around as the last, then the Conservatives win by 52% of the vote. So it is a winnable riding.

The real issue comes from your second point. The reason Patrick Brown employed Bance is that, in our system, men like Bance are very powerful. He is (or was) capable of mobilizing thousands to boring political meetings. Somebody like that is feared and respected by those in charge. Which, I suspect, is why the Party did not try to replace him with somebody more presentable.

[Autoguy]

This is the necessary downside to having true grass roots participation in the nomination process. Ugly but necessary.

[Karl]

Having stumbled across this post and having been the Ontario Campaign Chair for the Liberals in 2004, I can tell you that the Hamilton East-Stony Creek story isn't quite as depicted.

The new riding of Hamilton East drew almost evenly from the two old ridings that had existed pre-redistribution.

Tony Valeri has served as MP for 7 years and was the Government House Leader. Sheila was of course a 20-year MP and an icon.

Sheila, in particular, was a polarizing figure and there were lots of organizers on both sides but in the end, the meeting was about who could pull more of their constituents out.

Valeri pulled very heavily from among Italian-Canadians and Copps pulled very heavily from the Sikh community but the numbers were bigger than that and no community was monolithic in its support. The meeting was held on neutral ground despite requests from both Copps and Valeri to hold it in places that would have favoured one or the other of them.

The Chair ran the meeting evenhandedly but with 5000 people it was hard to marshal. There were some shenanigans on both sides but the outcome was a fair one in that the winning candidate was the one with the best get out the vote operation.

Do I regret not trying to persuade Stan Keys to run where he lived in ADFA, freeing up Hamilton Centre for Sheila Copps? Sure. Stan might have gone for it and it would have been hard for Sheila to turn down Hamilton Centre as it contained almost half of her old constituency. Then again, she turned down the offer of an uncontested nomination in Hamilton Mountain where Beth Phinney had agreed to make way for her.

The problem was that they were both absolutely certain that they would win and hence not inclined to compromise.

And on the core point of your post, I agree that there should be a longer term requirement for membership in order to vote in Party nominations.

[Cincinnatus]

Thank you Karl for your illuminating comments on the Hamilton East - Stoney Creek nomination battle.