TORONTO – On November 3, 2020, Republican David Andahl won the election for a seat in the North Dakota Legislature. Voters gave him 36 percent of the vote, enough for the candidate to win the election. And this despite the fact that Andahl had died of Covid a month earlier, on October 5. The electorate, in order not to vote for the other candidates, preferred to elect the one who had already passed to a better life. In the last federal election in the Spadina-Fort York district we witnessed something similar.
A “politically dead” candidate like Kevin Vuong received 18,991 votes (38.9%), beating Norm Di Pasquale of the NDP (16,833 preferences, or 34.5%) and three other candidates. Vuong a few days before the appointment at the polls had been disowned by the Liberal Party for the accusations of alleged sexual harassment carried out on a woman in 2019. After the vote, we saw pressure from numerous political personalities for Vuong to resign as a member of parliament. The new parliamentarian, for his part, reiterated his intention to remain in office. Provincial Liberal leader Steven Del Duca, former MP Adam Vaughan and Di Pasquale himself – the one who lost to the “dead” – have asked Vuong to take a step back, to allow Prime Minister in pectore Justin Trudeau to call a by-election as soon as possible.
There are several considerations to be made. The first is quite obvious: any form of harassment or violence against women is unacceptable. The second, equally important, is that we live in a state governed by the rule of law, where the principle of the presumption of innocence should be sacred: no one is guilty of a crime until he is convicted. Now, Vuong has not only not been convicted, but he has not even been tried: the charges brought against him in 2019 have been withdrawn by his own accuser.
So what should Vuong be guilty of? And if on the one hand it is entirely legitimate for political personalities to express themselves on the matter, on the other hand it leaves the political opportunism of Di Pasquale stunned, who in the polls before the vote was below 28 percentage points and who, thanks to the media cancan, managed to recover much of the disadvantage at the polls. The sense of contempt shown by the NDP candidate towards the voters of the district in question is also astonishing: his thesis – the voters did not know, for this reason they voted for him – starts from the assumption that the electorate does not inform itself before going to the polls and that the vote is simply a preference for a certain political shirt.
We must not forget that the Ndp candidate beaten by the “dead” is also a trustee of the Toronto Catholic District School Board, an organization committed to ensuring safety in Catholic schools during this pandemic, with questionable results, to put it mildly. And perhaps for this very reason the voters decided to turn their backs on him, and as in North Dakota, they preferred to elect the candidate passed – always “politically” – to better life.