Calgary - There’s a certain amount of naiveté to the suggestion that foot-in-mouth candidates Ron Leech and Allan Hunsperger should have had the good sense to step aside to prevent the air from leaking out of the Wildrose’s victory in Monday’s provincial election.
Jane Morgan, whose roots with the party go back to her running for its Alberta Alliance precursor, may be the first prominent party voice to say that Leech and Hunsperger were such a liability that the party would have fared better without them, says my Herald colleague Jason Markusoff in a blog.
That may be the case, but it’s regrettable that Morgan is the only one who knew the pair were trouble and should have been chastised long before Monday’s vote for their intolerance. Seriously, you can’t count on people with poor judgment to exercise good judgment. How silly to expect they would have had the good sense to put themselves on the sidelines.
“In my mind there was only one option for Hunsperger and Leech; and that was to step down. They left Danielle in the worst possible spot as the leader of a party based on democratic values. They each became a candidate either through a local nomination vote or local nomination committee accepting them as their candidate. Danielle couldn’t override that without trampling on the grassroots aspect of the party. I doubt though even if she had ejected them it would have ended there; likely people would start to call for other overtly Christian candidates to be removed as well,” Markusoff quotes Morgan as saying.
It speaks to a whole bunch of troubles. Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith should have simply and quickly stated that the sort of remarks made by Leech and Hunsperger had no place in the Wildrose party. The fact she didn’t say such a thing left the correct impression that they do. Don’t lay the blame in the mouths of a couple of rednecks; the blame rests with Smith for failing to be a leader when she needed to be.
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