New words to live by: 'Everything you've done in your life is public' (UPDATED)

While Canadians are (I hope) aware that there's a federal election campaign on, those of you outside of Canada may not be aware of that fact.

And one of the things that has characterized this campaign -- a fight between the Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, who was Prime Minister of a minority government for the last 958 days, and four main opposition parties -- has been candidate resignations and embarrassments.

Cases in point:

• A Conservative candidate whose cached blog entries included: arguments for debate on the right to carry a concealed weapon, an end to abortion and official multiculturalism, an elected Senate, and closing the CBC because of its "far left-wing bias." He said gay advocates in the Toronto Centre riding, which includes the city's gay village, tolerate the promotion of "promiscuity, drug usage and prostitution." (His site's gone down, so I won't link.)
• A BC Liberal candidate who once dressed -- so to speak -- as Lady Godiva at an anti-logging protest (right)
  
• A Liberal candidate who had argued in 1990 that the Canadian Forces should have been used to end a native occupation, even at the cost of 150 native lives, and upheld those views now;
• A Conservative cabinet minister who, on a conference call discussing a food safety crisis that has killed dozens of Canadians, talked about "death of a thousand cuts. I mean a thousand cold-cuts..."
  
• A BC NDP candidate who apparently went skinny-dipping in front of a group of teenagers in the past, and, it is alleged, engaged in some inappropriate activity;
• The suspension of a Conservative communications advisor after he accused the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan of criticising the government's Afghanistan policy because he was a Liber
  
• A Conservative candidate who resigned after it was revealed she had been convicted of uttering death threats and of breaching an undertaking, and charged with several other offences, and was being investigated by the charity which employed her;
  
• A Green Party candidate who made anti-Semitic remarks in an online forum;
  
• A NDP candidate who was a former campaign director for the Marijuana Party who resigned after "events of the previous few days," which probably referred to revelations about:
  
• ...Another New Democratic Party candidate who appeared on videos (including the one below) smoking pot, taking LSD, and driving while smoking pot...
  
  

And even this morning, a new blog scandal has been unearthed, with a Conservative candidate named Ryan Warawa's cached postings including

“It appears that Keith Martin will be at home with other Liberal political whores in Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca.”

“I wonder how many Liberal memberships [disgraced provincial Liberal staffer David] Basi offered to buy Martin with the Basi Boys’ drug money.”

“[fellow Conservative and Canada's Defence Minister Peter] MacKay fails miserably in my integrity and honesty litmus test, and I’ve yet to hear any true conservative vision to come out of MacKay’s mouth.”

A story in the Toronto Star this morning uses a quote from a New Democratic Party official as its headline: 'Everything you've done in your life is public'.

And he's right. I've been saying for a long time that many aspiring politicians who are growing up in the age of Google and Facebook are going to see their aspirations burn up or fall apart when their online personas come back to haunt them.

We all have weaknesses. We all have failings. But the more public we choose to be, and the more ignorant you are of the permanence of what you do and say publicly, the more those failings can and will be exposed in a painful and public way. And what seems to be an increasingly toxic political culture both here and in the US means that the intensity of the exposure is ratcheted up.

UPDATE: Kady O'Malley reports that the skinny-dipping candidate has dropped out of the election.

Ciao,
Bob.