Does residency matter in deciding who can best represent a constituency?
Conservative MP John Weston continues to accuse Dan Veniez, Liberal Party candidate, of being a parachute candidate because he doesn’t live in the West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country riding.
Weston raised the point in a recent interview with the Peak. “You need to have spent time in the emergency rooms; you need to have got wet on the sidelines watching the soccer games; you need to have eaten in the restaurants, walked in the streets, been in the parades, cried with the people, laughed with the people; you need to have got to know the teachers in the schools; you need to have lived and breathed in a place to represent it well,” Weston said.
Weston’s criticisms prompted Veniez to write an open letter to him, asking why he continues to mislead people. Veniez wrote in the letter that Weston has been raising the issue at private gatherings in West Vancouver and other places in the riding.
“Stop the infantile attempts at character assassination,” Veniez wrote. “Stop the cheap-shot artistry. And let’s have a real discussion on the issues that people care about. Because there is nothing to gain by your insulting the intelligence of the people of our riding. They deserve your respect.”
While Veniez lives in Vancouver with his family, he has had a second home in Davis Bay on the lower Sunshine Coast for 18 months and plans to vote there.
Patrick Smith, a professor of political science at Simon Fraser University, said it’s not surprising that someone looking for an advantage would raise the issue. “But it seems to me that there’s a larger issue, which is connectedness with the constituency, rather than forms of residency,” he said. “It’s not surprising that it gets raised, but it’s way down on the list of things for most people, providing that any candidate can explain and demonstrate other forms of local connectedness.”
Mobile candidates are a reasonable reflection of the electorate, Smith also said.
“Increasingly, we’re a pretty mobile population. In Canadian cities between elections, about half the population moves. If half the constituents are moving, which is the case in our large cities, it’s not surprising that you’re going to have people who can be accused of being parachutists because they’ve lived in other places.”
A candidate would be much more vulnerable to an accusation of being a parachute candidate if he or she had no associations in the riding, if they had been picked by a party leader as a star candidate and plunked down, Smith said. “That’s where you tend to get controversies and those controversies have as much to do with the local party as they do with the whole constituency.”
On the mobility side, the game is changing, Smith said. “The key is to be able to demonstrate a commitment to the constituency, some knowledge of the constituency and some engagement in the constituency.”
The Liberal Party riding association acclaimed Veniez as the candidate in September 2009.
