Categories: Capital Read, Inside the Queensway

Go, West: NDP candidate quits Saanich Gulf Islands race

by kadyomalley on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 1:59pm - 30 Comments

NDP candidate West quits over skinny-dipping brouhaha

NDP candidate Julian West has resigned from the election race after being dogged by controversy over a skinny-dipping incident 12 years ago. [...The hopeful in the Saanich-Gulf Islands riding announced his decision to drop out Tuesday morning, saying he did "not want my candidacy to detract from the campaign or from the issues that should be front and centre in this campaign."

He said he had already informed the party of his decision.
Julian West: NDP Saanich-Gulf Islands candidate resigned from federal election campaign

"I'm going to return to my private life now, and I sincerely hope the campaign will be focused on the issues," he said in a statement. [...]

Full story available here.

Tags: bc is just weird people, gary lunn must be pinching himself, naked went the candidate, NDP, saanich gulf islands

More by kadyomalley

Jack Mitchell

I nude this would happen.
Sean S.

I’m sure they were looking forward to his presence in caucaus as an honourable member…
Dot

Bad news for Gary Lunn.
Riley Hennessey

This has got to be by far the lamest election in history.

If voters didn’t like that the guy swam nude, they could simply decide not to vote for him.

The incident happened YEARS ago and he probably still feels pretty stupid about it. Who hasn’t done something really, really stupid and lived to regret it?
bob ward

Katy
Just checking your site to see the latest Nick #’s.
Want to see the impact the offical release of the liberal plan had on the numbers.

er…sorry…..you post this info almost every day but today the numbers are not out.

Don’t worry i’ll cruz by nanos web site and check it out.

P.S. Wonder why the numbers are not on your site today, since they are there every other day right away…almost like crack according to you.

bob
Dot

“West claims the portrait painted by students on his stomach was that of Dumbo the elephant, his trunk strategically placed.

Students attending the event remember it more as a portrait of Porky Pig.”
Dr. Leo Spaceman

Quit the campaign over skinny dipping? Can we as Canadians not handle a little nude bathing? Grow up Peter Pan… Count Chocula…
http://www.macleans.ca Kady O’Malley

I think you need to refresh your cache, Bob. The Nanos numbers were up before your comment appeared.
WDM

So now new candidate right for the Dippers? First Green MP maybe?
Heather

Maybe he was feeling guilty about potentially helping to re-elect Gary Lunn.

Kady, does this mean that there won’t be an NDP candidate in this riding now? How do you rate Briony Penn’s chances?
Steph C

So we’re left with candidates who have never skinny-dipped or smoked pot. How un-Canadian! Does that mean only the most socially-stunted among us need apply?
anon

Not sure this was just skinny dipping, or else he would have stuck around. The CTV story from BC is a bit more telling.
Dot

Doubtful the NDP votes will go to Lunn

SAANICH–GULF ISLANDS (2006/01/23)

LUNN, Gary (C) 24,416
BURGIS, Jennife (N.D.P.) 17,445
ORR, Sheila (Lib) 17,144
LEWIS, Andrew (G.P) 6,533
O’BRIEN, Patricia (WBP) 183
Dije

bob ward – you seem very grumpy. If the Maclean’s blogs, or Kady in particular, do not provide anything of value to you then pehaps you could find something of better value for your time?

Public griping is fine but you seem to be doing it on every post.
Dije

Thanks anon. That article makes it more clear and makes the incident sound much less innocent.
T. Thwim

Of course, if they split between Libs and Greens, Lunn could very easily come up the middle.
Ben Hicks

Bob Rae should be worried.
bob ward

Dije

Whats a matter, can’t liberals handle any comments that don’t agree with them??

Don’t worry, 4 years go by really really fast

bobo
Not the whole story

It wasn’t just skinnydipping. From CTV BC, who talked to one of the young girls:

But that statement was contradicted by a retreat participant, who said the New Democrat had a partial erection in front of the young girls.

“We were doing face-painting and he decided he wanted to get his legs painted, and some of the girls were painting his legs, and he took off his underwear and he had a partial erection and said ‘why stop there girls?”’ said Leah Jones, during a phone interview with CTV.

Jones, and six other female retreat participants, vowed to write NDP leader Jack Layton to call for West’s resignation.

So no, it’s not just skinnydipping.
Dije

bob – I would say many liberals can handle comments that don’t agree with their point of view. One of the things with being a leftard is that the idea that diversity of thought is a key function to any society. Uniformity in thought would reduce solutions and opportunities presented by problems.

Partisans are partisans and they fog their beliefs through those lenses. They also throw common sense out the window more often than not.

I’ll be voting NDP so I will be as critical of them as I am of the official opposition and the current party in power.

The next few years will go very slowly bob. The Conservatives will form the next government and with the current shinanigans roosting down south, combined with continued Conservative financial mismanagement, they are going to be a painful few years.

I hope the suffering goes quickly, but I know it won’t.
Compos Mentis

bob ward wrote: “Whats a matter, can’t liberals handle any comments that don’t agree with them??”

bob, you were the one taking Kady to task for ignoring latest poll numbers and insinuating she wasn’t posting them because of a perceived bias ( on your part).

If you wish to make a comment on the story, then fine – go ahead.

But when you start throwing accusations at people based on YOUR perceived bias and are called on it, don’t respond by questioning whether a poster can’t handle disagreeable comments!

Pot meet kettle….
Dot

If I was a betting man, I’d place my money on more votes going to the Green Party (notwithstanding the strength of the Liberal candidate).

After reviewing GPC policies, I have for a long time felt that the GPC under May is on the far left with the NDP (not occupying the political turf that the former PC party occupied, as she often likes to claim).

Jeffrey Simpson is also of this opinion, in his review of their platform in Saturday’s G&M:

So where do the Greens stand? Their 119-page policy document, Vision Green, shows where – way, way out on the political left.

It’s a general rule of politics that the further removed from power, the less credible a party’s platform, an observation that can be made about Vision Green. It gets one major policy largely right – the importance of tackling climate change with economic tools by taxing carbon emissions – but then overestimates carbon savings from alternative energies such as wind, solar and biomass, efficiency gains from conservation, public transit and vehicle emission standards.

The Greens, like the NDP, take themselves very seriously indeed, but are fortunate that most Canadians do not. As a result, the Greens can publish their vast wish list without any serious reflection on how to pay for it, even assuming some of the proposals were worth doing or could be done.

Before Ms. May became leader, the Greens were rather conservative. But, under her, the party has flown far to the left: they would, for instance, withdraw from NAFTA, raise taxes on most corporations and anyone earning more than $150,000, replace the GDP measurement with the ill-defined “genuine progress indicator,” reduce the standard work week to 35 hours, eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel industries but introduce massive subsidies for a wide range of other activities.
T. Thwim

Dot: Thanks for that! I’ve had my suspicions that they’d moved left, but to be honest, I couldn’t remember well enough the Harris years, and I didn’t think that much of a move would be likely, so thought that my own memory was playing tricks on me.

It’s good (but sad) to see that it wasn’t. I liked the PC-Greens. I don’t like this ones near as much.
Heather

Just noticed an interesting typo in the G&M/CP version of this story – note the first pronoun in the para below. You’d think – given the story – that the gender of the former candidate would not have been ambiguous (although this version doesn’t have the level of detail as the CTV story previously cited):

“Julian West issued a statement Tuesday morning, in which she apologized on the weekend for an incident 12 years ago in which he removed his clothes and swam naked at a retreat where children were present.”
TobyornotToby

As a some time skinny dipper (maybe not so skinny anymore) and one time denizen of Wreck Beach, I object to what this candidate did being called “skinny dipping.” If, as claimed, he pulled his pants down in front of other people who weren’t themselves nude or prepared for nudity in some way, that’s just indecent exposure. All the worse if they were teens and he was an adult.