Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe says the rapid rise in the use of blogs to express personal opinions is leading to sloppy, unrefined ideas which eventually come back to burn would-be politicians in election campaigns.

Tim Duboyce

Duceppe made the remark in reaction to the latest candidate
(Andrew McKeever, who is on the ballot for the NDP in the Ontario riding of Durham) to announce they will end their campaign following criticism over past remarks made online.

Duceppe says parties are susceptible these days to mistakenly selecting candidates who "weren't careful, that's the least we can say."

It is especially risky, Duceppe believes, when candidates are nominated at the last minute, with little in the way of background checks.

Duceppe says no one has figured out how to manage the barrage of opinions streaming over the Internet. He says some candidates who've been forced to drop out over blogged opinions, may not have been burned in earlier, pre-blog elections.

"Some of them could have written a book in the past. That was a way of doing it. But it's less work than writing a book, of course. So, we see a lot of those opinions coming in, and sometimes they are impressions instead of analysis," Duceppe said.

— Tim Duboyce