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The Ontario Liberal Party is having a tough time finding a candidate for Sault Ste. Marie.
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OPINION: Alleged social media mistakes can sink a political career before it starts – Sault Star
Someone is always watching and words and actions don’t go unnoticed
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In a week’s span, it has crossed off two potentials on its list – local Indigenous lawyer Naomi Sayers and Espanola teen Aidan Kallioinen.
The party’s vetting process and social media posts of the want-to-be candidates seem to have been the issue in both cases.
Sayers has since chosen to run as an independent candidate for Sault Ste. Marie and we’ll let that process unfold as it will.
It’s the Kallioinen issue that’s a little more interesting.
The Grade 12 student, 18, who is set to graduate from high school just weeks after the election, is barely old enough to vote.
In fact, based on his age, he’s never voted in a provincial election. Yet his political interests, and perhaps savviness, almost saw him as a candidate in the June 2 election. His social media presence may have ended his political career very early.
The teen holds steadfast that he didn’t pen the derogatory and racial social media slurs on a gaming social media platform. Instead, he counters that his identity was falsely associated with the social media posts.
“I have no prior involvement in any of those comments and I can’t control what people are saying,” he said in a telephone interview. “I can tell you they were not my posts. I was about 13 or 14 when I was part of that online gaming forum for Minecraft and those comments were not made by me.”
Hmmm. Perhaps he wasn’t as savvy at 13 as he is now. Perhaps he didn’t take precautions to protect his account. Perhaps he’s telling the truth. We will never know.
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Kallioinen no doubt has a strong interest in politics. He’s appeared as a panelist on Sirius XM’s Canada Talks PolitiKIDS channel. He’s been involved in a high school political group or committee. His social media posts follow or share both federal and provincial political highlights of the day. He’s even written his own stories on thecanadianidea.ca, a youth-led news site, met former Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing MP Brent St. Denis and has toured the Ontario legislature.
While it appears he was grooming himself for a future in politics, that came to an abrupt end after The Toronto Sun published a column that alleges Kallioinen’s name is associated with a number of derogatory and racial social media slurs. Some are found on a gaming social media platform where he allegedly used the name outfieldcheck, while others are on allegedly on Twitter, Instagram and reddit. The posts have since disappeared.
Kallioinen denies scrubbing his own social media profile – or at least most of it.
So, shortly after the column appeared and was shared on social media, Kallioinen spoke to Liberal Party officials and he was quickly dumped as a candidate.
The real lessons to be learned here are about social media and how posts can help or hinder an individual’s goals.
Sayers says she’s also been open and honest about her past – as a sex worker – and her extensive social media presence, some of which is critical of the federal Liberals and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It’s obvious some people don’t like seeing her honest and blatant truth in her posts.
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On the other hand, Kallioinen says he doesn’t have a large social media presence for someone in his demographics, yet that which is present and resulted in his candidacy dismissal, is not his. That’s a tough one to prove one way or the other.
On Friday, it was announced the Liberals fired another candidate in the Chatham-Kent-Leamington riding after the NDP pointed out the candidate used a slur on Facebook. It earlier fired Parry Sound-Muskoka candidate Barry Stanley for his unproven theory on the cause of homosexuality.
The Progressive Conservatives haven’t gone unscathed. Stephen Lecce was forced to apologize after his fraternity ‘slave auction’ fundraising event from more than a decade ago came to light. He has apologized and no further action has been taken – yet.
These incidents just go to show you that someone is always watching and words and actions don’t go unnoticed.
The reality is social media is a part of our daily lives and studies show that the time individuals spend on social media platforms is increasing. In other words, we’re likely to see and hear about even more of similar faux pas in the future and the incidents, photographs, or posts, are never completely erased.
While social media allows people to stay ‘connected’ to others and to events, among other things, posts are there in black and white. It’s like writing a letter or taking a photograph. It’s permanent. It’s there for all to see and any attempts to erase the undesirable later in life may not happen in its entirety.
Social media is continuing to evolve and will continue to become a more integral part of our lives. Similarly, social media users also need to evolve – and in some cases, beware before they press that ‘send’ button, click that image or speak certain words in front of others.
It’s not the social media platforms that should be branded as good or bad. Instead, it’s what individuals post to them that can be helpful or detrimental.
These are lessons that will continue to be learned – or not.
Elaine Della-Mattia is The Sault Star’s political reporter.
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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