“Life’s not knights on horseback ... It’s a fight for a knife in the mud," said Logan Roy, the fictional billionaire, media tycoon and political manipulator, on the most recent season of HBO's Succession.

Election campaigns can be reminiscent of Roy's view on life, and Ontario's has officially become a scramble in the dirt.

A day into the election, the Toronto Sun highlighted comments the NDP candidate in Thunder Bay—Superior North, Lise Vaugeois, made on a podcast in 2019 questioning the value of the national anthem — which the NDP felt weren't presented fairly.

The Liberals dumped three candidates in as many days over ugly or questionable past statements and looked into dumping a fourth.

The PCs and Leader Doug Ford have been forced to explain and defend candidate and education minister Stephen Lecce's participation in a "slave auction," while he was in university.

Ford has also been compelled to promise changes to a cash-on-the-side loophole allowing seven of his incumbents to receive money from their riding associations on top of their MPP salaries, which the NDP pushed into the spotlight.

Now the Liberals are going on the offensive. On Friday the party launched a new website and video meant to cast Ford's PCs as bigoted.

The "Meet Doug Ford's Conservatives" website highlights past comments by Sam Oosterhoff and Parm Gill, PC incumbents seeking re-election in their ridings of Niagara West and Milton. In the video on the site, eerie music plays in the background as videos of Oosterhoff's and Gill's comments about personally opposing abortion and gay marriage are shown.

"We have survived 50 years of abortion in Canada, and we pledge to make abortion unthinkable in our lifetime," Oosterhoff once said at a 2019 anti-abortion rally on Queen's Park's grounds.

"I'm sure some of you probably remember back in the day when same-sex marriage was a very hot issue ... that's why I first ran for the Conservative Party of Canada because I did not agree with that policy," Gill said in 2015.

In the previous provincial parliament, Oosterhoff was Lecce's parliamentary secretary, and Gill was citizenship and multiculturalism minister.

"These are the Ford Conservatives," the Liberals' video emphasizes. Party spokespeople wouldn't say whether the video would be run more widely as an advertisement, as they don't normally disclose that information.

Targeting other parties' candidates isn't a new strategy, by any means.

It was a big part of the PCs' 2018 victory. Cole Hogan, who ran the PCs' digital-advertising campaign in 2018, told QP Briefing that the PCs' counter to the NDP's surge in the last election was to run ads highlighting the "unreadiness" of certain New Democrat candidates' whose unflattering statements or photos from the past came back to bite them during the campaign.

Partly in response to the effectiveness of this PC strategy in the last election, the NDP significantly tightened up its candidate vetting and selection process leading up to this election.

"We have the capacity to vet candidates in a much more thorough way than we had in the last campaign," Horwath said a week before the election began.

All the major parties employ staff whose jobs are to vet their own candidates as well as look into the background of those from others. In a conversation that wasn't to be attributed to them, one of these researchers once styled the job as being a "dirt ferret." Many unflattering revelations about candidates that are reported in the media originate from these researchers.

Outgoing NDP MPP Suze Morrison said on the QP Briefing Podcast on Friday that parties' vetting proficiency and opposition research capabilities indicate how well-resourced they are. In this election, Morrison said the circumstances leading to the dismissal of the three now-former Liberal candidates are a reflection of the difficulties the party has had in recovering from its 2018 election decimation.

"I think it speaks to ... how, perhaps, under-resourced the Liberal party is at the moment," Morrison said.

The Liberals haven't had official party status since the last election.

"Something that comes along with official party status is, of course, administrative resources at the legislature, which means on the party side, you're not supplementing legislative work with party staffers," Morrison said.

She added that she thinks the Liberals' candidate-based issues speak to fundraising challenges they had leading up to the election campaign.

"They just don't have the money to be doing candidate vetting and opposition research the way they'd like to," Morrison said.

With files from Jessica Smith Cross.

After dropping candidates, Liberals target PCs for comments against abortion, gay marriage

Read this for free.