Candidate Guide

Once you have collected a sufficient number of signatures and completed the rest of the Nomination Form, call up your Returning Office and make an appointment to submit your form. If you do so well before the close of nominations you will have time to collect more signatures if neccessary. In the case of an unscheduled election or a by-election, the Returning Office will not be open until a few days after the writ is issued. Then you will be able to find the name, address and phone number for your RO on the Elections Ontario web site.

The Returning Officer will likely give your list of signatures to one of the clerks who will check to see if they are valid. Some ROs will accept the signature if the address is in the Electoral District. Others will check that the name is on the Preliminary list of voters.

The RO will offer you a variety of listings and other stuff. We recommend you NOT accept the list of Electors unless you have a good use for it. These are treated as confidential information and all copies must be returned or destroyed after the election. You can accept maps, list of voting locations, poll keys and such like, but if you don’t plan to use them, don’t bother.

You or your campaign manager will be invited to a couple of meetings at the RO. Attendance is not required. Mostly the RO covers procedures such as targeted enumeration.

Once your nomination has been accepted, notify your Regional Coordinator and/or the Campaign Director.

• Let your friends, neighbours and even relatives know you are running for the Libertarian Party. Give them a copy of our Platform.
• Ask them to make a donation to the Ontario Libertarian Party to help us with the election campaign.
• Participate in All Candidates Meetings if invited.
• Distribute copies of our platform door to door in your neighbourhood.
• Knock on doors, introduce yourself as the Libertarian candidate in the election, hand them a copy of our Platform and say, "I hope you will read our Platform and if you like it, I hope you will vote for me."
• If you plan to distribute a lot of Platforms and/or knock on a lot of doors, you should get a Map of the Electoral District showing the poll boundaries from your RO and follow the Poll Based Campaign strategy.

Funny: What NOT to say as a candidate

As an active candidate, it is your job to be prepared to answer questions with a clear and concise answer that follows the libertarian message of less government and more personal responsibility. What does that mean?

Interacting with the media can be a great opportunity to promote a libertarian message to a larger audience in your local community, however an unclear or inaccurate message can also increase the risk that you will lose control of the information you are providing to a reporter, or to other candidates during a debate.

Getting your ideas across clearly and staying on-message is a skill that can be learned and practiced. Try to remember that as you prepare yourself to be a candidate, especially if it is your first time acting in this role for the Party.

It is our job to provide you with the key ideas and messages from our platform, and to organize them in a way that will help you to answer questions from the public about the key topics that are discussed during an election. These topics, which are included in this New Candidate Guide, will cover diverse areas such as Healthcare, Education and Energy policy.

To assist active candidates in preparing for interacting with the public, in 2012 the Party held discussions at its Caucus meeting to outline some basic ideas for a complete platform document, and a first written draft was presented at our AGM in Toronto November 2012. The result of this effort is our current platform document: The Choice Book. The Party also developed an Internal Platform document, which is for candidate use only (not public). The content below will link to our internal platform whenever there is more information we can provide to help you answer media and debate questions.

Are you looking for some outside resources to prepare? Try these:

• Media Training: Remember that communicating with the media and staying "on message" is a skill that can be learned.  You might want to consider taking some time to research this topic online, or use a book such as this one to get a better idea on how to acquire these skills.
• Answers to some "tough" questions: Just because you are knowledgeable about a topic, doesn't mean that you are prepared to answer difficult questions about that topic from individuals (and members of the media) who may not share your points of view.  Knowing how to answer a deliberately difficult question is an important skill for a candidate to have, and books such as this one can be a useful resource to help you with this.
• We are a political party: And politics involves "policy." Have a look at this page from our neighbours in Michigan to help steer your political thinking. It is also available as a dowloadable pdf file, a good reference resource to a libertarian view of government.