You might think that, by the eighth week of a 13-week campaign, the gaffes would be pretty much done. Instead, all parties continue to contend with controversies about candidates’ past behaviour and social media eruptions.

There was that Toronto area Conservative candidate was caught urinating in a mug and was dropped immediately by the party, the Calgary young Liberal candidate forced to drop out after some offensive old tweets surfaced, and the NDP candidate from Hamilton who, in response to an old Facebook post, said she didn’t know what Auschwitz was.

And then there’s Stefan Jonasson, who was running as a federal New Democrat in a Winnipeg area riding and is now criticizing his party for hastily dropping him for comments he made comparing an Orthodox branch of Judaism to the Taliban with regards to its treatment of women.

Many veteran political strategists — people who have managed election campaigns on provincial and federal levels — say these controversies are surprising and the parties’ responses to them have been erratic. They say it’s been difficult during this campaign to see where parties are drawing the line — how they go about deciding whether to stand behind a candidate or cut ties.

“The number of these issues is surprising, and more so is the fact that they are still happening this far into the campaign,” said Mike McDonald, former campaign manager for B.C. Premier Christy Clark and a political strategist consultant based in Vancouver.

McDonald said federal parties seem more sensitive than usual because they’re trying hard to keep their message “from being ruined by a rearguard action that they have to deal with because of one of the candidates.”

Gordon Ashworth, a former federal Liberal national campaign manager and a member of the National Election Readiness Committee of the Liberal party, said he believes parties — and the media — are “being sort of phony” in the process. “It’s not about the best policy, it’s about avoiding the media circus and media scrutiny.”

Stephen Carter, who helped Naheed Nenshi win the 2010 Calgary mayoral race and ran former Alberta PC premier Allison Redford’s campaign, said federal parties are playing catch-up with Twitter and Facebook, and with people behind websites such as True North Times which have been working hard to rake over the candidates’ online pasts.

“This is really the first election where something you posted in 2008 is going to come back and haunt you in 2015,” said Carter. He also says that the recent controversies are even more troubling when one considers the vetting and screening processes the parties have in place.

“The candidates that have been caught in these problems are members-elected candidates, not leaders-dictated candidates,” said Carter, alluding to the fact that when the party establishment does the vetting, it has more resources to do so. At a constituency-association level, Carter explains, the constituency association volunteers have limited resources “to go through everybody’s social media accounts going back years and years.”

That’s a point on which he agrees with McDonald, who adds that often the candidates bounced from the ballot are in ridings that the party has no much chances of winning.

“So the level of scrutiny of those candidates is not as high because there is not as much at stake,” he said.

Still, these strategists say that there are instances where parties move too quickly to ‘kill the story’. They caution that this strategy may backfire because, according to McDonald, the public is capable of seeing which parties are overreacting.

And since Canadians’ views on what’s ‘appropriate’ for a political candidate have changed over time — it used to be an issue for a candidate to be divorced, after all — McDonald said parties should think twice before dropping a candidate, particularly one that expresses contentious opinions about social or religious issues. “It’s a tricky place for parties to be in that area, they have to use careful judgement and try to respect diversity of views. It’s usually when something was said out of ignorance or intolerance that you get into trouble.

“I almost wonder if every candidate in every riding in the country is going to have to just do a blank apology before they start campaigning. Something like, ‘I apologize for everything I have ever done’. So that way they can all be pardoned in advance.”

These controversies won’t necessarily affect the outcome of the election, said Ashworth, because in his view “elections are won by leaders and national policies and not by what somebody tweeted four years ago.”

Nevertheless, Carter said that these erratic reactions from the party establishments are likely to affect the democratic process down the road. “It’s a nightmare for the local campaign, but no one cares about the local campaigns anymore. When a candidate is dismissed, a lot of those volunteers just go home, and don’t come back. It’s absolutely terrible for the electoral process,” Carter said.