There’s a silver lining in the news of two Conservative candidates being dropped as candidates in the space of one day.

It’s this — apparently the party’s legendary database isn’t as full of personal information as some feared.

One would expect an all-powerful, all-knowing CIMS to pick up on the fact that Scarborough Rouge-Park candidate Jerry Bance was featured urinating into a coffee mug on TV in 2012, or that Toronto-Danforth candidate Tim Dutaud had made tasteless prank calls and videos.

‘Where,’ they asked on social media all weekend long, ‘is that team of resumé vetters, the ones featured in the Conservative ads? Were they too busy studying Justin Trudeau’s hair to notice the sketchy resumés coming from their own would-be MPs?’

Or, another possibility: perhaps Bance and Dutaud were forthcoming about their backgrounds, but they sent the information to the PMO in emails, which — as the Duffy trial taught us — sometimes go unread.

The disconnect between the Conservatives’ information on voters and their apparent lack of intelligence on their own candidates took over a lot of conversation threads on Twitter Monday. Peggy Blair, an Ottawa realtor and mystery writer, asked: “How can CPC have so much data on us that they can micro-target individual voters and NOT know about #wankergate or #peegate when vetting?”

Yes, that is a mystery. If I had to guess, I’d say it comes down to the Conservatives’ them-versus-us approach to protecting personal information. When the “base” was nervous about privacy and information — say, in terms of the long-gun registry or the mandatory long-form census — Stephen Harper’s government didn’t hesitate to eliminate ‘intrusive’ databases.

The scrapping of the registry and the census took place, ironically, just as the Conservatives were leading the political pack in gathering up information about voters — maybe in the hope of growing that base. We’re all familiar now with the stories of people who write letters to MPs or sign petitions — and suddenly find themselves the targets of greeting cards or fundraising letters from the Conservative party.

The double-standard on personal information — this them-versus-us approach to digging into people’s backgrounds — also plays a big part in the ongoing Senate scandal, in case that’s been forgotten. The double-standard on personal information — this them-versus-us approach to digging into people’s backgrounds — also plays a big part in the ongoing Senate scandal, in case that’s been forgotten.

There was, in other words, one threshold of intrusion for policy — and quite another one for politics.

Yet this is also the government that passed C-51, an anti-terror bill roundly criticized as an unprecedented threat to Canadians’ rights to privacy and speech. The bill bestows new powers on authorities to monitor and intrude into the lives of Canadians, in a bid to ‘crack down’ on would-be terrorists.

Supporters of the bill (mainly Conservatives) argue that this is only an intrusion for the people who have something to hide … ‘them’, not ‘us’. So the same people who said they resented telling the government how many guns they owned or how many kids they had living at home seem to be fine with the potential breaches of privacy in C-51.

One Conservative told me a while back that the difference between partisans’ attitudes to CIMS and the long-form census revolved around the matter of what is mandatory. CIMS data is gathered from people who voluntarily make information known to the party; the long-form census was a form of forced disclosure.

Yet privacy expert Colin Bennett, writing in iPolitics recently, pointed out that all the major parties — even and especially the Conservatives — may be collecting data from voters without giving them any right to opt out of the system. This could be doubly true if the Conservatives are using information they gather in their role as government — letters to MPs, for instance — to plug into their political database.

The double-standard on personal information — this them-versus-us approach to digging into people’s backgrounds — also plays a big part in the ongoing Senate scandal, in case that’s been forgotten. Certainly it’s clear now that Harper’s PMO failed to perform due diligence in its appointments of senators Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau, particularly with regard to their living arrangements. The little details about where they lived, as opposed to where they claimed to live for expense purposes, were not an issue to the government … until Duffy and Brazeau ceased to be seen as part of the ‘us’ team.

And as the Duffy trial unfolded, we heard testimony about how the most senior people in the PMO, including the prime minister, displayed a startling lack of curiosity about how the case of the senator’s expenses was being settled. More than one commenter has wondered how a PMO known for its micromanagement suddenly developed an attitude of breezy laissez-faire when it came to Duffy.

Certainly, after this week’s developments, no one in Harper’s circle will be able to protest that they were too busy vetting candidates to deal with the Duffy case.

There’s an old rule in politics: your friends can be more trouble than your enemies. It’s even more true when you spend more time learning about voters than you do about your own supporters.

Susan Delacourt is one of Canada’s best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.