Boo! at the ballot box

Sophia’s coming to the party

By all accounts, it was a beautiful day for a wedding. So beautiful, in fact, that it brought out an unexpected guest.

***

On a picturesque Saturday afternoon in August, 1999, a handful of guests from a wedding in the east end made the long trip west to one of Hamilton’s most iconic photo spots: Dundurn Castle. After paying the $50 fee to take official photos on the Dundurn grounds, the gang zipped over in their limos to spend two hours commemorating the special day with what they later reported to be around 200 photos. Then it was off to the stone-clad Barton Street landmark, Trocadero, for the reception.

When the bride gets the photos back, almost all the snaps are perfect. But, in a photo of the groom’s side of the wedding party, they notice an uninvited guest lingering in the background. Five men and two young boys are posing around the manor’s iconic front portico. The camera is angled to include the large bay window of Dundurn’s dining room. The uninvited guest is on the other side of the glass, appearing to peer out at the men. As the family looks at the photos, the bride’s cousin focuses in on the figure in the window and makes a quick determination. The uninvited guest, they say, is a ghost.

This assertion kicks off what The Spec’s Paul Wilson calls “a campaign to validate the apparition.” The bride brings the picture to a handful of photo labs, then to Dundurn, then to a metaphysical shop, all in the pursuit of some clarity. At the last stop, the occultist waves a pendulum over the photo and proclaims that the photographer has indeed captured an image of a spirit - one of a young woman, to be exact. But he adds a chilling prediction: “She will return.”

The bride, sufficiently spooked, extends her search for answers. Who is the spirit? What does she want? Is she angry? Does she need to be released? Will she actually return!?

That’s where Bettee Giles enters the picture.

***

Giles is Caledonia’s preeminent futurist, having discovered her gifts at a young age and training them by, as she would later tell The Spec’s Mike Hanley in 1996, “reading the sins” of people in her church. She pursued futurism full-time in 1977 and quickly became a local star, doing guest spots on local radio and network television stations, hosting her own show on cable, and even appearing on the Jerry Springer show. In a New Year’s Eve, 1999 Spec profile with then-reporter Lisa Hepfner (off whom Giles said she got “good vibes”), the Caledonian clairvoyant made a handful of predictions for the new millennium - some eerily prescient (Hilary Clinton winning a seat in the Senate, more wealth inequality, Y2K being overblown), some aspirational (unconditional social acceptance of queer people, an end to racism, almost no crime), some questionable (the Blue Jays winning the world series, mail-order designer babies, amalgamation being “the best thing that ever happened to our area”).

The spooked bride saw Giles on TV around that time and decided to see what she had to say about the spectral wedding guest. When Giles saw the photo, she was able to put the bride at ease, free-of-charge. The ghost wasn’t angry, Giles told her. No, instead she just felt that the family had good “spiritual energy” that made her comfortable enough to reveal herself. She showed up on their special day because she missed being part of the grand soirées that once lit up Dundurn Castle. Giles comforted the bride by telling her that the spirit’s visit was actually a good luck omen and that she would provide “great protective energy to the whole family.”

But there was one more thing Giles told the bride. The spirit had a name. And that name was Sophia.

***

Sophia (pronounced So-fi [as in fire]-ah) MacNab was born in Hamilton on July 5, 1832 and lived at Dundurn Castle, built by her father Sir Allan Napier MacNab, for her first 23 years. An avid diarist, the record she kept of her teenage years is now considered an important insight into the everyday life of late-colonial Hamiltonians. Sophia was Allan MacNab’s favourite child and she was dotted upon by everyone in the household for years. As the favourite daughter of one of Canada’s most powerful pre-Confederation leaders and (as reported by publications across the British Empire) a woman of great beauty, she was courted by aristocrats and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1855, she married the Viscount Bury - a union blessed by her Tory father, despite her new husband’s youthful affiliation with the Liberals in the UK. The pair moved to England after their marriage and began their family, which eventually grew to include 10 children. Consequently, (a fact you will undoubtedly hear if you visit Dundurn Castle today) Sophia’s great-great-great-granddaughter is one Camilla Rosemary Shand, known today as Queen Camilla. There’s also a lot of fun stories about Sophia’s son, George Keppel, due to the…relationship he and his wife (but mostly his wife) had with King George VII, but that’s a story for another time.

Giles seemed to provide an essential piece of the puzzle. But The Spec’s Paul Wilson needed a little more confirmation, so he went from a futurist to a historian. The Reverend Thomas Melville Bailey, a local Presbyterian minister and past chair of the Hamilton Historical Board who had published extensively on MacNab and Dundurn, told Wilson he had never heard of any ghosts inhabiting the castle. And, besides, Sophia never returned home to Hamilton after her marriage, living a very long and very happy life as a well-respected figure in society circles until her death at age 84 in 1917.

As if to settle the issue once-and-for-all, the photo chief at The Spec closely examined the wedding picture and made a determination. He wanted to believe it was Sophia, but it turned out to just be the reflection of some trees and clouds. Still, all the commotion stirred up by the photo gave Wilson a chance to revisit the story of Sophia and remind Hamiltonians of a little bit of their history. He conjured a spirit, alright; maybe not as a wedding guest, but certainly as a chapter in the story of our shared past.¹

Dead serious or a spooky secret?

Whether or not she showed up as a ghostly guest to a late 90’s wedding, Sophia was deeply connected to political candidates, but was never a candidate for public office (limited women’s suffrage only being introduced in Canada the year she died). Her father and her husband, Sir Allan and the Viscount Bury respectively, haven’t been reported to have returned as ghosts, but were both major political power players and candidates for office in their own time. So in the MacNab family, there have been ghosts and there have been candidates, but never in the form of the same person.

Despite this, ghost candidates do exist.

PLOT TWIST! Lure you in with a story about local history and then bam hit you with some politics!

***

The ghost candidate phenomenon is something that has intrigued me for a long time. The task of registering as a candidate for office - collecting signatures, paying deposits, filling out paperwork, adhering to legal deadlines - is fairly challenging. Even with all these hurdles, plenty of candidates will make the effort to vault over them, only to remain planted in place after the last jump, making no attempt to sprint to the finish line with all the other candidates.

So what defines a ghost candidate? There isn’t a strong academic definition for the phenomenon yet, though I did some work on ghost candidates during my doctoral studies and intended to include a brief section on them in my as-yet-and-maybe-never-to-be-finished manuscript based on my dissertation.

Based on all that work, I classify “ghost candidates” as people who register to run in an election but will do little-to-no active campaigning, have a negligible online and social media presence related to their campaign, avoid media or provide few comments during the campaign, skip debates or decline invitations to events, remain mostly unreachable by potential voters, do superfluous advertising (if any at all), and offer little in the way of personal information, ideological or platform-related cues, or explanations as to their motivations for seeking public office. They “haunt” campaigns by taking up space on a ballot without doing any of the real work necessary to win.

There are notable examples of ghost candidates either influencing or disrupting campaigns. In the last British Columbia election, there was controversy over the low profile maintained by Prince George-North Cariboo BC NDP candidate Denice Bardua, particularly since the BC NDP was in government and fending off a surge in support from the extreme right-wing BC Conservatives. Local news outlets ran articles about how Bardua did not attend candidate forums, answer media questions, or maintain an active website, though the candidate claimed they were spending their time on direct voter outreach instead. Bardua placed third in the conservative rural riding with just 17%.

In the 2022 Australian federal election, the far-right One Nation party was accused of running dozens of ghost candidates, with some candidates contesting seats thousands of kilometres from where they lived and flyers being printed that contained one candidate’s name and another candidate’s photo. At the time, Australian media speculated that One Nation was fielding ghost candidates to qualify for federal funding or to take advantage of the country’s unique single-transferable vote system. The news wing of ABC, the Australian public broadcaster, also noted that it was possible candidates were trying to prove themselves: “Maybe it's because they want to serve their party or get selected to a seat closer to home next time?”²

And, in the Florida State Senate election in 2020, ghost candidates were strategically used to harm the electoral efforts of an incumbent who ran afoul of the state’s electric utility provider. Jose Javier Rodriguez, the state senator representing the 37th District (downtown Miami) had been a vocal critic of Florida Power and Light (FPL) and introduced legislation that would have allowed landlords to install solar panels and supply electricity to their tenants, bypassing FPL. This evidently posed a threat to FPL’s profits (the utility is, like most things in the United States, privately held), causing the CEO of FPL to demand his subordinates do what they could to “make [Senator Rodriguez’s] life a living hell.” That kicked off a plot which involved consultants and Republican politicians finding someone with a similar name to Senator Rodriguez, running him as an independent candidate, paying him $40,000 for the scheme, pouring money into his campaign, and coordinating electoral efforts on his behalf from behind-the-scenes.

The plot actually worked, and Rodriguez lost his seat by just 32 votes to the founder of “Latinas for Trump”, while the “ghost candidate” - an auto-parts salesman named Alex Rodriguez - siphoned off 6,382 votes from Jose Rodriguez. Eventually, the whole conspiracy was revealed. That led Rodríguez número dos to plead guilty to campaign finance violations and turn on his accomplice, a former Republican State Senator, who was sentenced to 60 days in jail for his role in the “ghost candidate” scandal. The prosecutor in the trial was blunt in his assessment of what happened: “They stole an election.”³

The Ghosts of Federal Drive

Ghost candidates are a common phenomenon in municipal elections. In Hamilton’s last municipal vote, there were 8 ghost candidates. Their collective average was 5.5% of the vote, though one - Ward 3 public trustee candidate Fatima Baig - earned an impressing 14% of the vote. Few of them reported any campaign finance contributions and none were active in local media, online, or at community meetings during the campaign.

Municipally, ghost candidates make more sense. There’s no strong party organization providing campaign assistance, no natural team to keep you motivated, and very little in the way of readily-accessible guidance on how to actually run. Many people likely register because they feel like it’s a way to make a difference only to see a daunting challenge before them and step back, effectively suspending their campaigns without going through the process necessary to take their names off the ballot.

Federally, on the other hand, one would expect ghost candidates to only be a thing for minor parties or for the slew of independents that sign up to run (Longest Ballot Committee folks aside). But, in this election, there are way more ghost candidates than I would have otherwise expected - even running with major parties.

***

Most notable is the spectral nature of far too many NDP candidates “running” in this federal election. A long-time NDP voter in Collingwood even penned a Letter to the Editor to Collingwood Today expressing their disappointment that the NDP candidate in their riding was putting in no effort. “The irony is, the NDP has long claimed to be a grassroots party. Certainly nothing democratic about a party running such opaque candidates,” they wrote.⁴

A full 47 NDP candidates can be classified as “ghosts” in this election, amounting to 13.7% of the slate. Another 10 candidates are running dramatically paired-down campaigns, offering some comments to media, but not maintaining any websites, staying active on social media, or having any information regarding campaign offices. That means nearly 17% of the party’s slate is not putting in the work that would help get them elected.

Two of those candidates are in the Hamilton-area. Justin Abando is the NDP candidate in Niagara West, a fairly conservative seat that’s largely rural and includes Grimsby, West Lincoln, Pelham, and some of western St. Catharines. Standing as an NDP candidate in that riding would be a challenge, to say the least. But, in the past, the NDP’s stalwart candidate in the riding, Nameer Rahman, actually put in the effort. Abando ignored requests to participate in a local debate and has made no effort to respond to CBC Hamilton’s inquiries regarding their candidacy. The latter article on Abando includes the line “Information about Abando could not be found online,” which is hardly the kind of thing folks want said about them when they’re a candidate for parliament.

Most upsetting is the case of Hamilton East—Stoney Creek (HESC), a riding held by the NDP from 2006 to 2015. The party waited until the last minute to nominate a candidate in the riding, eventually picking Nayla Mithani with just hours to go before the close of nominations. Mithani is, apparently, a project manager in Jagmeet Singh’s office and recent McMaster graduate. I say apparently because Mithani has been conspicuously absent from the community over the course of the campaign. Like Abando, Mithani has not responded to the CBC and failed to earn the Hamilton and District Labour Council’s endorsement. Mithani’s absence from the Cable 14 debate, combined with Conservative candidate Ned Kuruc’s declining their invitation and the Green Party’s inability to run a candidate led to the debate’s cancellation, making it all the more apparent that Chad Collins is simply coasting to victory in the east end. Embarrassingly, Cable 14 told The Spec that, while Kuruc declined (as most Tories do), they got “complete radio silence” from Mithani.⁵ 

When the NDP lost HESC in 2015, they did so by around 3,000 votes. This is a riding where 50,000 voters regularly turn out to the polls and where the Greens (who, again, are not running a candidate) have earned between 1,000 and 3,000 votes since 2015. An eager east end New Democrat who put in the work could have easily been competitive in the riding. And yet the party has openly endorsed a ghost who has made no effort to campaign.

That doesn’t just look bad; it effectively hampers the party’s ability to run a strong campaign in the next election. Campaigns on the left have far fewer resources than centre-right and right-wing campaigns, which are often better funded and have access to more consistent streams of resources. That means much of the work done on the left is to identify past supporters to see who might want to volunteer, who might want a sign, who can contribute, and, importantly, who you can mark down as already on your side. That way, you can direct your precious few resources toward reaching out to those you haven’t previously identified as a supporter.

By not mounting a campaign in HESC, the NDP is making it just that much harder to run an effective and serious campaign in the next federal election.

***

It isn’t just the NDP. The Conservative standard bearer in Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas (The HWAD), Erika Alexander, despite being touted as a star candidate, has been noticeably absent from the campaign trail, leading the Liberal, NDP, and Green candidates to call her variations of a “ghost candidate” during the Cable 14 debate for that riding. In a follow-up Spec article (in which I am quoted, he said, humble braggingly), Alexander called the critiques “campaign politics” and, like many other candidates in her position, claimed she was busy meeting “residents one-on-one.”⁶ Alexander is far more present than most ghost candidates, though, with her signs absolutely plastered all over the riding and plenty of online information about her available.

The Greens, on the other hand, opted to not run candidates in HESC or on Hamilton Mountain as part of their “deliberate” strategy to ensure swing ridings didn’t go Conservative. This is a very different strategy than the one the NDP has pursued. For the New Democrats, it seemed like a better approach to make sure names were on the ballot, even if the candidates themselves weren’t going to mount a serious campaign. For the Greens, it seemed to serve the system better to not offer people an option when that option would be a spoiler and the candidate wouldn’t actively make an effort.

Both approaches have their pros and cons. With the NDP’s approach, they can run candidates so that their supporters aren’t forced to hold their noses and vote Liberal and prove to the country that they’re a serious party. On the flip side, running candidates that aren’t actually doing any campaigning diminishes faith in the party as an institution, makes grassroots activists feel ignored by the central party office, can hurt their campaigns in the future, and might have the impact of getting Conservatives elected.

With the Green approach, they can divert resources to ridings in which they have a shot and make sure they don’t earn the ire of voters who are pissed that a Green candidate appears on the ballot that they know nothing about. Other side of the coin for them is that it makes it look like they have limited organizational capacity, that people don’t want to run for them, and that they aren’t taking the election seriously.

***

There’s nothing we can do about this for the election we’re in right now. But we can push for change in the future. If you’re sold on a party (even just the idea of a party), you can sign up and try to get yourself on a local riding executive. You can help with candidate selection, work with the party to identify folks who could be good candidates, or build the groundwork to run yourself. You can work to get yourself onto a party’s larger executive boards to help guide policy - including policies relating to candidate selection and identification. You, as a voter and citizen, have more power in the process than you think. So if ghost candidates are spooking you, you have ways of exorcising them. It, like everything else in politics, takes time and work. But it’s absolutely possible.

Sophia MacNab Keppel may not be haunting the grounds of Dundurn Castle, but some federal candidates sure are haunting our ballots.

BOO!

1  _{References for this section come from: Mike Hanley. “For a fee, Bettee the psychic will tell you exactly what you want to know.” Hamilton Spectator, November 22, 1996 (Spec archive link); Lisa Hepfner. “The prophets of BOOM.” Hamilton Spectator, December 31, 1999 (Spec archive link); Paul Wilson. “Did ghostly guest crash wedding?” Hamilton Spectator, August 17, 2000 (Spec archive link).}

2  _{Stephen Hutcheon. “What's all this talk about One Nation's 'ghost' candidates in the 2022 federal election?” ABC News (Australia), May 5, 2022 (Link).}

3  _{Mario Alejandro Ariza. “‘They Stole an Election’: Former Florida Senator Found Guilty in ‘Ghost Candidates’ Scandal” Mother Jones. September 30, 2024 (Link).}

4  _{Mark Stewart. “LETTER: NDP 'ghost' candidate insulting to Simcoe-Grey voters” Simcoe Today, April 15, 2025 (Link)}

5  _{Mac Christie. “Most Hamilton Conservative candidates skip televised election debates” Hamilton Spectator, April 15, 2025 (Spec link)}

6  _{Matthew Van Dongen. “Star candidates vie for open seat in Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas” Hamilton Spectator, April 24, 2025 (Spec link)}