It seems that the necessity of a major overhaul of Canada’s federal Election Act suddenly became important following the most recent election and its nasty aftermath where voters in several ridings had been mischievously directed, by robotic phone calls, to go to places where, as it happened, there was no polling place to cast their votes.
This happened in a handful of ridings, mostly in central Canada, and most of the mischief was traced back to Conservative operatives. One charge has been laid, in a Guelph riding.
While these events likely didn’t influence any outcomes (although Conservative misinformation was distributed in the nearby Nipissing-Timiskaming riding via robocalls where the incumbent Liberal MP was defeated by a Conservative by a mere 26 votes), still it was disturbing to think that people working for a political party would seek to interfere with this most basic unit of the democratic process: voting.
Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but the Conservative government’s response to this seems to be, to put it simply, nasty and vindictive.
The Fair Elections Act (Bill C-23) is being fast-tracked through the House of Commons and, unusually, there will be simultaneous debate in the Senate on Bill C-23.
It’s clear the Conservatives want to push these changes ahead and are not only changing the normal process (usually the Senate will deal with proposed legislation after the appropriate committees have made their suggestions and the House of Commons has debated it and motions have been made to move it into law) but the minister responsible (Pierre Poilievre, Minister of State for Democratic Reform) has been clearly rude to and about those people who have criticized the legislation as it is proposed.
In fact, Mr. Poilievre last week referred to several well-known Canadians who have taken contrary positions on the bill he is charged with shepherding into law as “so-called experts.”
Well, one of these “so-called experts” is Sheila Fraser, recently retired auditor general for Canada.
Another is Marc Mayrand, currently Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer. Conservative MPs have even suggested Elections Canada has a conflict of interest in encouraging higher voter turnout, a seemingly counter-intuitive conclusion to draw.
Self-styled experts? Ms. Fraser, in her retirement, was appointed last fall to a special Elections Canada advisory board along with a dozen other thoughtful citizens.
She is currently co-chair of this advisory group which means that, as a person who most Canadians know is a “quick study” because of her successful term as auditor general, she doubtless knows at least as much about Canada’s electoral process by now as does Minister Poilievre.
Ms. Fraser has expressed publicly her concerns about the negative impact on the democratic process parts of this bill will have, citing the muzzling of the chief electoral officer as chief among these.
We’re reading much about Mr. Poilievre’s defence of the proposed deletion of “vouching” as a means of obtaining a ballot at a polling place. Vouching has been recognized in the federal Election Act whereby a voter comes to the place where they are to vote but does not have the appropriate means of identification with them required by the deputy returning officer in order to give them a ballot. When another voter who has produced their own appropriate identification is able to confirm that the person is who he/she says they claim to be, then they can receive a ballot and vote.
About 120,000 voters were vouched for in the last federal general election, about one percent of the total voters. Mr. Poilievre defends this change whereby vouching would be eliminated, over and over again, as a sure-fire way to safeguard the democratic process.
But there is much more in this bill that affects the democratic process at its most fundamental level other than the vouching issue (and there is no evidence whatsoever that there is any more fraud associated with the vouching practice than there was with, say, the overenthusiastic Conservative workers who conjured up the idea of sending non-Conservative voters anywhere but to the right place to cast their ballots, distributing this particularly nasty misinformation by way of robot callers who claimed in their patter to be calling on behalf of Elections Canada, just to put things in perspective).
It would seem that there is a war being waged on Canadians by the current governing party in order to try to give themselves every advantage to remain the governing party and while the robot call gambit was, hopefully, an unofficial and renegade effort, changing the Election Act fundamentally seems to seek to accomplish the same thing as did the robot call creators, only officially.
Some of the other major changes proposed in the Fair Elections Act include taking away from Elections Canada the authority to run thoughtful campaigns geared at encouraging Canadians to come out and vote.
The rationale by the framers of Bill C-23 is that, since voters are not coming out in significant numbers this means that the Elections Canada campaigns have failed. Instead, the pre-election role of Elections Canada will be limited to telling voters where and how they can vote. The Conservative position is that it is naturally the role of the political parties to get out the vote.
Well certainly it is; to convince their own supporters to vote.
This official government position is at best cynical and at worst insidious for of course it should be the role of a disinterested party, like Election Canada, to tell the story of the importance of voting without fear or favour.
The various political parties are going to be doing this anyway, geared to their known supporters.
What about that generally large margin of “undecided voters” with no unshakable political alliance or who always examine all of the options as they make their voting decision? They may be deemed to be among the most thoughtful of voters, as independents, but who, if not Elections Canada, is going to offer them gentle persuasion?
Here is another puzzling change: if you vote in the next federal election, and if one or more of the political party associations in, for example, Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing, wants to know who voted, they will be able to request and be given this list following the election.
They’ll be able to compare the voter turnout lists with the lists of enumerated voters in this riding, poll by poll, and devise separate campaign strategies for those who voted and for those who stayed home.
We make much of privacy issues in this day and age. Very much. The idea of sharing this personal data with organizations that, by their very nature, have something to sell to us is abhorrent and it’s a fair prediction that this provision, should it proceed, will convince some people not to vote at all.
Another suggested change is in the way that Elections Canada funds outside expert resources, when they are required. An example of this would be the secondment of a person from another parliamentary democracy in order to assist in fine-tuning Canada’s electoral protocol.
Currently, Elections Canada would request additional funding for such an activity from government as part of its budgeting process and this would be dealt with by the civil service.
Bill C-23 would require that an Elections Canada request for funding for external expertise would have to be made directly to the Treasury Board, thus completely politicizing the process as the minister responsible for the Treasury Board and his/her political advisors could easily question who was being hired and, it’s conceivable, deny the request altogether or attempt to influence who was hired.
Third-party advertising is also being re-thought under C-23. These are the ads that, for example, trade unions could run in support of the NDP (or against a particular political party, like the Conservatives). Currently, third-party groups can spend up to $200,100 in advertising during an election campaign (usually four to five weeks in duration).
Now, they can spend the same amount “in relation to” an election. That is to say, they could spend a portion of this set limit alerting the public about their concerns about this very bill, C-23. But should they use some of this fixed amount for such an endeavour, they’d have that much less to spend during an actual election campaign, suggesting that the government has determined that it is that much less likely to be attacked in advertising campaigns between elections as these third-party groups (once again, trade unions are good examples) would want to maintain this amount intact as a war chest for use during the actual election campaign period.
On the other hand, political parties themselves would still face no restrictions whatsoever on the amount of money they could spend in the period pre-election. Do the attack ads on the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau ring a bell?
And now, back to robocalls, the issue that may well have set all of these proposed changes in motion: Bill C-23 would require any firms, individuals or groups hired to undertake mass telephone calling on behalf of parties or candidates (or doing this voluntarily) to maintain a recording of each call, and when it was made, for one year.
A record of the actual numbers called will not have to be maintained, though, because Minister Poilievre has declared this would be an invasion of privacy.
Pardon?
This is the same minister and the same bill that will legislate that the names of everyone who votes will be cheerfully handed over to any political party requesting it. This is an invasion of privacy in precisely the same spirit that Minister Poilievre has determined that maintaining a list of phone numbers robotically called would be, a file that would only be accessed in the first place in the event of a concern such as was the case during the past election.
There are clearly double standards hard at work in virtually every aspect of the election changes Bill C-23 proposes; double standards that can easily be interpreted as benefitting the party currently in power.
On the vouching issue, the very people most likely not to have appropriate identification (part of which must include their street address, not a post office box) are homeless people and, First Nations leaders say, also Aboriginal people. Let’s face facts: these are constituencies that are not likely to support their local Conservative candidate.
If skewing an election act, which above nearly all legislation must be seen to be fair, is the only way to win an election and a majority government in 2015, than the party proposing such legislation clearly does not deserve to form the government.
Ramming such legislation into law is a clear abuse of power and will add authority to the cynical view that already pervades many citizens’ view of Canada’s political process and we predict an even lower voter turnout if this law proceeds as written.
