Election law and fair elections contributed to Canada
To make sense of the many disparate provisions in the
Conservatives’ sprawling 242-page Fair Elections Act, the first question
to ask of each is not whether it is good or bad but: what problem was
this intended to solve?
God knows we have enough real problems with how we run elections. The bill was born of the mess of the 2011 election, with its multiple allegations of voter fraud, including but not limited to the infamous robocalls affair: still unsolved, two years later, despite a Federal Court judge’s finding that, indeed, mass fraud had occurred. A partial list would also include the vast and needless expense of modern election campaigns, and the consequent diversion of party energies, rhetoric and policy to the ceaseless quest to raise funds. And, despite or perhaps because of all of these frenetic efforts to “reach out” to the electorate, the constant decline in turnout.
But that is not, apparently, how the Tories see it. Rather, the bill seems motivated by an entirely different set of concerns.
Take the battery of provisions aimed — that seems the appropriate word — at Elections Canada, the government agency responsible for running elections and enforcing their rules. Frustrated by the slow progress of the investigation into the robocalls scandal the chief electoral officer had asked for greater powers, notably to compel evidence from witnesses: a draconian measure, but not unknown in similar circumstances.
The act gives him none of these, responding instead by hemming in the powers of investigators on all sides. For example, they would be required to notify subjects that they were being investigated: an unusual provision, to say the least, even if an exception is made where this would compromise the investigation. Even more remarkably, the whole of Elections Canada’s enforcement operations, under the commissioner of Canada elections, would be removed from it and transferred to the director of public prosecutions, within the Justice department. This would make it accountable, not to Parliament as it is now, but to the government.
Whether this would make any practical difference to how election irregularities are investigated is an open question. What’s of interest here is what it reveals of Tory thinking. That is, the problem it was intended to solve would seem to be that the elections investigator was too powerful, too dogged, too independent.
Quoting the
www.canada.com
The original link
http://www.canada.com/news/national/Fair+Elections+takes+Elections+Canada/9483424/story.html
God knows we have enough real problems with how we run elections. The bill was born of the mess of the 2011 election, with its multiple allegations of voter fraud, including but not limited to the infamous robocalls affair: still unsolved, two years later, despite a Federal Court judge’s finding that, indeed, mass fraud had occurred. A partial list would also include the vast and needless expense of modern election campaigns, and the consequent diversion of party energies, rhetoric and policy to the ceaseless quest to raise funds. And, despite or perhaps because of all of these frenetic efforts to “reach out” to the electorate, the constant decline in turnout.
But that is not, apparently, how the Tories see it. Rather, the bill seems motivated by an entirely different set of concerns.
Take the battery of provisions aimed — that seems the appropriate word — at Elections Canada, the government agency responsible for running elections and enforcing their rules. Frustrated by the slow progress of the investigation into the robocalls scandal the chief electoral officer had asked for greater powers, notably to compel evidence from witnesses: a draconian measure, but not unknown in similar circumstances.
The act gives him none of these, responding instead by hemming in the powers of investigators on all sides. For example, they would be required to notify subjects that they were being investigated: an unusual provision, to say the least, even if an exception is made where this would compromise the investigation. Even more remarkably, the whole of Elections Canada’s enforcement operations, under the commissioner of Canada elections, would be removed from it and transferred to the director of public prosecutions, within the Justice department. This would make it accountable, not to Parliament as it is now, but to the government.
Whether this would make any practical difference to how election irregularities are investigated is an open question. What’s of interest here is what it reveals of Tory thinking. That is, the problem it was intended to solve would seem to be that the elections investigator was too powerful, too dogged, too independent.
Quoting the
www.canada.com
The original link
http://www.canada.com/news/national/Fair+Elections+takes+Elections+Canada/9483424/story.html
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