By Michael Nabert

The Harper government’s so called “Fair Election Act” is one of the most egregious attacks on the very idea of fair elections that Canada has ever seen, but their strategy to game the system and rewrite the rules in their favour doesn’t end there. New ridings created to expand the number of seats in Parliament were carefully chosen to create more safe seats for Conservatives. That’s not enhancing democracy. It’s called Gerrymandering.

Voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in Canada, so, any claim that the fair elections act is necessary to combat voter fraud is dishonest. Of course, it’s a total coincidence that the Harper Government would be stripping the voting rights of more than 100,000 people who are less likely to vote conservative.

In truth, voter suppression was only one of the nasty things lurking at the heart of the bill. Even denying Elections Canada the right to encourage young people to vote is clearly intended to make sure that demographics less likely to vote for Harper are not in any way encouraged to show up at the ballot box.

And voter suppression in the Fair Elections Act isn’t this government’s only effort at stripping the right to vote from Canadians citizens.

To justify that bill, Pierre Poilievre repeatedly cited a report on the 2011 election to tell us we need to make these changes to deal with rampant voter fraud. Unfortunately, the report didn’t say that, and the author came forward to set the record straight.

Most disturbing, the suggestions he made to improve the process and deal with the problems he really did find are pretty much the opposite of what the act proposes. Neufeld’s report told us that while voter irregularities were rare, he saw a broad range of “errors” carried out by polling station officials, who were often doing so for partisan reasons. Conservatives want no one but partisan hands to be in charge of polling stations, the ultimate democratic fox in the henhouse electoral move. The fact that their current majority would allow them to decide what partisan hands would have the opportunity to meddle at the majority of the nation’s polling stations is horrifically undemocratic.

In 2006, to first come into power, the Conservative party seriously broke election funding laws with the “in and out scandal,” which allowed them to spend roughly a million dollars more on advertising in the last days of an election cycle when it would make the most difference and get away with it by paying a smallish fine five years later. In the next election, they broke election funding laws once again, as Dean Del Mastro was recently found guilty for. (Don’t worry about Dean, though, he’ll still get an enormous public pension to thank him for acquiring the job fraudulently). In 2014, they snuck a clause into the “Fair” Election Act to allow them to set election spending limits anywhere they want, in whatever way will be most convenient for their own finances and least convenient for parties they oppose and for third party organizations that also want to have their voices heard. This is outrageous, and couldn’t be more the opposite of democratic.

Canadians were rightly upset over the great unsolved crime of the Robocall scandal from the 2011 election. One lone junior staffer from only one of 135 ridings where voter suppression attempts occurred, and who didn’t even have access to the Conservatives database used to generate the numbers, was charged for a crime in which the judge clearly found that he did not act alone, but the investigation was ended anyway. Without the ability to compel testimony, Elections Canada could only investigate based on any evidence the Conservatives chose to voluntarily offer up. The outcry helped lead to that “Fair” Election bill. So how did it address the problem of Elections Canada basically having its hands tied when it tries to investigate election fraud? It tied them tighter. The bill prevents Elections Canada from publicly reporting on election fraud, and cancels Elections Canada’s research and public education programs. It forbids Elections Canada from launching ad campaigns to encourage people to vote. It denies election officials the investigative power to compel political parties and their riding associations to provide financial documentation to support their financial returns. It fails to give the Commissioner of Elections the authority to compel witnesses to give evidence.

For goodness sake, it requires Elections Canada to warn anyone they think may have committed fraud that an investigation is imminent (so warm up the paper shredders), but denies them the right to warn Canadians about that fraud. That’s as backwards as it gets.

$600,000,000 tax dollars have been spent on partisan advertising by the Harper government, using public money to promote the agenda specifically of their party rather than the good of the nation.

Now that their economic policies sacrificing everything imaginable for the convenience of the oil and gas sector have tanked the national economy, with job growth tepid at best and almost all insecure and part time jobs, household debt the worst in the world outside of Greece, and all the other hollow claims of wise economic stewardship deflating in the face of facts so stark they can’t even be hidden any more by ending basic information gathering tools like the census, Harper clearly intends to rely on scaremongering to try and direct our attention away from it.

The Harper government is not one that values democracy or the democratic process. It values power, and whatever it can do to secure its power, no matter what sort of rule breaking, rule rewriting, bullying, cynicism and misdirection it might take to get there. Canadians need to stand on guard for democracy, because it is under assault by our own government.

About Michael Nabert: During the last Federal election, I was naive enough to think that this was as bad as the Harper impact on Canada could get.

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
― H.L. Mencken