National Post Ottawa correspondent John Ivison reported something very interesting, somewhat in passing, in Wednesday's edition: "Veteran campaigners admit openly their side called Jewish voters on the Sabbath and said they were contacting them on behalf of their political rivals."
This is one of two forms of dodgy telephone calls currently dominating the news. We have allegations that people were directed to nonexistent polling stations in hopes they would not vote at all. And we have allegations that representatives of Party A made rude and harassing phone calls while pretending to work for Party B, in hopes of driving people away from Party B's candidate.
No one, not even scapegoat-apparent Michael Sona - the Tory staffer from Guelph who resigned last week, saying the media had made him a distraction - is admitting to being involved in, or sanctioning, the vote-suppression calls. They are beyond the pale, and there is nothing more to be said. But conventional wisdom seems to treat the other kind of calls as less reprehensible, perhaps even de rigueur.
Neither practice is defensible, but trying to trick someone into not voting is indeed more offensive than trying to trick him into voting for the other guy, if only because the latter is basically the full-time job of a campaigning politician. The law, however, seems not to make any distinction.
Section 482 of the Canada Elections Act stipulates that "every person is guilty of an offence who by any pretence or contrivance ... induces a person to vote or refrain from voting or to vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate at an election." Self-evidently, this describes both kinds of calls at issue. The Act provides for up to five years' imprisonment.
One assumes we didn't just enact this law for squeaks and giggles. One furthermore assumes that these veteran campaigners do not plan on going to jail. We need to know if this sort of malfeasance has attained the status on Canadian campaign trails that speeding has attained on Canadian highways.
Yet another disturbing report by the Ottawa Citizen's Glen McGregor and Postmedia's Stephen Maher suggests that may be the case. During the election campaign, Liberal lawyers complained to Elections Canada about "persons falsely identifying themselves as calling from the Joe Volpe campaign."
Last week, the Commissioner of Canada Elections responded that "the [Elections Act] does not prohibit or regulate the use of telephone solicitations for a particular candidate or party, or the content of a call unless actual intimidation or false pretence can be shown."
This inspires little confidence in what should be a vigorous enforcement mechanism. "False pretence" is exactly what the Volpe campaign was complaining about. The media have already unearthed testimonies from people who insist some jerk down the telephone convinced them to switch teams.
That's a very bad thing, manifestly illegal and unethical, and fertile ground for a public inquiry - especially if the law isn't being enforced. But legalities aside, it is worth remembering that for every dodgy phone call a reasonably well-informed voter might have received, he is likely to have absorbed a far greater overall dose of character assassination, policy misrepresentation, fearmongering and demagoguery between March 26 and May 2 of last year. Why worry about one source of it and not all the others?
This week, the Council of Canadians launched a campaign urging people to report any dodgy phone calls they received, in hopes of building a legal case to overturn the results in affected ridings. In fact, they asked people to report any "phone call or other communication (electronic, written, or in person) related to the election that [they] consider to be suspicious or fraudulent."
Good grief, where to start? The Conservatives claimed that a vote for the Liberals was "a vote for a reckless coalition that'll include the Bloc Québécois." Michael Ignatieff claimed his father "came off a boat in 1928 without anything." Photographs captured a volunteer for the aforementioned, aggrieved Mr. Volpe, pilfering mailboxes of Green Party literature and replacing it with Liberal literature. The endless hidden agenda nonsense. On and on it went.
Compared to the accumulated weight of unmitigated codswallop that politicians spray around the campaign trail, the practical democratic effect of a fraudulent phone call meant to imply Candidate X is an inconsiderate jerk seems rather minor. We can crack down on the law-breakers, but many of the same nefarious ends will still be achievable - as indeed they were achieved in the 2011 campaign - via legal, unethical and all-but universally embraced means.
That's not to say we should legalize dodgy phone calls. It's to say penalizing dodgy phone calls is an incomplete solution to the problem at hand. Maybe we ought to be aiming higher across the board.
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Chris Selley
This is one of two forms of dodgy telephone calls currently dominating the news. We have allegations that people were directed to nonexistent polling stations in hopes they would not vote at all. And we have allegations that representatives of Party A made rude and harassing phone calls while pretending to work for Party B, in hopes of driving people away from Party B's candidate.
No one, not even scapegoat-apparent Michael Sona - the Tory staffer from Guelph who resigned last week, saying the media had made him a distraction - is admitting to being involved in, or sanctioning, the vote-suppression calls. They are beyond the pale, and there is nothing more to be said. But conventional wisdom seems to treat the other kind of calls as less reprehensible, perhaps even de rigueur.
Neither practice is defensible, but trying to trick someone into not voting is indeed more offensive than trying to trick him into voting for the other guy, if only because the latter is basically the full-time job of a campaigning politician. The law, however, seems not to make any distinction.
Section 482 of the Canada Elections Act stipulates that "every person is guilty of an offence who by any pretence or contrivance ... induces a person to vote or refrain from voting or to vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate at an election." Self-evidently, this describes both kinds of calls at issue. The Act provides for up to five years' imprisonment.
One assumes we didn't just enact this law for squeaks and giggles. One furthermore assumes that these veteran campaigners do not plan on going to jail. We need to know if this sort of malfeasance has attained the status on Canadian campaign trails that speeding has attained on Canadian highways.
Yet another disturbing report by the Ottawa Citizen's Glen McGregor and Postmedia's Stephen Maher suggests that may be the case. During the election campaign, Liberal lawyers complained to Elections Canada about "persons falsely identifying themselves as calling from the Joe Volpe campaign."
Last week, the Commissioner of Canada Elections responded that "the [Elections Act] does not prohibit or regulate the use of telephone solicitations for a particular candidate or party, or the content of a call unless actual intimidation or false pretence can be shown."
This inspires little confidence in what should be a vigorous enforcement mechanism. "False pretence" is exactly what the Volpe campaign was complaining about. The media have already unearthed testimonies from people who insist some jerk down the telephone convinced them to switch teams.
That's a very bad thing, manifestly illegal and unethical, and fertile ground for a public inquiry - especially if the law isn't being enforced. But legalities aside, it is worth remembering that for every dodgy phone call a reasonably well-informed voter might have received, he is likely to have absorbed a far greater overall dose of character assassination, policy misrepresentation, fearmongering and demagoguery between March 26 and May 2 of last year. Why worry about one source of it and not all the others?
This week, the Council of Canadians launched a campaign urging people to report any dodgy phone calls they received, in hopes of building a legal case to overturn the results in affected ridings. In fact, they asked people to report any "phone call or other communication (electronic, written, or in person) related to the election that [they] consider to be suspicious or fraudulent."
Good grief, where to start? The Conservatives claimed that a vote for the Liberals was "a vote for a reckless coalition that'll include the Bloc Québécois." Michael Ignatieff claimed his father "came off a boat in 1928 without anything." Photographs captured a volunteer for the aforementioned, aggrieved Mr. Volpe, pilfering mailboxes of Green Party literature and replacing it with Liberal literature. The endless hidden agenda nonsense. On and on it went.
Compared to the accumulated weight of unmitigated codswallop that politicians spray around the campaign trail, the practical democratic effect of a fraudulent phone call meant to imply Candidate X is an inconsiderate jerk seems rather minor. We can crack down on the law-breakers, but many of the same nefarious ends will still be achievable - as indeed they were achieved in the 2011 campaign - via legal, unethical and all-but universally embraced means.
That's not to say we should legalize dodgy phone calls. It's to say penalizing dodgy phone calls is an incomplete solution to the problem at hand. Maybe we ought to be aiming higher across the board.
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Chris Selley
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