“As so often is true about elections laws, they sound great on paper but when it comes to either enforcement or even just evasion, it’s quite a simple matter even to get around them,” said Robert MacDermid, elections expert and political science professor at York University.
When the robocalls scandal broke last winter, Elections Canada faced more than 700 complaints and 31,000 contacts about allegations that voters in as many as 18 federal ridings had received automated phone calls on election day last year purporting to be from the electoral agency and falsely telling voters their polling stations had been moved.
The Council of Canadians has launched a court challenge to overturn the results of the 2011 election in seven of those ridings: Don Valley East and Nipissing-Timiskaming in Ontario; Elmwood-Transcona and Winnipeg South Centre in Manitoba; Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, Sask., Vancouver Island North, B.C., and Yukon. On July 19, the Council of Canadians’ court challenge survived an attempt from the Conservative Party to have it thrown out of court and is going forward in Federal Court. All seven ridings are represented by Conservatives.
Another case of contested election results, in the Ontario riding of Etobicoke Centre, is expected to be resolved with a Supreme Court ruling as early as this week. Canada’s highest court convened in a special summer session this month to hear evidence that clerical errors by Elections Canada staff may have allowed ineligible people to vote in the riding, changing the election’s outcome.
Rookie Tory MP Ted Opitz beat out the incumbent, Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj by a margin of 26 votes in the May 2, 2011. A lower court has ordered a byelection in the riding, and the Supreme Court could either overturn that ruling or call for a new vote.
In the wake of the robocall allegations, the New Democrats introduced a motion in the House of Commons demanding that the government introduce amendments to the Canada’s Elections Act forcing the telecommunications companies that candidates and parties use to place the automated calls to register themselves and all their clients. It also advocates giving Elections Canada more powers in requesting documents from candidates and political parties.
At the height of the uproar last March, the motion passed unanimously in the House. It gave the Conservatives six months to draft and table a law outlining the necessary amendments.
That six-month deadline will come and go before Parliament returns from summer holidays on Sept. 17.
NDP democratic reform critic Joe Comartin (Windsor-Tecumseh, Ont.) said that he isn’t hopeful that the Conservatives will table legislation any time soon.
“We’ve heard nothing, we’ve seen nothing from them,” he said.
Kate Davis, spokesperson for Tim Uppal (Edmonton-Sherwood Park, Alta.), the minister of state for Democratic Reform, said that government is looking at a range of recommendations and “a proposal will be put forward in due course.”
Before the robocalls scandal broke, Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand submitted a set of recommendations to Parliament on updates to the Canada Elections Act. The House of Commons Committee on Procedure and House Affairs reviewed and supported most of them, and made a few of their own before submitting their report to Parliament.
“The government is open to constructive suggestions on electoral improvement,” said Ms. Davis.
Elections Canada spokesperson John Enright said he could not confirm whether the agency had been consulted on drafting any legislation.
At a committee appearance on May 29, Mr. Mayrand indicated that his office had not been consulted on any possible legislation resulting from the motion, and said he would like to be consulted on it.
In the wake of the robocalls scandal, Mr. Mayrand said he was also preparing a report to suggest changes to the Canada Elections Act to deal with how new technologies as well as social media sites are used during an election.
“Among other things, it will address issues such as voter contacts, either through automated or live calls, and whether, and if so to what extent, these communications need to be regulated,” he told the Procedure and House Affairs Committee in May.
The problem with creating a telecommunications registry, said Mr. MacDermid, is that those misusing technologies such as automated phone calling, which can be used to deliver a prerecorded message to thousands of voters simultaneously, likely won’t register.
“Obviously anybody with a phone, for heaven’s sake, could do what they did,” he said, referring to the still unknown “Pierre Poutine,” the pseudonymous person with an unregistered cellphone at the centre of the robocalls scandal.
“If there’s any skullduggery at least that way we’ll know who’s doing it, or we’ve got a list of potential suspects, even though I suspect that if they had to register they wouldn’t do it,” he added.
Mr. MacDermid also noted that information about the telecommunications companies used to do voter contact is already available in all candidates’ financial returns.
Mr. Comartin said that the point of the registry system would be to establish a set of standards that those using automated phone calls would have to comply with. He added that giving Elections Canada more powers to access documents, such as the scripts used in automated phone calls, would help expedite investigations.
“It’s those standards that I think will go a great distance to cleaning up this area of campaigning,” he said.
Mr. MacDermid said that in the past, using phone calls to contact voters, whether for legitimate reasons or not, was limited by technology and enumeration.
Under the system of voter enumeration, which was eliminated in 1996, Elections Canada workers went door to door collecting voter information, a process that took a long time and meant that candidates didn’t get lists of electors weeks into the race. The internet-based technology used to send out bevies of simultaneous phone calls is also a recent invention. In the past a campaign would have relied on a less sophisticated dialing system or a bank of live phone volunteers.
“Even a small group can be limited of what you can do,” he said of that time.
Now, he explained, “obviously the technology of robocalling, where you can feed in the numbers and the names, hugely amplifies the ability of that one rogue person.”
Many of the misdeeds perpetrated in the robocalls scandal are already covered under existing sections of the Canada Elections Act, said University of Toronto law professor Peter Rosenthal.
“In my view, the Canada Elections Act already has sufficient provisions and sufficient possible penalties. The problem of enforcement, that’s a whole different thing,” he said.
He cited a number of clauses within the act, such as Sec. 482, which makes it an offence to attempt to suppress votes—that could cover abuses of technology aimed at swaying the results of an election.
The key is to make sure the legislation is enforced, he said.
“All the technologies that are being talked about…that’s a serious problem, but it’s not a question of legislation it’s a question of how you’re going to somehow track down people who use modern technology to deviously avoid capture. That’s a difficult policing problem perhaps, but I don’t see how legislation is going to affect that,” he said.
Meanwhile, Elections Canada’s budget of $136.2-million will drop to $94.8-million by 2014-2015 as some programs wind down and budget cuts come into effect, but the agency has the ability to pull straight from the government’s bank account to fund investigations.
“There’s enough power there I think within the Elections Act, and it’s the responsibility of the commissioner of elections to do investigations and lay charges when necessary. If there were a few charges laid that might deter people,” he said.
Elections Canada’s record and style of investigation and enforcement are hard to evaluate. According to civil watchdog group Democracy Watch, the agency has had more than 3,000 cases in front of it since 1997, but it is impossible to know what they were about, or what came of them because the agency doesn’t make that information public.
“It’s impossible to answer your question because we don’t know, because it hasn’t been made public,” said Mary Liston, a professor and expert on elections law at the University of British Columbia.
By looking at Elections Canada’s sentencing digest Mr. MacDermid said it was possible to get a sense of the agency’s track record.
“You’ll see how few offences actually take place and are actually prosecuted. It’s very small and it’s just hard to believe that there aren’t more nefarious things going on than that. But I would say that that goes back before the internet and goes back to many other forms of election regulation that are not adequately, in some ways, supervised, because it’s difficult,” he said.
Ms. Liston said that while it’s arguable that the misuse of new electoral technologies is covered under existing elections law, it would be beneficial to include some specifics sections on automated phone calls.
“There’s a gap around telephone calls, although they are part of advertising this wasn’t contemplated at the time the act was drafted, nor in any of the recent updates,” she said.
“This is a new thing and it would probably be wise to have a specific definition as to what constitutes proper automated calling,” she explained.
“It’s a broad act, but we’ve had a number of issues over the last couple of years where it seems that it’s playing catch up, certainly with technology and all kinds of new behaviours that haven’t been contemplated,” she added.
If the proposed telecommunications regulations come through, Ms. Liston said that it would be important that significant penalties are attached to them for those who break the rules.
Mr. MacDermid said that with all the focus on robocalls and clerical errors, corruption of Canada’s electoral system is minimal.
“I don’t think it’s really widespread. I wouldn’t get hysterical about it,” he said.
“That’s not to say that there aren’t some people who take it so seriously that they do do this. And could they do it quite easily? Yes,” he said.
The professor, who specializes in election finances, said that even skirting longstanding financial rules—something Elections Canada is investigating Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro (Peterborough, Ont.) for, relating to his 2008 election expenses—is simple.
Mr. Del Mastro is alleged to have tried to cover up evidence that he overspent on his campaign in the 2008 election. It is also alleged that a company owned by his cousin, David Del Mastro in Mississauga, Ont., enticed its employees to make large donations to the campaign by promising to reimburse them and let them keep the tax break.
Mr. Del Mastro has denied all of the allegations, and has said he is willing to talk to Elections Canada investigators.
“The law is there, the enforcement has to be rigorous,” said Mr. Rosenthal.
The government acknowledges the importance of enforcement.
“While strengthened regulation across the electoral system will continue to ensure free and fair elections, tough oversight is key to ensuring that those who seek to break the rules and game the system are held to account with the full force of the law,” said Ms. Davis.
She added: “Minister Uppal believes that Canada’s electoral system on a whole, including political parties and candidates, generally functions with a high degree of integrity.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Jessica Bruno
No comments:
Post a Comment