Elections Canada
On Tuesday, Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor at Postmedia revealed that two weeks ago, Elections Canada sent a letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons, Andrew Scheer, asking that he suspend two Conservative MPs due to their apparent “failure to file campaign documents from the 2011 election.” As it turns out, Marc Mayrand, the chief electoral officer, told Scheer that one of those MPs – James Bezan – has “failed to correct his electoral campaign returns for the 39th, 40th, and 41st general elections.” The Speaker has yet to inform the House of Commons of the letter.
Both Bezan and his colleague, Shelly Glover, have both filed legal challenges in Manitoba over their campaign returns.
Still, their continued presence in the House has irked the opposition. In question period Wednesday, Liberal Marc Garneau quoted the Elections Act, arguing that Bezan and Shelly Glover should not be allowed to remain in the House of Commons, let alone vote on the main estimates later that night. “Is the prime minister going to allow the member for Selkirk-Interlake and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Finance Minister to vote illegally on over $65 billion?” he asked.
“The Elections Act is clear on a lot of things,” Conservative Pierre Poilievre replied from the other side of the House. “First of all, it is clear that these members have the ability to make this intervention at the court level. We also know that they acted in good faith and there is a difference of interpretation with Elections Canada.” Poilievre then accused the Liberals of accepting illegal donations during the party’s leadership contest.
Later in the afternoon, Liberal Scott Andrews rose on a point of privilege on the matter, telling the Speaker that while he understood that the two Conservatives might disagree with Elections Canada “on the substance of their filings” and have made applications to the Federal Court on the issue, “this does not change the fact that they should not sit or vote in the House until the matter is rectified.”
“This goes to the heart of our democracy,” Andrews said. “The fact that we are all elected to this place on the same footing, by the same rules and on an even playing field for all provides for a fair election to the House of Commons.”
In his rebuttal, Government House Leader Peter Van Loan argued that it was his understanding that “the individuals in question are being asked to account twice for a single campaign expense, that being the billboards that were put up on a permanent basis. The rules in the past have always been that if there is spending that transfers over from an election period to a non-election period, any costs that are fixed are pro-rated.” He argued that it was a simple dispute over an interpretation of the rules.
“That is where the matter sits right now. It is a quite simple dispute,” Van Loan said. “It is certainly not the kind of question of accounting interpretation that I think a reasonable person would say would justify a member being suspended from being able to participate in the House, having been duly elected by the voters.”
Brent Rathgeber
Wednesday evening, Conservative MPs on the House ethics committee proposed amendments to substantially change a private member’s bill put forward by their caucus colleague, Brent Rathgeber. His bill, C-461, set out initially to provide more transparency on federal salaries and expenditures. A key component of the bill’s proposal that disclosure requirements would apply to those in the federal service making anywhere over $188,000 a year. That point was agreed upon only after “much negotiation with the senior bureaucracy.” However, when it came time for the ethics committee to discuss the bill, the Conservatives put forward amendments that watered down Rathgeber’s proposals, including raising that salary disclosure level to $444,000, putting disclosure so high that only a fraction of the public service would be forced to disclose anything.
Rathgeber seemed to have anticipated the move, writing only days earlier, when that salary bar was still slightly lower, that “not a single witness has supported the government’s dubious proposition that the benchmark for specific salary disclosure for federal public servants should be raised to $329,000.”
A few hours after watching his bill be stripped at committee, Rathgeber announced he was resigning from the Conservative party caucus, effective immediately. He tweeted the news Wednesday evening at 10:18pm, approximately three minutes after having apparently told the prime minister. Thursday morning, he again took to his blog, explaining in frank terms the vote on his bill was the “proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back,” but that his comfort level in caucus had been evolving for “at least a year.”
He wrote:
“Recent allegations concerning expense scandals and the Government’s response has been extremely troubling. I joined the Reform/conservative movements because I thought we were somehow different, a band of Ottawa outsiders riding into town to clean the place up, promoting open government and accountability. I barely recognize ourselves, and worse I fear that we have morphed into what we once mocked….For a government that was elected on a platform of accountability, my constituents are gravely disappointed. They appreciate human frailty but when a group misses its self-proclaimed standards, a little contrition and humility not blust and blunder, is the expectation.”
Rathgeber’s exit prompted a quick rebuke from one Harper loyalist – his former director of communications, Dimitri Soudas tweeted Wednesday evening that Rathgeber’s “pattern of behaviour was obvious it was coming to this,” and, like the prime minister’s current director of communications also did Wednesday evening, encouraged Rathgeber to run in a byelection.
However, the prime minister might be more concerned with what the Canadian Taxpayer’s Federation had to say about the amending of C-461. In a statement, the group’s federal director, Gregory Thomas, said “it’s absolutely disgusting that the government would gut a piece of accountability legislation in order to keep taxpayers from finding out what senior government employees do and make.”
Peter MacKay and the leadership voting system
All of this (along with the Nigel Wright–Mike Duffy fiasco) is coming to a head only weeks before the Conservatives will host their policy convention in Calgary. Both the Canadian Press and the CBC made note this week of pending convention resolutions that propose changes to the way leadership contests are run within the party. One suggests a one-member-one-vote scenario, and the other outlines a weighted system wherein larger riding associations would have more weight during a leadership vote.
Resolutions on the manner in which the Conservative party would pick a leader aren’t new. Here’s how Jennifer Ditchburn explained it Wednesday:
“When the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties merged in 2003, a central part of the agreement was that each riding association would be given an equal say in a leadership vote. The idea was that the riding associations in Western Canada with thousands of members would not be able to swamp the smaller ridings in areas such as Quebec and Atlantic Canada. The issue has been characterized as a deal breaker by some well acquainted with the merger.”
Thursday morning, John Ivison at the National Post reported that Defence Minister Peter MacKay would think about leaving the party entirely should the rules change at the convention. “It would be a very different party with a very different future,” Ivison reports him as saying.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Colin Horgan
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