Here’s something potentially creepier, however. What if the government kept its list of friends and enemies on a huge, computer database, with names, addresses and personal information about millions of Canadians? And what if you had no right at all to see how you were listed?
Such a database exists. Up to now, it’s been called the Constituent Information Management System, CIMS for short, though the Conservative party is reportedly in the midst of building a better machine, called C-Vote.
And yes, CIMS does organize the political universe into friendly and not-so-friendly people. If you’ve been a friend to the Conservative cause over the years, volunteering, donating or even writing nice things about Conservatives in letters to the newspaper, a yellow, smiley face appears beside your name in the database.
If, however, you have put up lawn signs for rival parties, slammed the door or hung up the phone on the Conservatives, your name appears in CIMS with a frowning red face.
Friend: smiley face. Enemy: frowning face. It’s as simple as that.
Conservatives aren’t the only party with a database, of course. The New Democrats have NDP Vote and the Liberals have Liberalist. These databases also sort the world into likely and unlikely voters.
But Conservatives are the only party at the moment with a database and a lock on power in the federal government, at least for the next two years.
They are the only national political entity, in other words, with the means to turn the party’s friends and enemies into friends and enemies of the state. And what guarantees do we have that they’re not blurring those lines? None.
There is abundant evidence already that the Conservatives are using information they gain while in government to feed the party database. Petitions sent to a minister’s office have turned into mailing lists for Conservative postcard campaigns, to raise one example.
Michael Sona, the former Conservative staffer now facing charges in the so-called robocalls case, has said that when he worked in MPs’ offices, part of his job was inputting constituent information into CIMS. CIMS is regularly consulted by ministerial staffers when it comes to making government appointments, he said.
How many frowning-face people do you think were put on the lists of “who to appoint” that also went into the new ministers’ briefing binders this week?
Outside the Ottawa bubble, there may have been a tendency to shrug at the news of the “enemy” lists as just the usual, hyper-partisan nonsense from the world of politics. Sure, many people may be thinking, the government has enemies — but they’re probably the kind of people who have done something to deserve it: annoying media people, pesky protest groups, former Liberal sympathizers.
The CIMS database, though, takes this whole friend/enemy business to another level — the grassroots, citizen level. So even if you don’t think you’ve done anything to get on the enemy lists, you may well be there — a frowning, red face beside your name.
If you suspect you’re on one of those lists the staffers put in the ministerial briefing books this month, you do have a way to attempt to find out. It takes time and lots of paperwork. But you could do as veteran’s advocate Sean Bruyea or artist Franke James have, and doggedly submit formal Access to Information and Privacy requests to the government.
No such mechanism exists to find out your status in the CIMS database, or any other party database. Although Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand and Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart have been urging that laws be tightened up surrounding these databases, there’s no sign so far that the Conservative government shares any sense of urgency about the existence of these friend-and-enemy lists.
This spring, in fact, the government and the Conservative party curiously declared victory when the Federal Court found that the CIMS database had been used in a systematic, “robocalls” scheme to suppress votes of non-supporters of the Conservatives — the political version of an enemies’ list.
One of the people hailing the ruling was Ottawa-area Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre, who, as coincidence would have it, was once the owner of one of those automated-dialing “voter research” firms, called 3D Contact.
Poilievre was promoted this week to Minister of State for Democratic Reform. He’s now in charge of long-awaited reforms to Canada’s election laws.
We probably shouldn’t be holding our breaths, waiting for some kind of restrictions on enemy lists — political or otherwise.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: susan delacourt
No comments:
Post a Comment