Apologies to Leslie Gore. I like that song. But the version coming out of a Conservative MP in the House of Commons doesn’t make anyone want to dance – just throw up in the parking lot.
On February 6, Conservative MP Brad Butt was only doing his job – parroting the party line in the House of Commons like a well-rehearsed witness at a Stalin show trial. All in a day’s work for that lost tribe of un-elevated Tories. They are the ones even further back in the Commons seating plan than the bobble-head brigade.
Butt’s subject was the Fair Elections Act, a piece of legislation designed to suppress voting, legalize more money for the Conservatives, and get even with Elections Canada for depleting the Harper Government’s front bench over elections law infractions. The government also has an online description of Bill-23 for those who prefer fiction.
One of the things the Harper government wants Canadians to swallow without chewing is Bill C-23 and its tougher voter ID rules. It claims this will deal with fraudulent voting. Voter Information Cards will no longer be accepted as valid identification. Just your CPC membership card. (Only kidding) And don’t bother bringing your sketchy-looking uncle to vouch for you. That won’t work either after this bill is passed. The days of voting fraud in Canada are over.
There is only one problem; they never began. There is absolutely no proof of widespread voting fraud in this country to justify the legislation, unless of course Pierre Poilievre gets special dispensation from on high to tell us more about Robocalls.
Here’s the skinny from those in the know: voter fraud is virtually non-existent in Canada, or at least it is according to two leading experts in the chief-electoral-officer business, Marc Mayrand and Harry Neufeld. Both agree that the government was trying to fix something that isn’t broken. It was exactly as Green Party Leader Elizabeth May so aptly put it: the problem isn’t that too many people are voting multiple times, it’s that not enough are voting once. Under the new legislation, Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer won’t be able to speak to that issue — making Canada the only democracy in the world where that is true.
So what is the minister for undemocratic reform talking about? Harry Neufeld for one says that Pierre Poilievre’s legislation will lead to court challenges and the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters. Bless you in your innocence Harry — that’s the freakin’ plan. What is the Republican Party’s plan for the next elections in the U.S.? Voter suppression, as reported by the Washington Post. When the turnout is low, Republicans win.
Which brings me back to Brad Butt. Perhaps realizing that his elevated colleague had no evidence, Butt soared like a turkey vulture to the rescue of the man who looks as though he were recently manufactured at a Mattel factory. Can someone be embalmed before dying?
The Mississauga-Streetsville MP said in the House that he, Brad Butt, had actually witnessed voter fraud. He had personally seen the evil-doers collecting discarded Voter Information Cards. He had watched in horror as they distributed them to other evil-doers, who then used them to commit voter fraud. Pierre Poilievre was 100-per-cent right. There was massive voter fraud out there and it was going on in places like Mississauga-Streetsville, and he, Brad, had seen it with his own eyes. You can’t make this stuff up.
Or can you? A week later, Butt’s poetic license was revoked. What he had seen, now became what he had heard; eyewitness testimony travelled the bumpy road to hearsay. Butt now told the parliamentary committee that he had only heard anecdotes about evil-doers handing out discarded Voter Cards and others using them fraudulently. With the Opposition after Brad’s butt, he retracted the whole lie on February 24th. I hasten to add that Brad himself says, that although what he said in the House of Commons was untrue, it was not a lie, but rather, “banter.”
I don’t know why Bantering Brad went from eyewitness to ‘I made it up.’ Perhaps someone asked him this: as an MP, when you saw this voter fraud going on, did you do anything to stop it? Did you report it to Elections Canada? I note that Butt contacted EC about his retraction.
Whatever the reason, he had nothing to worry about with the Big Boss. Stephen Harper is also a man who tells the truth in instalments. The prime minister even said Butt should be praised for correcting the record voluntarily. Evangelical caucus members take note. Harper has amended the Ten Commandments. Number nine now reads, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour, without belated retractions when caught out.”
And of course, Pierre Poilievre would never say a bad word against a mendacious colleague who was simply trying to help the minister to misrepresent voter fraud in Canada. How could he? The minister has been doing that himself for weeks.
In what will surely go down as one of the funniest spectacles in Canadian political history, Poilievre has been quoting from a report to defend Bill C-23 even after the author of the report says he has misread it. That said, Poilievre manfully insists that his interpretation of Neufeld’s report is correct, and it is the author who is wrong. Which leads to this fully-frontal absurdity: Pierre Poilievre, His Master’s Voice in this government, says that if Neufeld comes before the parliamentary committee studying Bill C-23, the minister will not be swayed by his testimony. But he will continue to cite the deluded man’s report to justify the government’s crack down on non-existent voter fraud.
Brad Butt’s pants are now a five-alarm fire. Under normal circumstances, what the PMO and the minister will not put right, might have been redressed by the Speaker of the House. Instead, Andrew Scheer presented his party credentials. Although Brad Butt had in the Speaker’s opinion “likely misled the House”, Scheer decided to let MPs dispose of the matter, knowing that the Conservative majority would not send this matter forward to committee. Lying to the House is now a matter for partisan absolution rather a high-crime against the institution.
It is raining bananas.
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