The provision, an amendment to original wording in the legislation that extended the length of time voter calling services will be required to keep records and caller scripts for robocall telephone calls to voters, would allow the calling services to destroy the records from one election a full year before the next election.
The amendment was one of 45 changes the government tabled with the House of Commons committee that studied the legislation, Bill C-23, on April 25, before the opposition MPs began detailed scrutiny of the amendments the following Tuesday with a deadline of May 1 at 5 p.m. to begin voting on the amendments with no more discussion.
Opposition MPs said Tuesday—as the bill went through its final few hours of debate prior to a scheduled final vote later in the evening—that the limited scope of the amendment would be a crucial failing in any subsequent investigations of the kind of robocall disturbances that created an uproar after the 2011 election and led to charges against a Conservative campaigner in Guelph, Ont.
The controversy over the robocall scandal, as well as widespread complaints about misleading telephone calls from live operators during the 2011 election, was claimed by the government to be one of the chief reasons it wanted to overhaul the Canada Elections Act.
But one of the biggest opposition complaints after the government tabled the legislation on Feb. 4 centred over the fact that voter contact services contracted by candidates and parties during federal general elections or byelections would only be required to retain their contract records and script transcripts for one year following election day.
Along with other amendments the government tabled at the last minute—including changes that restored communication between the chief electoral officer and the commissioner of elections in charge of investigations—it also extended the robocall record and script retention period to three years.
But MPs, who had not been part of the committee study, agreed on Tuesday that the brief extended period means the records could be destroyed prior to a subsequent general election under a fixed election law the Harper government passed soon after it won power in 2006.
Despite the law’s requirement for a four-year period between general elections, Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) convinced then governor general Michaelle Jean to dissolve Parliament in 2008 for a general election during a government standoff with the opposition
Liberal and NDP MPs noted in interviews with The Hill Times on Tuesday the brief three-year period for retention of robocall records means the possible evidence for an Elections Canada investigation similar to those that followed the 2011 election could still be destroyed before the next election.
Elections Commissioner Yves Cote made a point in a report he released last month from a three-year investigation into the robocall allegations from 2011, many of which surfaced after a 2012 news report about the Guelph robocall investigation, that most major telecommunication providers did not retain their phone records further than a few months following the election, while a calling service provider that unknowingly channelled the fraudulent robocalls into Guelph had erased his data before an Elections Canada investigator approached him afterward.
Liberal MP Judy Sgro (York West, Ont.) said of the two-year extension for the period of record retention: “It’s like bread crumbs for a starving man.”
She was referring to the fact that the opposition saw the addition as a step forward, in light of Minister of State for Democratic Reform Pierre Poilievre’s (Nepean-Carleton, Ont.) insistence to that point that the bill was sound and there would be no major amendments.
“These guys do nothing without thinking through how it’s going to benefit them,” Ms. Sgro said in an interview with The Hill Times. “Any amendments that they agreed to were all very calculated to make sure that they can still do all of the trickery possible in the next election, just like they did in the last one.”
Independent MP Brent Rathgeber (Edmonton-St. Albert, Alta.), who resigned from the federal Conservative Party after the government watered down a private member’s bill he had sponsored and who took part in the final clause by clause committee review of Bill C-23, said he had not noticed until Tuesday that the period of record retention for robocalls would be four years less than the period charges can be laid for Elections Act violations, and also fours years less than the standard retention periods for income tax records, personal credit records, and records kept by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
“I didn’t [realize it], but now I do. I hadn’t thought of it in terms of election cycles. It is kind of an arbitrary year, I mean income taxes are generally kept for seven years, a bad credit rating on you credit score lapses after seven years,” Mr. Rathgeber said.
NDP MP Paul Dewar (Ottawa Centre, Ont.), also not on the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, agreed the period could lead to investigations or cases collapsing prior to a subsequent election.
“One year was not sustainable, so, politically, they had to change it to something else,” Mr. Dewar said.
“So they put three years, which is not four years, or five years and certainly not the threshold of seven,” he told The Hill Times.
“Once they were outed on that, they had to change it to something else. Just from observation, when you have seven years for all these other qualifiers for everything from your credit card to prosecution, it would be in line with what they’re doing in terms of regulation and oversight and that is when it comes to the ability of the chief electoral officer to investigate, prosecute, hands are tied. When it comes to actual evidence, evidence available, they pull back the yardsticks,” Mr. Dewar said.
In the clause-by-clause scrutiny as the government rushed the bill through committee to meet its own deadline, Conservative MPs voted down three opposition amendments that would have extended the record and script retention periods to five years.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com/
Author: Tim Naumetz
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