“We in the Ottawa bubble have been engaged in this for weeks, but it’s really only starting to reach critical mass as an issue in the coffee shops of the nation,” said NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.). “If we manage to get the poor Chief Electoral Officer to appear, I anticipate Dean Del Mastro will move that we go in-camera which is non-debatable and always succeeds so, it will be of questionable benefit to the general public if the chief electoral officer’s not allowed to say his piece in public and it gets shrouded in a cloak of secrecy.”
In a statement recently, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand said that he will deliver a report to Parliament “in due course” with regard to the investigation into fraudulent calls during the last election campaign, but said he would “welcome the opportunity” to appear before the Procedure and House Affairs Committee “to provide information on [Elections Canada’s] administrative and investigative processes.”
Conservative MP Joe Preston (Elgin-Middlesex-London, Ont.), chair of the House Affairs Committee, told The Hill Times last week that getting Mr. Mayrand before the committee is a “matter of arranging a date.” The Globe and Mail later reported that the committee has asked him to appear this Thursday, March 29, the same day Finance Minister Jim Flaherty (Whitby-Oshawa, Ont.) tables the budget.
Currently the committee is looking at a point of privilege against Public Safety Minister Vic Toews (Provencher, Man.). Mr. Preston said points of privilege usually take precedence at committee meetings, but the committee could decide to stop working on that issue and move on to something else. He said he anticipates the committee will hear from Mr. Mayrand in “the next week or two.”
“I’m at the will of the committee as to if they want to stop what we’re doing and have him come. It’s not a one-person decision here. I get to be a better chair by not making decisions for my committee and letting the committee make the decisions. It may make the process slower, but it sure makes it happier,” Mr. Preston said.
In response to whether the committee will be in camera, Mr. Preston said he doesn’t see why Mr. Mayrand’s appearance would need to be behind closed doors.
“The Procedure and House Affairs Committee works very collegially and we are as open as we can possibly be. Normally, committee business would make us be in camera, but I can’t see where having the chief electoral officer would be in camera,” Mr. Preston said. “That’s at the choice of the committee, not the chair.”
Liberal House Leader Marc Garneau (Westmount-Ville Marie, Que.), vice-chair of the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, said he is hopeful that the Conservative members of the committee would not try to move the meeting in camera.
“They have said that they want to be open and cooperate … so I cannot see the Conservatives saying we need to do this in camera,” he said. “I can’t speak for the committee and I won’t speak for the committee, but I think that issue is likely to come up next week. I hope it does, in terms of at least setting a date.”
Mr. Garneau noted, however, that he doesn’t know exactly what Mr. Mayrand wants to share with the committee, and if necessary the meeting could go in-camera.
“If he gets into some information that may be related to the pursuit of certain inquiries where sharing that information with the public might prejudice something, then there might be some reasons for that, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see whether the chief electoral officer intends to just provide information that he intends for the whole public to know, or whether he wants to discuss some sensitive information, in which case it will become clear he would like to do this only in camera,” he said. “I don’t want to judge it, because I don’t know yet.”
The robocalls story broke last month when The Ottawa Citizen and Postmedia News reported that Elections Canada received complaints about automated calls on May 2, election day, last year. Voters in as many as 18 ridings received phone messages, or “robocalls” from a service pretending to be calling on behalf of Elections Canada, telling them that their polling station had been moved, and misdirecting people to a new location. The calls seem to have been targeted at Liberal and NDP voters in hotly-contested ridings that the Conservatives were hoping to take from Grit incumbents. Voters have also complained about being inundated with annoying or harassing pro-Liberal or NDP calls at all hours of the day. Elections Canada is currently investigating the issue.
The Conservative Party has denied allegations that there was a central, coordinated effort to suppress the vote during the last election campaign. During House debate on the issue, Minister of State for Democratic Reform Tim Uppal (Edmonton-Sherwood Park, Alta.) said: “What is alleged to have happened in Guelph, Ontario is unacceptable. Voter participation is the cornerstone of our democracy. In fact, we are proud that more than 900,000 more Canadians voted in the last election. We saw that right across the country and believe it demonstrates the strength of our democracy. However, anyone who makes an effort to suppress voter participation by providing wrong information should be held fully accountable by Elections Canada for doing so.”
In Mr. Mayrand’s statement, he said the public shouldn’t be “drawing conclusions based on possibly inaccurate and incomplete information.”
Last week, the National Post reported that the calls originating from Guelph went to cities as far as Thunder Bay and Kingston, and suggested that the person making those calls could have had a bad data set and therefore the voter suppression issue could be isolated to Guelph, rather than more widespread than previously assumed. Mr. Martin said he doesn’t “buy” that explanation, however.
“I’m more inclined to accept the tentative conclusion that you get a phone call from the Conservative party and they’re asking, ‘Will you vote for the Conservatives? If you say yes, you go on one list and you get a phone call that says, ‘Make sure you come out and vote.’ If you say no, you don’t support the Conservatives, you go on list B, and that means you get a phone call on election day that lies to you saying your polling station has changed. That’s the scenario that I believe that’s closer to the truth,” he said.
“I just hope that Elections Canada has the tools to investigate that fully because if our worst fears are realized, and that was the game, then our electoral system needs a serious shake up and a serious review and we can’t allow that to undermine and compromise our democratic institutions. That has to be condemned in the strongest way possible and corrected so that it can never happen again,” Mr. Martin said.
Mr. Garneau said there are still many unanswered questions, including how widespread the issue is.
“If you live in Thunder Bay and you’re told to go to the mall in Guelph, then it’s clearly somehow something went wrong and it was really focused on Guelph, but if on the other hand, you live in Thunder Bay and you were told to go to a place that does exist in Thunder Bay, then that’s two different places. That’s the kind of information we don’t have at the moment so I think I’ll let the wheels of the inquiry turn and see what comes up out of it,” he said.
Both Mr. Martin and Mr. Garneau said that the issue will continue to dominate Question Period in the early part of the week before the budget is tabled this Thursday.
“There’s no question that the budget is important and there’s always new things that come up all the time, but certainly I think our basic strategy is if something new comes up related to the robocalls you can be sure that we’ll be talking about it, if there’s nothing new, we may be talking about it occasionally just to keep in the minds of Canadians,” Mr. Garneau said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: BEA VONGDOUANGCHANH
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