In June, for example, Elections Canada sent a note to the Speaker of the House of Commons asking him to suspend a Conservative MP from Manitoba, Shelly Glover, for failing to file proper documents relating to the 2011 campaign.
More seriously, in the 2006 election, the Conservative Party of Canada used the “in and out” scheme to take advantage of a loophole in spending rules.
In the 2011 election, about 7,000 voters in Guelph riding received fraudulent robocalls directing them to the wrong polling station. In a separate case, misdirecting calls in other ridings led to a court challenge asking a Federal Court judge to overturn the election results in six ridings. The judge found that misdirecting calls did take place, found that the most likely source of the voter information behind those calls was the Conservative database, CIMS, but declined to overturn the results.
In that same election, Conservative candidate Peter Penashue’s campaign took inappropriate contributions in Labrador and several Conservative candidates were told they had overspent their limits.
The in and out scandal resulted in convictions and fines under the Canada Elections Act for the Conservative party and its fundraising arm. Del Mastro has been charged and has left the Conservative caucus. Penashue stepped down, ran in a byelection, and lost. In the so-called robocalls scandal, so far the only person charged is Michael Sona, a Conservative campaign worker in Guelph.
Yet through it all, the response of the Conservative party has been either spin (in the case of in and out), stubborn support (Del Mastro, Penashue), silence combined with juvenile deflection (robocalls) and even, a judge found, outright “trench warfare” to prevent the courts from looking into allegations of electoral fraud.
In short, every election since Stephen Harper became prime minister has been associated with some Conservative battle with Elections Canada, some scandal over broken rules.
It is hard not to wonder whether Harper’s Conservative government has a problem with Elections Canada.
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If so, the problem is long-standing. It goes back, at least, to June 2000. That’s when Stephen Joseph Harper, the president of the National Citizens Coalition, launched a court challenge of the Canada Elections Act. He argued that the limits on third-party advertising were unconstitutional infringements of free speech, because citizens have the right to participate in elections by making their views known.
In 2004, he lost. In a case called Harper v. Canada, the Supreme Court upheld the rules, which among other things, place caps on advertising at both the national and riding level and prohibit collusion to get around those limits. The court found that the restriction of expression was justified: “In the absence of spending limits, it is possible for the affluent or a number of persons pooling their resources and acting in concert to dominate the political discourse, depriving their opponents of a reasonable opportunity to speak and be heard, and undermining the voter’s ability to be adequately informed of all views.”
Two years later, Harper became prime minister. His time as an activist was at an end but his struggles with Elections Canada were just beginning.
The question is: What motivates this continued antagonism? He is no longer the National Citizens Coalition activist. His tenure has been marked by a great deal of compromise and even outright reversals on policies he once fervently espoused. The recent series on Harper in power by Postmedia’s Mark Kennedy was tellingly titled Rebel to Realist.
Yet there is a thread connecting Stephen Harper the pragmatist prime minister to Stephen Harper the young ideologue: Fundamentally, the Conservative Party of Canada under Harper resents being told how it can spend its money during elections.
A corollary of this is that the Conservatives don’t like important elements of Canada’s election law or the agency that enforces it. Somewhat ludicrously, given their “strong, stable” majority government, they still see themselves as victims of the overbearing power of the state.
For example, in an affidavit filed in response to the Council of Canadians-backed court challenge, the official agent for one of the Conservative candidates, Jeff Watson, said Elections Canada was “pursuing a vendetta” against the Conservative party. In 2008, MP Pierre Poilievre called an RCMP raid on Conservative headquarters a “circus” and accused Elections Canada of tipping off the opposition.
That year, the Conservatives — including Poilievre and Del Mastro — voted against an opposition motion expressing support for Elections Canada.
Combine the mistrust of the bureaucracy with its offence-only strategy of deflection, and you get a government that is at odds with, if not openly contemptuous of, one of the fundamental institutions of Canadian democracy.
On several occasions, these election-related scandals have also contributed to the undermining of that other institution which the Conservatives have shown themselves willing to hold in contempt: Parliament. The 2008 breakdown of Parliamentary committees was connected to the in and out scandal.
The irony is that respect for institutions and traditions should form the bedrock of conservatism. Perhaps that is one reason why the government has inflated the importance of the trappings of our democratic heritage — the rebranding of museums and the military, for example. The Elections Canada feud pits two streams of the modern Conservative party against each other: conservatism proper, which respects the rule of law and institutional authority, and the National Citizens Coalition strain of populist libertarianism that rejects centralized state power and praises civil disobedience, at least when it comes to people refusing to obey the Wheat Board, fill out census forms or follow election financing rules.
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In 2001, still as head of the citizens coalition, Stephen Harper wrote a fundraising letter in support of Paul Bryan, who had posted election results on his website in violation of the ban on “premature transmission” in the Canada Elections Act.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Kate Heartfield
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