Thursday they were joined by Harry Neufeld, the former chief electoral officer of British Columbia and the author of an inquiry into irregularities in the 2011 election. Neufeld’s report has been much quoted by the minister responsible, Pierre Poilievre, in particular to support his contention that the bill’s ban on “vouching” — allowing one voter to affirm another’s eligibility to vote in a riding, in cases where the usual documentation is lacking — was needed to prevent voter fraud.
But as Neufeld told a parliamentary committee studying the bill, he never suggested that voter fraud was a problem — indeed, like his federal counterparts, he does not believe it is. Like them, he is much more concerned by the number of eligible voters likely to be disenfranchised by the ban on vouching, and by a similar ban on the use of Elections Canada’s voter information cards as proof of residency: as many as half a million. Not only did the minister blatantly misrepresent his report, he told the committee, but in drafting the legislation he made no effort to consult him. As for the bill itself, his advice was blunt: “amend it or pull it.”
As I say, under any normal government, this would be considered fairly devastating stuff: not only near universal expert opposition, but a widely held suspicion that the bill, far from merely flawed, is expressly designed to tilt the next election in the Conservatives’ favour. As for Poilievre, the revelations that he had acted in such consummate bad faith on such a critically important bill — failing to consult, ignoring some experts’ advice and misrepresenting others — would ordinarily be career-limiting, to say the least.
But this is not a normal government. It does not operate in the usual way, nor does it feel bound by the usual rules. After all, if this were a normal government, it would not have as its minister for democratic reform such a noxious partisan as Poilievre, whose contempt for Parliament and its traditions registers every time he rises to speak in it.
If this were a normal government, it would have sought the widest possible input on the bill, in recognition that this was no ordinary piece of legislation. Even a radical government, with little time for consensus-seeking in pursuit of its agenda, would understand that an elections bill is different, in that it touches, not just on this or that question of policy, on which there will always be disagreement, but on the public’s faith in the democratic process — on which there should be no disagreement. Indeed, a radical government would be especially concerned on this point — for it would want to arm itself with an unassailable popular mandate to enact the changes it desired.
Chances are that a more consensual process would not have produced this bill. A normal government would not give rise to the same suspicions of its intentions in the first place, but where it encountered the kind of general opposition, not to say alarm, various provisions of this bill have aroused, would have been at pains to amend or at least explain them. Consider, as an example, the extensive efforts made by the Conservative MP Michael Chong to disarm opposition to his Reform Act. In a normal government, he and not Poilievre would be the minister for democratic reform.
But as this is not a normal government, Poilievre has instead doubled down. To the detailed objections of its critics, he offers nothing but the same, and I mean exactly the same, talking points, recited without evident effort to persuade but merely to impress upon his listeners how genuinely uninterested in their opinion he is. To Neufeld’s complaints at having his report misrepresented, he responds that Neufeld does not understand his own report. The inaccurate and out-of-context passages he had cited from it were, he told Parliament, quoted “accurately and in context.” If Neufeld did not wish to use these words, he blithely told the CBC’s Evan Solomon, he should not have written them.
And so we face the likelihood, as incredible as it sounds, of the government using the majority it won in the last election to pass a bill widely perceived as intended to fix the next — and contesting that election in the shadow of illegitimacy the bill would cast. It will do so, what is more, not in spite of the opposition it has aroused, but because of it: because it has convinced itself that all such opposition, from whatever source, proceeds from the same implacably partisan motives as its own.
This is how you get to 28% in the polls: when every criticism is only further proof that you’re right. It’s one thing to fleece the rubes in the grassroots with this nonsense — They’re all out to get us! Please send money! — but when you start to believe your own rhetoric, your brains turn to mush. It makes you incapable of acknowledging error, or even the possibility of it. And so it blinds you to the train wreck to which you are headed.
On the other hand, can it get any worse for the Tories? They are already down to the hardest of the hard core: the people whose faith has remained unbroken, through every blunder, broken promise and scandal. Would even the perception that they were trying to fix the election shake this support loose? Could anything?
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Andrew Coyne
No comments:
Post a Comment