Who cares who the election act benef its?
We should ask if change helps our democracy
The prime minister, charges Andrew Scheer, is “rigging the rules” of future elections “to benefit himself.” Worse, he is “ramming through” his proposed changes to Canada’s election law “before Parliament or Canadians have a say.” In sum, according to the Conservative leader, he is imposing undemocratic changes by undemocratic means.
It is, to be sure, a delicious moment for the Conservatives. Were they not accused of the very same thing by the opposition Liberals when they were in power, in respect of the notorious Fair Elections Act? By turning the charges back on the Grits, they can not only tar their opponents as scheming antidemocratic hypocrites, but may hope to partially exonerate themselves. After all, if Everybody Does It, then self-interested power plays like the Fair Elections Act are no longer assaults on democracy or even particularly odious, but mere politics as usual.
But hold on. Are the two morally equivalent? There’s a certain symmetry, granted: much of Bill C-76, as the legislation is known, would simply repeal various provisions of the Fair Elections Act. But if one party’s changes to the elections law can be criticized as self-serving, so far as they appear to favour that party’s interests, is it equally self-serving for another party to reverse them? More broadly, is that the only test of whether a given change in policy is to be desired: whether it is to the benefit of the governing party?
Certainly there is the potential for abuse in any such exercise, even the suspicion of which should be enough to warn governments away from imposing broad changes to the elections law without some degree of cross-party consensus, or at the very least consultation. Curtailing debate on the bill in Parliament, as the Liberals did Wednesday, is hardly conducive to that consensus — though a better test will be whether the Grits are willing to accept opposition amendments in committee.
There is, what is more, much to criticize in the bill. Far from banning all foreign interference in Canadian elections, it leaves open a giant loophole that would seem to permit much of the financial funny-business seen in previous campaigns.
Rather than subjecting political parties to the same limits faced by private corporations under the federal Privacy Act, the bill gives the parties continued carte blanche to use Canadians’ personal data as they wish: they just have to report how.
Instead of putting parties and “third-party” advocacy groups on an even footing, each as legitimate avenues for citizen self-expression in a democracy, the bill blatantly favours the parties, allowing them to spend orders of magnitude more to influence public opinion at election time. Parties would continue to benefit, likewise, from the uniquely generous tax credit available to contributors, as they would from the partial reimbursement of candidates’ expenses.
Would the bill also be to the particular benefit of the Liberal party? No doubt it would, in some respects. Foreign contributions to Canadian political campaigns have not tended to be for the benefit of the Conservatives; that, as much as any concern for principle, may explain why the Conservatives have been so eager to close it off, and the Liberals so reluctant.
At the same time, limits on campaign spending are presumably to the benefit of the party that has less money to spend (the Liberals) versus the party that has more (the Conservatives). Which may again explain the parties’ positions.
But so what? The proper question to ask of any reform is not which party happens to benefit disproportionately from it, but whether it helps or harms our democracy.
Just because a policy is to the advantage or otherwise of a party doesn’t make it bad policy. We can surely agree that eliminating foreign influence from Canadian elections, for example, is a good thing: that this might benefit the Tories or disbenefit the Liberals is secondary. Neither is a bad policy saved merely because it is unclear which party might profit from it most.
That doesn’t mean we should be insensitive to the ways in which an otherwise defensible policy might have the effect of benefiting one party or another. Some limits on campaign spending during the pre-writ period, such as Bill C-76 would impose, is probably wise, but the Conservatives are right to point out how this might favour the governing party, with all of the resources at its disposal; their proposal for offsetting limits on government advertising in the same period likewise probably has merit.
The same lens should be applied to the changes enacted under the Conservatives. What made the Fair Elections Act so pernicious was not the extent to which its provisions might have tilted the playing field in favour of the Conservatives, but the collateral damage to other important democratic principles. Excluding the use of voter information cards or vouching as means of voter identification, for example, is wrong not because it might be to the advantage of one party or another, but because of the many voters it might disenfranchise.
By the same token, earlier reforms such as eliminating corporate and union donations and abolishing the pervote subsidy might have been to the advantage of the Conservatives, with their comparatively large base of small individual donors. That may even — who knows? — have been the intent. But it was also good policy.
Parties will always seek advantage. That’s a given. But it is the effect, not the intent of policy that counts; and fairness between the parties is but one consideration among many. Maybe not even an especially important one.