Tory election bill is too important to be rushed
When the Conservatives introduced an election reform bill this week, they took hold of Marc Mayrand, the chief electoral officer, and rubbed his face in the snow, politically speaking.
Mayrand, whom Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed in 2007, has repeatedly been the public face of disciplinary action against the Conservatives for various electoral misdeeds, and this week the Tories sought to even the score.
The bill would remove the jewel from Mayrand’s bureaucratic empire — Elections Canada’s investigative branch — and limit his power.
Pierre Poilievre, Harper’s minister of state for democratic reform, justified these moves by saying “the referee should not be wearing a team jersey.”
The next day Mayrand responded: “The only jersey I think I’m wearing, if we have to carry the analogy, I believe is the one with the stripes, white and black.”
I think Mayrand is right and Poilievre is wrong, but we shouldn’t let this to-and-fro distract us from carefully considering this 242-page bill, which will be governing the conduct of our elections long after Harper and Mayrand are gone.
Everyone ought to agree with some of the changes — like the establishment of a registry to track political calls — but a number of measures need careful debate at boring committee meetings: ■ The Tories have their hearts set on moving the office of the commissioner — where investigators work — away from Elections Canada, apparently to separate the regulatory and investigative functions.
But the Director of Public Prosecutions — who will appoint future commissioners — isn’t responsible for any other investigative agencies. Also, he reports to the government, not to Parliament. It’s hard to see how the move would allow for political interference, which is the really scary prospect, but it also poses problems. ■ The act limits the authority of Mayrand in several ways. I like the idea of requiring him to post interpretations of rules, but the act appears designed to muzzle him, forbidding him from speaking to the public about anything except the location of voting booths.
This is either a drafting error or an unacceptably authoritarian move. It must be reversed. ■ The same clause that forbids Mayrand from speaking would stop Elections Canada’s efforts to promote turnout. No more ad campaigns to encourage voting among groups with low turnout — like young people and aboriginals — groups that — what a coincidence! — don’t vote Tory.
Poilievre argues that political parties do a better job of encouraging voting — an interesting point — but parties tend to focus on likely voters, especially boomers and seniors. ■ The bill will eliminate vouching — where a voter without identification is vouched for by another voter — and eliminates the use of voter information cards as acceptable identification.
This might make it impossible for some people to vote: students, aboriginals, homeless people and residents at seniors’ homes.
This may disproportionately affect non-Tory voters and seems like a solution in search of a problem.
The Conservatives point to a study that shows many administrative errors can be blamed on vouching, but that same study says the best solution appears to be improving the administration of elections. ■ The Elections Act lays out exactly how the agency can hire the army of election officials needed for one day every four years: there were 150,000 polls in 20,000 polling sites in 2011.
At each poll, there is a poll clerk and a deputy returning officers, both of which are appointed by a party, so that you normally have officials from two parties looking over each other’s work at each table.
Parties are no longer able to field the armies of volunteers like they once did, though, which causes Elections Canada big staffing headaches. The act gives the agency an extra week to staff up, but it also allows the incumbent party in each riding to appoint the central poll supervisor, which seems like a terrible idea. ■ The bill fails to give Elections Canada the authority to inspect the books of parties or riding associations. Since post-Watergate reforms in the United States, Americans have been able to see how parties spend money. Canadians have absolutely no idea. ■ The bill also fails to give investigators the authority to compel testimony from witnesses of election crime, as Elections Canada requested. Poilievre said it would be unconstitutional, but several Canadian investigative agencies have that power. This looks especially bad given that several Conservative election workers have refused to speak to investigators about a mysterious Guelph robocall.
On Wednesday, the day after they tabled the bill, after only a few hours of debate, the Conservatives moved to cut short debate before sending it to committee, which suggests the government plans to treat the legislative process for this bill as a ritual that must be endured, as is its habit.
But the legitimacy of our political system depends entirely on public faith in the electoral process, so the government has excellent reasons to allow this bill to be properly debated and amended as necessary.