Voters’ rights under attack
Two numbers stand out in the heated debate over the Conservative government’s ironically named Fair Elections Act.
One hundred and fifty nine. That is the number of academics in law, history, and political science from across Canada — including experts from the University of Saskatchewan such as Michael Atkinson, director of the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, and John Courtney, a member of the Saskatchewan electoral boundaries commission — who signed an open letter to the National Post this week that warned the proposed legislation would undermine democracy in Canada.
The other number is nine. That, according to pollster and political commentator Jaime Watt, is the percentage of Canadians outside Ottawa who are paying attention while their rights are being undermined.
Mr. Watt, who provides public opinions data in the weekly Political Traction segment of CBC’s Power and Politics, says that within the Ottawa bubble — the politicians, bureaucrats and pundits for whom politics is a staple — there’s intense interest in the bill now flying through Parliament.
It’s not just the academics who are concerned over the bill. Its detractors stretch from former NDP leader Ed Broadbent to former Reform leader Preston Manning to Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand and Harry Neufeld, the author of a much-misquoted report on the problems of Canada’s electoral system.
The bill has also come under withering criticism from most of Canada’s major newspapers, with the Globe and Mail commenting that its flaws are so numerous that they cannot be addressed in a single editorial, but require a series that’s been running all week.
Critics point out that while the elections bill touches on some flaws in the current legislation that the governing Conservatives have exploited over the past few elections — including the use of robocalls to suppress votes — the harm the revamped law will do to the democratic process is far too great to warrant the proposed minor improvements.
Yet the Conservative government is determined to rush the flawed legislation into law before it faces the voters in 2015. The party even shoved aside a complaint from the Opposition after Tory MP Brad Butt lied to Parliament, then recanted after being found out. He received a rare reprimand from Speaker Andrew Scheer.
While the dangerous flaws of Bill C-23 are well documented and too numerous to detail here, what is most disturbing about its overt attempt to discourage voters from exercising their rights is the similarity it bears to the tactics being used by extreme factions of the Republican party in the U.S.
As in the U.S., the Conservatives have created a completely fictitious threat of widespread voter fraud to justify identification requirements that favour their supporters while making voting more difficult for traditionally non-conservative voters.
As Harvard Professor Alexander Keyssar says, the various voter suppression laws follow the same pattern — a template provided by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council — and use the same rhetoric to promote it. And, as in Canada, this attempt to roll back voter rights is fundamentally contrary to our postwar history. The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The StarPhoenix. They are unsigned because they do not necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the members of the newspaper’s editorial board, which operates independently from the news departments of the paper.