Investigating election preserves trust

DEAR EDITOR:

We have Donald Trump to thank for the scourge of election denialism, which creates a crisis of trust in our elections.

Today, one accusation is enough to create an echo-chamber of impropriety and raise a flurry of doubt.

If pressed, it provides opportunity to challenge results – doubt is contagious. Trump’s insurrection on Capital Hill inspired a copycat insurrection in Brazil, by the “Trump of the Tropics,” Jair Bolsonaro.

And then, there is election denialism Peruvian style, where street riots erupted when opposition congress members and corporate elites arrested and removed president Petro Castillo, a school teacher from the rural Andes region and Peru’s first indigenous president, after he announced plans to nationalize the country’s copper mines, in order to share more of the country’s wealth with ordinary Peruvians.

In Canada, thankfully, we don’t reach for our guns like the Americans do. Instead we tend to deny and question by creating royal commissions and special inquiries – the Canadian version of election denialism.

Of course nobody wants foreign interference in Canada’s elections, but before “friend-shoring” and “de-coupling” policy, we were an interconnected globalized world willingly to engage with China and others.

It is not unusual for China to have preferences. We ourselves have our own preferences in seeing changes in Russia and China.

We should also remember that Meng Wanzhou, Huawei chair was arrested in Vancouver airport Dec. 1 2018, and things just went south from there, when the two Michele’s were later imprisoned for over 1000 days in Beijing.

So is China’s heightened interest so unusual? As a long-time active federal election campaign worker and volunteer, I find the CSIS threat assessment a little incredulous.

It describes the kind of behaviour every campaign worker and volunteer from any federal party, might have said or done once or twice, trying to get their particular candidate elected, during the robust and rollicking days of every Canadian election cycle. However, the Prime Minister has rightly called for an investigation.

Jon Peter Christoff, West Kelowna