Elections Act follies need Parliament’s direct attention
Third-party spending needs better policing
It seems like about a hundred years ago, but one of the disquieting revelations of last year’s federal election campaign was that the Elections Act’s rules covering third-party spending are completely bananas.
Readers may recall Elections Canada warning environmental groups that they couldn’t just go on spending money in the fight against climate change without registering as third parties, with all the paperwork and bureaucracy that entails, all because People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier had supposedly made it a “partisan issue.” Now we have another bunch of overripe bananas on our hands: As the National Post first reported, the Commissioner of Canada Elections is investigating an anti-abortion organization called RightNow for having allegedly “recruited, trained and coordinated volunteers that were directed to over 50 campaigns” during the 2019 campaign.
RightNow’s mission is to identify pro-life candidates with a chance of winning, and connect them with volunteers eager to help them with their nomination and election campaigns. Readers may not find this particularly controversial. Members and supporters of all manner of groups, most famously and numerously labour unions, campaign alongside political candidates all the time. A quick rummage around Facebook from last year’s campaign finds both Toronto NDP MP Andrew Cash (who was eventually defeated) and Nova Scotia Liberal candidate Bernadette Jordan (who is now federal fisheries minister) thanking Unifor members wearing “Unifor Votes” T-shirts for their canvassing help. Photos on Unifor’s own Facebook page chronicle an October 5 event in Winnipeg called “Politics and Pancakes event plus canvassing for (NDP MP) Daniel Blaikie.”
Unifor president Jerry Dias made no bones about his intention to prevent Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives from winning; the mega-union spent over $1.4 million in those efforts; and Dias boasted of his success in a triumphant postelection blog post: “Damn right we spoke out. Damn right it made a difference. And damn right we’ll do it again.”
Unifor was far from alone. Public Sector Alliance of Canada (PSAC) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers encouraged their members to volunteer for non-Conservative candidates. The United Steelworkers (USW) explicitly endorsed the NDP, encouraging members “to volunteer and make individual donations.” A March 19 resolution of the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ (CUPE) national executive board “endorse(d) CUPE’s participation in the 2019 federal election, including ... providing campaign skills training for our activists (and) publicly supporting the New Democratic Party of Canada.”
At first blush, there doesn’t seem to be anything legally untoward with this — or indeed what RightNow was doing on a much smaller scale. (USW claimed $1.1 million in third-party expenses, PSAC $345,000, CUPE $161,000. RightNow splashed out a whopping $8,255.71.) “Volunteer labour” is explicitly exempt from the Elections Act prohibition against third parties donating to political parties or candidates, either in cash or in kind. But in an April 22 letter to Albertos Polizogopoulos, RightNow’s legal counsel, the commissioner’s director of investigations, Mylène Gigou, argued that “the recruiting, training and coordinating of volunteers are core political activities of a political campaign” — and in performing those activities, RightNow may have “circumvented” the third-party donation prohibition.
This is, of course, preposterous. On what principle would we allow members or supporters of third parties to volunteer in election campaigns — as any healthy democracy ought to — while prohibiting spending so much as a dime to recruit said volunteers? “Training” or “coordinating” could be defined as narrowly as telling peop le what sorts of things to say on people’s doorsteps and what sorts of things not to. You don’t just turn people loose with your campaign materials, like sheep on a grassy meadow, and hope for the best.
At the very least, the Commissioner of Canada Elections seems oddly fixated on small game. But that’s not to say it’s misinterpreting the legislation. The consensus regarding Elections Canada’s warning to environmental groups was that it had lost the plot — perhaps that’s why nothing has been done about it — but it hadn’t. The rule is crystal clear: any person or group “taking a position on an issue with which a registered party or candidate is associated,” and who wants to spend more than $500 on advertising with respect to that issue, has to register as a third party.
It’s idiotic and offensive on any number of levels: Why the hell should anyone have to change the way they talk or advertise just because someone in Ottawa called an election? But Elections Canada didn’t author it. It’s up to Parliament to change it. And now it’s up to Parliament to clarify that not only is there nothing wrong with advocacy groups training and co-ordinating volunteers to advance their cause, it’s precisely what a healthy politics should want. Politicians and their parties enjoy utterly outrageous public subsidies, via the 75-per-cent rebate on donations up to $400, and are free to use as much as they want of that money turning volunteers into brain-dead partisan drones. A $100 donation to RightNow or any other grassroots organization that isn’t a registered charity gets you precisely bupkis back. Our election laws have no business whatsoever interfering with their activities.
WHY THE HELL SHOULD ANYONE HAVE TO CHANGE THE WAY THEY TALK OR ADVERTISE JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE IN OTTAWA CALLED AN ELECTION?