Liberal MP gets off lightly
A CABINET POST MUST SURELY BE IN THE OFFING
This week, the national elections commissioner officially announced that the case of Calgary’s creeping candidate has been formally resolved. You may recall that George Chahal, now Liberal MP for Calgary Skyview, was caught on video having a nighttime rummage through a constituent’s mailbox during the late federal election and removing a Conservative flyer.
Representatives of Chahal’s campaign were initially unrepentant, claiming that Chahal had a perfectly acceptable reason for stealing an opponent’s flyer out of a mailbox — namely, that the Conservatives were giving out incorrect polling-station info. As the CBC’S Hannah Kost pointed out Tuesday in an item on the resolution of Chahal’s case, something like the complete opposite seems to have been true: it was Chahal’s flyers that had incorrect information, and the ones he was stealing, in quantities now unknowable, were accurate. Either way, it struck me then — and strikes me now — as a lousy excuse, and Chahal soon chose to admit guilt.
This seems to have greatly impressed the commissioner of Canada elections, who had the option under the Elections Act to charge Chahal with a summary-conviction criminal offence carrying a maximum penalty of six months in prison. Chahal violated Section 325(1) of the Elections Act, which states that “No person shall prevent or impair the transmission to the public of an election advertising message without the consent of a person with authority to authorize its transmission.”
We think it inarguable that this understates the nature of Chahal’s offence, irrespective of its purely technical correctness. It puts his behaviour under the same heading as spray-painting an opponent’s lawn sign or billboard — merely interfering with a rival’s campaign efforts — and rifling through a mailbox is self-evidently more heinous than that.
No matter. The commissioner generously decided, as recent changes to election law allow, that it was best to let Chahal off with an “administrative monetary penalty,” rather than suffering the agonies of a criminal trial. This sent the matter on an algorithmic set of rails. Chahal’s wrongdoing, in the commission’s casuistic scheme, is still considered very serious. It is a “Type C” violation of election law, where “A” is the least serious and “D” means you’ve probably voted 16 times or dumped a ballot box in the river. Type C conduct is anything that causes “harm to the fundamental objectives sought by the (Elections Act)” — i.e., having a democracy.
The baseline administrative penalty for this species of abominable behaviour turns out to be $500. The commissioner is free to adjust this penalty, within algorithmic limits, for mitigating or aggravating factors. His published decision does not explicitly consider that Chahal might have been filching flyers all night before he picked a porch with a sufficiently good camera. It doesn’t mention that his action had an invasion-of-privacy aspect as well as a purely electoral one. It takes no conscious notice of the Chahal campaign’s initial bravado, or indeed of the inaccurate polling information in Chahal’s own flyer. And it certainly doesn’t suggest that the punishment applied to the winner of a tainted election should be harsher than the fine for some fringe kook who would have finished fifth either way.
No, it merely observes that Chahal was very co-operative once the evidence of his bizarre act was all over the internet. The final fine stays at $500, and the new member is properly shriven. Can that cabinet chair for which he was so widely touted be far behind?