Chief electoral officer left out of reform loop
Unethical calls trigger election changes
The federal government will introduce a comprehensive “election reform act” on Thursday without having shown the legislation to the chief electoral officer.
Tim Uppal, the minister of state for democratic reform, announced in question period Tuesday that the longoverdue piece of legislation would be tabled to “improve the integrity, accountability and administration of Canada’s election system.”
Last month, as Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand released a report recommending changes to respond to the robocall affair, he said he hadn’t been consulted by anyone in government about a new elections law. On Tuesday, Elections Canada spokeswoman Diane Benson said that Mayrand had still not been consulted.
“Elections Canada officials will be briefed by government officials on the contents of the bill on Thursday afternoon and will then begin the process of reviewing it,” Benson said in an email.
A spokesperson for Uppal said late Tuesday that he met with Mayrand this week to discuss election reform but did not give Mayrand a copy of the bill.
Former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley said Tuesday it would have been better for the government to review the legislation with Mayrand before tabling it.
“It is always preferable to consult meaningfully the chief electoral officer on legislation affecting the Canada Elections Act before tabling it,” he said. “If they are going to be proposing changes in the procedures and the way of doing things, there is a practical element that the chief electoral officer is in an ideal position to comment. Instead of waiting for the bill to be tabled and go to a committee and say, ‘You should change this,’ it’s done beforehand.”
Kingsley said the strategy the government is using doesn’t pre-empt the chief electoral officer from expressing his views, “but it makes it more awkward than necessary.”
In March 2012, after reports of unethical telephone calls during the last election, Conservative MPs voted in favour of an NDP motion calling for legislation to be tabled within six months.
The government didn’t act until this week.
Last month, Mayrand tabled an in-depth report recommending urgent legislative changes to prevent dirty political calls and give investigators greater powers to tackle them when they take place.
Uppal told reporters Tuesday the act to be tabled this week will be based on Mayrand’s report, but also on the 1994 Lortie commission report on electoral reform, a report by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and recommendations from a House of Commons committee. By tabling a comprehensive bill, the government may seek to take the focus off changes required to deal with unethical calls, said Craig Scott, the NDP critic for democratic reform.
“We’re not just looking at fraud-call stuff,” he said. “We’re looking at other things. The question is whether the most crucial stuff is going to get buried in the details.”
Scott said he also is concerned that the reforms, which Mayrand has called urgent, could be derailed if the government prorogues before the next election. That would kill the bill.
“I just worry they’ll pull the plug some time in the next year,” he said.
In his report, Preventing Deceptive Communications with Electors, Mayrand outlined suggestions for new elections rules. He recommended increasing penalties for violations and giving Elections Canada investigators broader powers to investigate complaints. He also repeated an earlier proposal to give his office the power to require that political parties open their books, a recommendation that was previously rejected by a Conservative-controlled parliamentary committee. Mayrand also said it should be made illegal to impersonate an Elections Canada official, noting that neither the elections law nor the Criminal Code prevent the kind of ruse used by “Pierre Poutine,” the pseudonym of the person or persons behind misleading robocalls sent to voters in Guelph in 2011. The bill also suggested a registry of party phone calls to voters and new rules requiring them to clearly identify the origin of the calls.
It’s not clear which recommendations from the procedure and house affairs committee Uppal considered in drafting new legislation.
The committee’s last report on reforming election rules was issued in February 2012 — written before the robocalls affair made headlines — came in response to Mayrand’s report on the 2008 election, not the 2011 vote, which was marred by misleading calls. That report, in response to a set of recommendations from Mayrand, rejected his proposal to give the chief electoral officer the right to request documentation to support financial returns filed by political parties.
Currently, local candidates must submit detailed financial reports for their campaigns to Elections Canada but the central party campaigns need only provide general reports that have been audited by a third party.