Tories’ election bill is crazy making
First principles ignored and critics called ‘ biased’
Conservatives at their best disdain the lazy moral relativism that passes for sophistication in some corners of the left. There are such things as right and wrong, they insist, not right for some and wrong for others. Some absolutes remain.
Conservatives at their worst espouse their own brand of relativism, with its own slipshod reasoning and its own situational ethics. It is the achievement of this government to have relativized a number of what were once considered absolutes: whether the census should be accurate, for example, or whether governments should be answerable to Parliament. And, now, whether elections should be fair.
Ideas previously accepted as axiomatic — that everyone has a right to vote, that those who don’t vote should be encouraged to, that public confidence in elections should not be undermined nor the integrity of their administrators lightly impugned — are now in play. The people who uphold these ideas — experts in election law, present and former elections officials, people with long experience in the legal and political worlds who have earned reputations for sound judgment — now find themselves dismissed as biased, or even bought. Because there are now “sides” to this question.
Criticism of the Fair Elections Act as such is impossible. For criticism, to have traction, must appeal to first principles: A thing is considered deficient so far as it falls short of agreedupon standards, commonly shared ideals. But if there are no first principles, it is pointless; if everything is debatable, nothing can be debated.
The Tories have arrived at this station, convincing themselves if no one else and convincing themselves that no one else need be convinced, by way of folklore: generalizations, shards of truth, passed around and embellished upon until they become proof that they are right and everyone else is wrong.
There are such things as empire- building bureaucrats, for example, intent only on expanding their budgets and powers. But that general observation does not automatically apply in the individual case of Marc Mayrand, the chief electoral officer ( nor if it did would that decide the merits of his argument).
It is not unknown to find partisans among the civil service, Liberal mandarins who never could accept the Tories as the legitimate government of the country. But Mayrand was a Conservative appointment. It is not sufficient to prove bias that he has sometimes ruled in a way the government does not like.
One can imagine Elections Canada campaigns to encourage people to vote that would be prejudicial to one party or another. But that does not mean that every such campaign is by its nature prejudicial, still less that Elections Canada has, as Sen. Linda Frum claimed, “a conflict of interest” in both administering elections and promoting participation in them. It may be that those groups least likely to vote, and therefore most logically the target of such campaigns — students, for example — are less likely to vote Conservative. But that does not mean it is unfair for Elections Canada to encourage them to vote; it means the Conservatives should make greater efforts to reach them.
The presumption in a democracy is that everyone has a right to vote, and everyone has a duty to: in the full exercise of their democratic rights they advance not only their own interests but society’s. The electorate is not made up merely of those voters it occurs to the parties to drive to the polls: It’s everyone. It is for the voters to choose the parties, not the parties to choose them.
The most superficially appealing part of the bill — and the issue to which the government has sought to reduce the entire debate — is the ban on vouching. What is so unreasonable, Conservatives ask, about requiring that every voter should provide identification?
You have to provide ID to get on the bus, after all, or to buy booze, if asked. And if you don’t stop to think about it or haven’t followed the debate, you may find that argument persuasive.
If, on the other hand, you are aware that it’s usually not proving who you are that’s the issue, but where you live; if you bear in mind that of the government’s famous “39 pieces of identification,” two- thirds do not carry an address; if you appreciate the legitimate difficulties some groups have — natives on reserve, for example — in obtaining this sort of documentation; if you realize, not only how rare voter fraud is, but how unlikely it is that vouching ( one person with ID swears an oath in support of one other person, who also swears an oath) could be used to commit it on any scale; if you remember that, until 2007, no ID was required of any kind; and, most of all, if you understand that voting is an inalienable right of citizenship — unlike, say, riding the bus — then you will be less ready to accept that the same rule of ID must be applied in every situation.
The most disturbing expression of this government’s relativism is what one might call its relativization of knowledge. That it could casually dismiss the unanimous expert opposition to the bill, without bothering to offer a rebuttal, shows contempt not just for those involved but for the whole concept of expertise.
Experts can sometimes get it wrong, of course, even where they are agreed. But the insinuation here is that they are wrong because they are experts, of which their very unanimity is further proof. That way lies madness, as we saw in the longform census “debate.”
It takes us into a partisan Bizarro World, where the more indefensible the policy is, the more it must be correct — for the more universal the expert dissent it arouses, the more this is taken as evidence, not that the policy is crazy, but of a kind of academic class hatred of the Harper government.
That’s one possible explanation, certainly. The other is that it’s crazy.