The Fair Elections Act

The “Fair Elections” Bill

 

Two followers of this blog recently asked me to comment on the Harper government’s Bill C-23, the so-called “Fair Elections Act.” An open letter on the Op-Ed page of the April 23^rd edition of the Globe and Mail signed by more than 400 Canadian academics provides a good summary of the bill’s major flaws. I support the arguments of its authors and will not attempt to duplicate them here. Today, April 25^th, the government introduced significant amendments to the bill which appear to remedy some of its worst features. What follows represents commentary on the arguments put forward in support of the original bill.

As I read the defenses of the bill put forward by its proponents including Senator Linda Frum and the Minister of Democratic Reform Pierre Poilievre, I am struck by how perfectly their arguments illustrate points made by George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. “In our time,” Orwell wrote, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”    

The question-begging used to justify Bill C-23 begins with its title. It is always a warning sign when a bill is given a value-laden title to put its proponents on the side of the angels and its critics on the defensive.

We seem to have borrowed this disreputable tactic from the Americans. When George Bush brought in legislation in the wake of 9-11 to allow the U.S. Intelligence services to carry out previously illegal wiretaps, searches without warrants, and the detention of persons suspected of terrorist sympathies without charges, he called it the Patriot Act. By implication, anyone who criticized the bill’s infringements on civil liberties guaranteed under the U.S. constitution was unpatriotic.

Similarly, by calling Bill C-23 the “Fair Elections Act,” the government brands its critics as defenders of unfair elections, while asserting that the current Elections Act and those who administer it allow, if not encourage, “unfair” election practices.

The “euphemism” and “cloudy vagueness” employed in defence of the bill are on a similar level of intellectual dishonesty. For example, the bill prohibits the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada from encouraging and enabling eligible voters to cast their ballots. Senator Frum claims that this frees them from a “conflict of interest,” because otherwise they would be tempted to allow ineligible voters to vote in order to increase voter turnout. This is equivalent to arguing that, although the police have a mandate to prevent crime, they should not be allowed to engage in crime prevention programs because doing so will tempt them to under-report criminal activity to show that their efforts have been effective.

Not to be outdone, Minister Poilievre claims that the voter ID provisions of the bill are “common sense and reasonable. For example, it makes the reasonable request that people show ID when they vote.” What the bill does in fact is to make it more difficult for eligible voters to identify themselves and their address by doing away with the practice of having one’s identity vouched for by a neighbour or relative and the use the of the voter cards issued by Elections Canada to prove one’s address. So it is “common sense” and “reasonable” to demand voters show ID with proof of their address, while making invalid existing cost-free means of enabling legitimate voters to meet that requirement.

Similarly, the bill increases penalties for election fraud, but refuses to give those prosecuting and investigating this crime the ability to compel witnesses to potential fraud to testify. Without such testimony it is very difficult to successfully prosecute such practices as systematically directing supporters of other parties to the wrong polling location. So, in the name of “fairness,” the Harper government proposes to do nothing to ease the prosecution of exactly the kind of fraud the Conservatives were accused of engaging in during the last federal election.

In the past, amendments to the Elections Act have been developed through all-party consensus which drew on recommendations from elections officials charged with the responsibility of administering it. In drawing up and defending the “Fair” Elections Act, the Harper government has ignored suggestions from other parties and elections officials and gone out of its way to undermine the motives and credibility of those officials in order to restrict their mandate.

To any unbiased observer it is clear that, for the government, Bill C-23 had two purposes. The first was to use the fictional spectre of mass impersonation of voters through vouching to justify making it more difficult for eligible transient and low income Canadians to vote. Why? Because the Conservatives believe such people are unlikely to support them. The second was to continue to deny Elections Canada officials and the police the powers they need to effectively investigate the kind of vote fraud their party was accused of attempting during the last election. Those purposes were clearly indefensible; necessitating tortured justifications for the bill which illustrate all the characteristics Orwell identified 68 years ago.