"Fair" Elections Act

Unionist wrote:

onlinediscountanvils wrote:

Quote:

-  Forbids Elections Canada from launching ad campaigns to encourage people to vote.

This is the only positive measure in the lot.

Very much agree. Even though the main aim of the bill is to weaken any oversight.

[By the way, how uncool is it that "oversight" means both quality-control and slip-up?]

As an educator, I can't agree...   aside from how it favors incumbents of old parties, the loss of the vote promotion campaigns that particularly target secondary school students (readiness to vote) and young adults is a strike against democracy.  Citizenship education is a public responsibility.

Rewriting our Elections Laws (elizabethmaymp.ca)

Quote:

It was introduced for First Reading on Tuesday, February 4 and the hammer came down to limit debate on Thursday. By Monday night, February 10, it had cleared Second Reading. This is an administration in a hurry.

Unionist wrote:

DLivings wrote:

As an educator, I can't agree...   aside from how it favors incumbents of old parties, the loss of the vote promotion campaigns that particularly target secondary school students (readiness to vote) and young adults is a strike against democracy.  Citizenship education is a public responsibility.

Two questions:

1. Is "citizenship education" currently part of the syllabus at any level of the school systems? If not, should it be?

Citizenship education shows up more as learning about systems, the hows and whys of democratic structure... and this includes "rights and responsibilities" of citizens.  My experience in western Canada that these programs don't adequately promote the notion of democratic participation.

Unionist wrote:

2. I'm unfamiliar with the vote promotion campaigns run by Elections Canada. If you know more about them, do they qualify in your view as "citizenship education"?

Elections Canada's vote promotion activities are really quite narrow and do something that most curricula don't do.  During election campaigns they simply say "Get out and vote.  It's your responsibility."  For school age children they have taken to suppor mock voting during campaigns, and while that's weak in one sense, it does build some patterns.  It doesn't and shouldn't get into promoting partisan positions or even thinking.  A good school program and a good teacher will prod students to consider and debate important issues and approaches.

The CPC convention isn't exactly a Harper love-in this time. Brad Wall and Jim Prentice have spokken for oil and gas regulation and respect for First Nations rights and the enviironment. Now Preston Manning speaks against Harper's election reform act.

http://www.thespec.com/news-story/4392156-preston-manning-says-elections...

[i] OTTAWA - Preston Manning, the former Reform Party leader who's become an elder statesman of the Canadian conservative movement, has chided the Harper government for its electoral reform efforts. In a speech to his namesake convention on Saturday, Manning said the Conservatives should be strengthening, not weakening, the powers of Elections Canada. Manning said the government should amend its Fair Elections Act currently before the House of Commons to address the "greatest challenge" to Canada's electoral system — declining voter turnout across the country. Conservative governments, conservative opposition parties and the conservative movement need to constantly affirm and re-affirm their commitment to extending, rather than limiting, democratic expression, Manning said.[/i]

Some things don't change:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/did-stephen-harper-misca...

[i] Here was Sun News columnist and Liberal insider Warren Kinsella's take on Poilievre's appointment last July:[/i]

[i]Pipsqueak, who Harper actually named minister of state for democratic reform, is in fact one of the most despicable, loathsome politicians to ever grace the national stage. He is a pestilence made flesh.
[/i]

:lol:

BALONEY METER: Poilievre statement on Fair Elections Act put to the test
http://www.calgaryherald.com/touch/story.html?id=9718204

MUlcair is way ahead on this. He has asked 71 questions on this; Trudeau, 3. NDp have spent 32% of their time attacking on this, the Libs only 6%. I am willing to give Trudeau credit all right, credit for nothing!

Libs at HP say, hey we're 3rd party so don't expect us to waste a lot of time asking about Fair Elections Act. If you ask them what cud be more important, they tell you know nothing about Parlimentary procedure, and should yield to their intellectual superiority. What a bunch of cry babies. I can recall plenty of times when the NDP had limited questions and remained laser focused on an issue. How do you think we got Universal Helath Care, CPP, EI, etc? They are such smug morons. Considering how many insults they hurl at me, I have to wonder why if I am such a loser? Pathetic!

Former MP Carolyn Parrish tweeted

"We all knew a Poilievre in school. Never chewed gum, shouted answers, did homework, sneered at lesser students & got stuffed into lockers!"

terrytowel wrote:

Former MP Carolyn Parrish tweeted

"We all knew a Poilievre in school. Never chewed gum, shouted answers, did homework, sneered at lesser students & got stuffed into lockers!"

Kewl attack and belittle the person not the actions and thus drive more of the indecisive majority into the Harper camp. Good job parrish

Conservative senator Linda Frum OP-ED in Globe and Mail

Elections Canada has a conflict of interest

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/elections-canadas-conflict-o...

The Conservative Senators were unanimous in recommending amendments. Hmm.

Harper will accept their small amendments, keep the points he wants in the bill, appear to back down gracefully, make his Senators look good, and make the Senate look worthwhile.

Ahah! How long have they been planning this?

Why are the media buying this?

Duh!

Conservatives unhappy with Poilievre’s ‘bombastic’ style on elections overhaul bill

http://www.hilltimes.com/news/news/2014/04/21/conservatives-unhappy-with...

A great article about our the lose of our democracy by one of my favourite columnists

Harper sees role as protector of the rich and powerful

Why do I know that Stephen Harper would hate these guys?

You have probably never heard of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page but their message just might wake up dozing Canadians oblivious to the decline of our democracy.

They are professors from Princeton and Northwestern universities and they have just pronounced American democracy dead. Some have already called this the “Duh Report” because the ugly truth has been apparent for quite some time: The United States is now the land of the rich and the home of the knave; an oligarchy.

I know. Stephen Harper would say the professors are perpetrating sociology. Perhaps. But sociology beats the ongoing Big Brother impersonation that this prime minister passes off as democracy.

Harper’s grip on power is based on ignorance being strength. As poll after poll confirms, his strongest support is from people who know the least about public issues, the bumper-sticker crowd. What could be wrong with Bill C-23? It’s called the Fair Elections Act, right?

Conversely, the more people learn about Harper policy, the less they like it. Hence the need for all those commercials aimed at the ill-informed and disengaged — paid for by taxpayers. The prime minister now reports on himself in a weekly video. It wastes the time of up to four officials from the PCO and other staff members from the PMO. It is a raging success; 21 viewers for the French language version in Quebec. Of course, Harper cannot share with us how much it costs to produce. We are the piggy-bank, the government is the pig.

Back to the professors. In a democracy, the will of the people is supposed to be paramount. But in an America built by too many Republican administrations, where government and business are one in the same, the average citizen has all the power of a small animal going over Niagara Falls. The way the professors see it, the rich few dominate policy, the plankton people have no influence. That is not democracy.

“A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time”, the professors write, “while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five elites in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time.”

The professors found that when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or “organized interests” they generally lose. Worse, even when “fairly large majorities of Americans” favour policy change, they generally don’t get it if it collides with the status quo that elite interest groups are constantly lobbying to maintain.

As reported by the BBC, the professors arrived at their conclusion by breaking down answers to 1,179 survey questions asked over a twenty year period from 1981 forward. They separated the responses by income level and then connected how often various income levels and organized groups saw their policy choices realized.

The road to oligarchy in the United States ran through the U.S. Supreme Court. In two major, and I would argue disastrous decisions, the court extended personhood to corporations and lifted campaign funding limits during elections. As a result, government of the many has become government of the money.

And part of a comment:

And Trudeau - with his fundraiser Stephen Bronfman - will really change the plutocracy we are developing?
They are from the elites, themselves. Trudeau's empty rhetoric about the middle class - which he and Bronfman have never spent one moment in - rings hollow.
Trudeau never speaks of the growing numbers among the working poor - the almost one million Canadians who depend upon food banks!
Trudeau's support for a massive corporate tax cut to 15% and support for Harper's oil/pipeline strategy of shipping raw bitumen - and good, value-added Cdn jobs - to the US via the XL pipeline and to China via the Kinder Morgan pipeline makes him Harper-lite at best.

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/04/20/harper-sees-role-as-protector-of-the-...

They say that politicians are swayed by public opinion and have an aversion to mockery, especially when it is used to point out a truth. I've chosen to voice my opinion about the Fair Elections Act and Mr. Harper via letters, petitions and in derisive satire.

I've created images to visually state my opinion, and as I have no objections to sharing these opinions with others, please feel free to pass them along.

The images can be found at http://politicalhippo.imgur.com/ If they can be of any use to you in the protest against the Fair Elections Act, please avail yourself.

Further,

Mr. Harper intends that Bill C-23 be passed in June and he is using pages from the American Republican Party playbook to achieve that end. It can be said that democracy is in danger on both sides of the border and to date, no one has pointed that out. Though one can only speculate on the reasons that Mr. Harper and the GOP are advancing these policies in tandem, the fact remains that they are.

Bill C-23 mirrors the GOP on their voting rights agenda. In terms of reasoning, rhetoric, strategy and tactical implementation, the parallels are obvious and in some cases identical – hobbling the Elections Commission, disenfranchising via voter identification, lifting limits on party spending, etc,. Does that sound familiar? To see for yourself the best examples of the GOP efforts, look no further than the Voting Rights section on the Rachel Maddow website at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

Compare these examples to Bill C-23 and it becomes apparent that by passing the Fair Elections Act in June, Mr. Harper would be imposing GOP ideology/policies on Canadians. Any government's purposeful disenfranchising of its citizens is an affront to democracy. Even though Mr. Harper and the GOP describe themselves as defenders of democracy, they continue to do their best in passing laws to impede it.

The Fair Elections Act is an oxymoron. Canadians should insist on the very opposite of Mr. Harper's proposals – we should be emboldening our election Commissions, encouraging voter participation, and demanding stricter accountability from politicians.

Bill C-23 is a bad Bill and should just be withdrawn. The irony in this of course, is that the powers that be will be exercising their right to vote on a Bill that will limit ours.

Mulcair was at his usual best again in QP today on this topic and others.

Mulcair to Harper: Let’s talk

Thomas Mulcair is calling the proposed amendments to the Fair Elections Act, unexpectedly announced by Pierre Poilievre last Friday, a result of the New Democrats fighting “tooth and nail” against the controversial bill.

In a speech delivered the the NDP caucus the morning MPs returned to the Hill after a two-week break, Mulcair took shots at both the Conservatives — for what he said is an attempt to rig the next election with the bill — and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau — for being “missing in action” in the debate for weeks.

The government, Mulcair said, is “more interested in their own partisan interests than in your fundamental right to vote. That’s why New Democrats have been fighting the Unfair Elections Act at every turn.”

And “while the NDP was fighting this bill… the Liberal leader decided to play hookie,” he said. “Well, that’s simply not good enough.”

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/04/28/mulcair-to-harper-lets-talk/

Both Toms are on a roll it seems but Trudeau and the Liberals are once again missing in action. :

Elections bill illustrates Harper’s vindictiveness, pragmatism, Flanagan says

The federal government's controversial proposed overhaul of election laws illustrates the ruthless, vindictive and hyper-partisan side of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's character, a former chief of staff says.

But Tom Flanagan says the fact the Conservative government has suddenly backed down on some of the most objectionable aspects of the bill shows another side of the prime minister — his capacity to be pragmatic and realistic.

"The whole episode illustrates the complexity of the man," Flanagan said in an interview.

As originally proposed, Bill C-23 would muzzle the chief electoral officer, hive the investigator of election law breaches off Elections Canada, boost campaign spending and donation limits, create a loophole that would allow rich, established parties to spend untold millions more during election campaigns and potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of Canadians by ending the practice of vouching for voters without proper ID.

Flanagan noted that Harper has had "this antipathy to Elections Canada" for decades, dating back to his time as head of the National Citizens Coalition, when he challenged limits on third party campaign spending all the way to the Supreme Court. That hostility was exacerbated by the watchdog agency's successful prosecution of the Conservative party for orchestrating a scheme to spend more than $1 million over its spending limit during the 2006 campaign.

"So, the initial version of the bill really did seem to be aimed at Elections Canada, taking away powers, clipping what it can do and, along the way, putting in some features that would appear to help the Conservatives at the expense of other parties," Flanagan said.

"So you might say that bill, the original bill, may have expressed the vindictive side of the prime minister, you know, pay-back time."

Last Friday's partial climb-down, however, showed Harper's pragmatic side, he added.

http://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2014/04/28/elections-bill-illustrates-h...

Yep, the Libs are worried about this. And they should be. There Leader can't talk about issues; he has to be able to spin and push without being challenged. He'll fold like a cheap suit if he is.