Poilievre's Disdain For Democracy

The last time Pierre Poilievre was in government, he introduced a bill to make it harder for several segments of society to vote, more difficult to investigate electoral fraud, easier to get around campaign spending limits, and illegal for Elections Canada to promote voter participation. He named it, without a hint of irony, the Fair Elections Act. It was rammed through the Conservative majority Parliament and passed in the spring of 2014.

This week, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act which risks disenfranchising some 69 million American women. There is no coincidence, and the North American right wing has not lost their focus on disenfranchising their opponents in order to fix elections in their own favour.

The Fair Elections Act significantly reduced the number of documents that would be recognised as valid identification for the purpose of voting, including removing the Voter Information Card — that drab looking piece of paper voters are sent by Elections Canada a few days before each election with your name and where to vote — as an option to prove your address.

It required original bills and documents, and removed the ability to vouch. It meant that homeless people would no longer had a means to prove their identity for the purpose of voting. It meant that in households where, for example, bills were in only one person’s name, they could not be used for their spouse’s proof of identity.

The Act moved the Commissioner of Elections, the person responsible for investigating electoral fraud, from the office of Elections Canada, which reports through the Chief Electoral Officer to Parliament, to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who reports to the Government through the Attorney General, providing a means for a government to prevent an investigation into itself.

The changes were made in the midst of a series of investigations relating to Conservative election fraud in the previous elections, most famously Robocalls, and also involved physically moving the physical office of the investigators from Ottawa to Gatineau, interrupting their work in the months leading up to the 2015 election.

The Fair Elections Act changed campaign spending limits from a fixed amount per party per election to a pro-rata amount based on the standard campaign length, meaning that if the Prime Minister called the election with a 72 day campaign instead of the normal 36 day campaign, the spending limits would be doubled.

Then in 2015 they did exactly that, launching a 77-day campaign in August for October 19th to take advantage of the expanded limits, more than doubling the national campaign spending limit to $54 million per party, up from just under $21 million the previous election.

It exempted the cost of fundraising from spending limits, further increasing how much each party could spend on elections, and thereby directly increasing the role of money in Canadian politics.

Each of these measures were intended to directly benefit the Conservative party at the expense of the public interest. Those who would have trouble voting were overwhelmingly not Conservative. Those who had been prosecuted for election fraud were overwhelmingly Conservative. Those who had the most money were the Conservatives, who fundraise on dogwhistles of division and fear and have little interest in honest discourse.

Then, to top it off, the Act specifically banned Elections Canada from launching educational campaigns to inform people about the election and its voting requirements, which mostly directly targeted students and the disabled — more groups that were not historically Conservative. As Rick Mercer said at the time:

It was Pierre Poilievre himself, the current Conservative candidate for Prime Minister, who concocted, tabled, pushed through, and effectuated these changes the last time he was a Minister. In over 20 years in office, it is the only bill he has ever tabled that passed. This is the man the Conservatives are asking Canadians to entrust with the keys to our democracy.

In his book, Trumpocracy, David Frum, himself a speechwriter for George W Bush whose presidency paved the way for Trumpism, wrote: “If conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” He would know.

Poilievre has an exceptionally thin track record from his time in government. His only accomplishment was to directly undermine the very foundations of our democracy by attacking the institutional structures of our electoral system.

If we let him be Prime Minister, you can bet he will do it again.