The Green Party is suggesting that the resources and powers of investigation for Elections Canada be expanded and rules added to the Elections Act to specifically prohibit impersonation of any government body or political party in phoning or communicating by any means with voters.

“It is sad that this is what we have come to in Canada. This scandal shows that we can not afford to be complacent. We must act to protect the most fundamental right of voting,” said May.

The Greens have also suggested a ban on TV advertising by political parties and third party groups to reduce the increasingly negative tone in elections.

In addition, to better engage voters, leaders’ debates should be taken out of hands of the media consortium and handled by an independent body that would ensure the inclusion in debates is based on fair rules.

“Above all, Canadians object to unfairness. What we need to do now is restore Canadians’ faith in our electoral process and take action to restore fairness and transparency in our elections,” said May.

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People who are knowledgeable about politics say ‘going negative’ works. Attack ads are effective. It wasn’t until I was researching my last book that I took the time to try to figure out why. I hate the shift in our political culture to nasty and ad hominem campaign advertising. Everyone I know hates it. Every audience I have addressed, in every town meeting, anywhere in Canada, say they hate it too. So how on earth does something everyone professes to hate keep getting more prevalent?

When writing Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy, I found the research from numerous experts on public opinion. According to Andrew Grenville, a researcher with Ipsos Reid, ‘Attack ads can often work in the short-term. They give you a short boost. But they reduce the number of people who want to vote. They reduce participation in the democratic process. They poison the system’—Vancouver Sun, Todd, ‘Federal Conservative Attack ads ‘poisoned’ the election.’

Attack ads discourage people from showing up to vote. So, by definition, attack ads are anti-democratic.How does driving down voter turn-out help a political party? Well, look at the 2008 election campaign. The nastiest ads were run by Mr Harper’s Conservative Party. If your measure of whether they ‘worked’ is the number of Conservative votes, you would conclude they failed. The Conservatives got approximately 170,000 fewer votes in 2008 than in 2006.

It isn’t really a surprise that an attack ad that ridicules or degrades other politicians did not persuade voters to support the party running the ad. The attack ads helped the Conservatives because of the impact it had on the voter base that supported the Liberals in 2006. Over 700,000 fewer of them bothered to vote at all. Historically low voter turn-out helped Mr. Harper’s party win more seats – with fewer votes.

The Prime Minister expressed concern with the low voter turn-out, saying ‘We’re obviously disappointed by voter turn-out. It’s low and been getting lower for some time now.’ Ottawa correspondent for the Halifax’s Chronicle Herald, Steve Maher wrote, ‘Mr Harper is not at all disappointed that more people didn’t vote in this election, since he has been working diligently for almost two years to make sure that the Liberals stayed home.’— October 16, 2008, Chronicle Herald, ‘Keeping Grit voters home.’

Knowing this, I am really worried about the next federal election campaign in Canada. Where Harper’s attacks on Mr Dion were limited to his ability to be persuasive in his second language, Mr Ignatieff offers the Harper ‘fear factory’ (as his communications team is called in Ottawa) a veritable smorgasbord of attack ad opportunities. Mr Ignatieff hosted TV programmes in Canada and the UK and frequently appeared on US television networks. He defended the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib on the Charlie Rose programme (now watchable on Youtube). He referred to himself now and again as an American. There are issues for Mr Ignatieff to address, but if the worst clips are framed by experts in public opinion manipulation, the system will be ever more poisoned.

Mr Harper has already expressed his intention to use tapes of Ignatieff. In one bizarre exchange in the House, Mr Harper shot across the aisle that with ‘the tapes I have’ on Ignatieff, he wants to see him in an election. Reporters were scratching their heads. Was this some sort of Nixon- esque reference to illicit tapes? No. Quite simply, it is the store of video tapes that makes Mr Harper excited about the next round of attack ads. With every election, voter turn-out goes down. Regardless of what party you support you should be very worried about the erosion of democracy in reduced voter participation.

Now is the time to propose solutions—before the next election. Looking around the world to see what other countries do to restrict attack ads, I discovered many do not allow paid political party TV advertising at all. The list of countries that do not allow it is long: the UK, South Africa, Brazil, Belgium, Switzerland, Chile, Sweden, Ireland, the Philippines, and more. Some countries ban TV ads, but allow radio. Others ban both.

Canada and the US stand out as practically the only countries with access to paid political TV ads by political parties. Right now, the only limitation in Canada is on paid television advertising during a writ period. The only limitation is how much money a party is allowed to spend. Outside of writ periods there is no spending limit. And that is the period Mr Harper’s party has used very effectively. In fact, the Conservative Party’s January 2007 ‘Not a Leader’ series against Mr Dion were the first attack ads aired outside an election period.

Let’s have this conversation now. Let’s demand a ban on paid television political advertisements, before and during the writ period. Think of it as an experiment. If democracy is sick, let’s stop poisoning it and see if things get better.

Elizabeth E. May is the author of Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy (McClelland and Stewart, 2009 ). She is the Leader of the Green Party of Canada.
For more information about US non-party campaign ads, see NPR article ‘‘Independent’ Groups Behind Ads not so Independent,’ www.npr.org.

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In essence, elements of Westminster parliamentary democracy are being changed to a more American model. The centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s office actually exceeds anything possible in the United States, due to the checks and balances in the US Constitution. In Canada, the legislative and executive branches are essentially the same, and when a Prime Minister denigrates the role of the House and runs rough-shod over the opposition, the PM’s powers to do so are unconstrained by anything other than tradition and respecting the supremacy of the House.

The Harper government has introduced greater partisanship throughout the workings of the House of Commons. House committees have been contaminated by the use of filibusters. Conservative Chairs of committees have been instructed by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to control proceedings in the partisan interest of the governing party. The chairs have been instructed that if a witness is potentially embarrassing the Conservative Party of Canada, the chair should throw down his pencil and storm from the room. This move leaves the committee in a procedural quandary and ends the hearing.

Increasingly toxic partisanship is also infecting electoral politics. The use of attack ads outside of any election period are also new to Canada, starting with the memorable ‘not a leader’ series used to undo Stephane Dion. By the time the Conservatives ran the ‘ just visiting’ ads targeting Michael Ignatieff, Canadians seems to have accepted that politics was now permanently nastier.

Since the book came out last spring, things have gotten even worse. We had the second, astonishing, prorogation.

We had the conflict between the PMO and the House over access to the Afghan detainee documents, settled by an historic ruling by the Speaker in favour of the rights of the House over the PMO. This was quickly followed by further PMO thwarting of House authority by refusing to allow senior members of the PMO staff to appear before House committees; a situation that was unresolved as the House rose for summer recess.

‘Omnibus’ Bills Abuse of Power

Add to this litany a gross abuse of process. It started in spring 2009, when the budget implementation bill, normally a small and procedural piece of legislation to make the budget vote operational, was replaced with a bill larded with other non-budgetary measures. In 2009, the budget changed the definition of ‘navigable’ in the Navigable Waters Protection Act, weakening a law on our books since 1867; removed the right of women in the federal civil service to pay equity; and raised the threshold for review of the foreign take-over of Canadian corporations. The changes went through with only independent and Progressive Conservative Senators standing on principle to oppose the use of the budget to change unrelated laws.

The attraction of including these things was clear. In the House, budget bills are confidence measures, but as Senator Lowell Murray, former member of Mulroney’s Cabinet argued, the Senate has the right to remove those non-budgetary matters without triggering an election. His arguments fell on deaf ears—the bill passed with hardly a murmur.

We did not have to worry long about whether a precedent had been set; in 2010, the budget implementation bill was far worse. The numbers tell the story. The length of budget implementation bills, on average from 2001-2008, was 139 pages. In 2009, the first year of real abuse, the bill came to 580 pages. Distinguished Professor emeritus Ned Franks of Queens University has pointed out that at 580 pages, the 2009 budget measures constituted 32% of all the House business in that session. All with no House committee review, no debate on the substance of the changes. In 2010, the budget bill, titled the ‘Jobs and Economic Growth Act, Bill C-9,’ weighed in at 883 pages—or approximately half of the work of the House in the last session.

As Professor Franks wrote,‘These omnibus budget implementation bills subvert and evade the normal principles of parliamentary review of legislation.’ (‘Omnibus bills subvert our legislative process’—Globe and Mail, July 14, 2010) On July 6, I testified before the one legislative body that paused to examine the budget bill, the Senate Finance Committee. In a series of rushed hearings, the Senators heard about the changes found in those 883 pages: removal of lucrative business for Canada Post, potentially weakening our national public carrier; pre-approval for sale of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, without a public review of the questions of who will be responsible for the long-term management of high-level nuclear wastes; changes to the EI system; new taxes for airline travel; and, most appalling, the gutting of the environmental assessment process.

After my testimony, the Liberal Senators decided to join with independents to insist on splitting the bill to remove the non-budgetary matters. Combined, the Liberals and independents had just enough votes to split the bill and send the non-budgetary matters back to the House. Senator Doug Finley, Harper’s campaign director, threatened an election, but rather than continue sabre- rattling, on July 9, the Prime Minister appointed one more Conservative partisan to the Senate. The whole 883 page bill passed into law.

Some may see this as an outrage against environmental law, and it is. However, even more egregiously, it is an assault on democracy. It is further evidence that Stephen Harper is bent on undermining fundamental principles of Canadian government.

Elizabeth May, Order of Canada, author of seven books, including Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy (McClelland and Stewart, 2009), is leader of the Green Party of Canada and federal candidate in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

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