Monday, December 03, 2012

Has The Time Come For Someone To Start Asking Elections-Canada Some Hard Questions?

AllTheRoboRealCallComplaintsThatFit
AllOverThePlaceVille


After comparing E-Canada Emails (in which citizens very real concerns about misleading Robo/Real Calls were discussed) that were published separately, and at very separate times, by PostMedia and the CBC, Saskboy wonders if that time has come some 585 days after the fact:

...Why did Electi
ons Canada officers, with the power to write arrest warrants for people caught in the act of committing Election Act crimes, apparently accept the Conservatives’ claims that they weren’t behind the misleading calls when the source phone numbers distressed citizens were providing, led back to Conservative Party call centres’ voice mail?...



'Nuff said?

.

6 comments:

scotty on Denman said...

Was it Bismark who quipped that politics is like making sausage...everyone wants to see sausage in shop windows, but nobody wants to see how it's actually made. Politics is grizzly business, democracies being, according to Churchill, the least bad sort. A growing number of Canadians associate politics with electoral campaigns, replete with non-stop attack ads and simplistic sloganeering, and so might be excused for not being able to answer the question: what does politics have to do with Elections Canada?

The correct answer is: nothing; Elections Canada is supposed to be completely unpolitical, impartially and singularly concerned with verifying citizens' eligibility to vote and counting those votes. Somehow Elections Canada has recently been mandated to protect the government's seat-count for apparently political reasons, a complete abnegation of its legal purpose. Further, the courts have assisted in protecting the government by allowing the Etobicoke contest to be decided upon a sample of votes rather than a re-count. To make matters worse, the plaintiff had to pay from his own pocket to do what Elections Canada is supposed to do and the government paid to defend its MP's seat. To top it all off, the court inappropriately and incorrectly called the election in the Conservative's favour when democracy demands voters decide who will represent them. As it turned out, the Conservatives inadvertently created a precedent favourable to all sitting governments: inject politics into Elections Canada. It seems Canadians hardly noticed this dangerous development.

scotty on Denman said...

Harper sows disconception in the simple minds of Canadian voters. Hence the 37% who voted for him, out of the 60% who bothered to vote at all, is equated to a "strong, stable, Conservative government" elected by a majority of Canadians when his government actually represents little more than a fifth of us. Again we hear Harper say stuff like "supremacy of Parliament" when the Supreme Court doesn't find in his favour, "differences in interpretation" of the law when his government was convicted of the "in and out" method of scamming voters, "unconstitutional coalitions" when opposition parties agreed to form government during his minority and a string of bogus theories to relegate Her Excellency Jean into titular irrelevance. Harper has taken the usual hyperbole of campaign rhetoric and turned it into universal diktat, passing it off as ordinary political discourse. The stuff that's supposed to be openly debated is convened behind closed doors, by invitation only. HST, FIPA et al. Politicizing Elections Canada continues the havoc.

Saskboy said...

Yes, Elections Canada certainly doesn't seem neutral or apolitical at this point. They shouldn't be so concerned if a result is challenged in the court, they should be welcoming evidence of crimes so they can pursue and charge violators. Instead they enter into "compliance agreements" with the likes of Van Loan who overspent, so we can expect the same for DDM and Penashue, when their results should be invalidated, and they could face jail time.

Bill said...

scotty on Denman... should be scotty in Ottawa or scotty in Victoria! Wouldn't that be a refreshing wind from the west. Someone in the know calling it like it truly is.

"They" get away with all their corruption and dishonest spin because sadly the majority of the MSM are for too many of the wrong reasons not doing their jobs, spinning rather than reporting - a great disservice to Canadians.

Far too many Canadians are still too lazy to become truly informed and involved to hold politicians accountable for their actions/inactions. Thankfully that tide may be finally turning.

Maybe Denman should be the new capital.




scotty on Denman said...

The BC Liberals also subscribe to politicizing the electoral process, not on Harper's advice but aided by their natural unfairness and propensity to cheat, you know, the unfair advantage of the incumbent is merely the victors' spoils; and the lying and cheating to win that victory? Well, all's fair in love and war, right?

Harper and Campbell were co-conspirators in the infamous HST lie but the neon-con probably didn't take any advise from the neo-con when the subsequent uproar triggered Citizens' Initiatives: BC is unique in this regard. Nevertheless Campbell, in the most blatant way imaginable, had the Chief Electoral Officer and his long-serving Assistant summarily turfed and replaced with an "Acting" CEO of his own selection in an attempt to derail the various Citizens' Initiatives. The "Acting" CEO wasted no time in confirming suspicions of partisan bias when he had to be forced by the courts to make public the results of the anti-HST petition. Campbell, fighting his inevitable ouster to the very end, again tried to curry political favour by unilaterally reducing the threshold for the HST Referendum, now legally required by the success of the Petition.

Despite Campbell's resignation, the BC Liberals continued to play dirty politics where no politics is allowed by misappropriating public funds to peddle disinformation about the hated tax and finally by introducing a highly suspect mail-in ballot system rife with veracity and voter fraud problems. Again, the BC Liberal-selected "Acting" CEO was in charge of compiling and counting.

Although we may never know what the exact Referendum margin was, the true result was decisive enough to preclude overt vote-rigging (which doesn't rule out making the margin as narrow as possible for "political reasons.") The HST was rejected in the first instance of tax legislation being repealed by popular demand in the entire history of New Westminster parliamentary history going back centuries. But, you guessed it, even that rejection fell victim to politics, the BC Liberals still collecting the hated tax to the very end of their rotten regime.

Anonymous said...

Interesting details about RMG phonecalling for the Conservatives in 2010.