Chris Selley points out some of the oddities of the federal Elections Act:
“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
It seems like about a hundred years ago, but one of the disquieting revelations of last year’s federal election campaign was that the Elections Act’s rules covering third-party spending are completely bananas.
Readers may recall Elections Canada warning environmental groups that they couldn’t just go on spending money in the fight against climate change without registering as third parties, with all the paperwork and bureaucracy that entails, all because People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier had supposedly made it a “partisan issue.” Now we have another bunch of overripe bananas on our hands: As the National Post first reported, the Commissioner of Canada Elections is investigating an anti-abortion organization called RightNow for having allegedly “recruited, trained and coordinated volunteers that were directed to over 50 campaigns” during the 2019 campaign.
RightNow’s mission is to identify pro-life candidates with a chance of winning, and connect them with volunteers eager to help them with their nomination and election campaigns. Readers may not find this particularly controversial. Members and supporters of all manner of groups, most famously and numerously labour unions, campaign alongside political candidates all the time. A quick rummage around Facebook from last year’s campaign finds both Toronto NDP MP Andrew Cash (who was eventually defeated) and Nova Scotia Liberal candidate Bernadette Jordan (who is now federal fisheries minister) thanking Unifor members wearing “Unifor Votes” t-shirts for their canvassing help. Photos on Unifor’s own Facebook page chronicle an October 5th event in Winnipeg called “Politics and Pancakes event plus canvassing for (NDP MP) Daniel Blaikie.”
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At first blush, there doesn’t seem to be anything legally untoward with this — or indeed what RightNow was doing on a much smaller scale. (USW claimed $1.1 million in third-party expenses, PSAC $345,000, CUPE $161,000. RightNow splashed out a whopping $8,255.71.) “Volunteer labour” is explicitly exempt from the Elections Act prohibition against third parties donating to political parties or candidates, either in cash or in kind. But in an April 22nd letter to Albertos Polizogopoulos, RightNow’s legal counsel, the commissioner’s director of investigations, Mylène Gigou, argued that “the recruiting, training and coordinating of volunteers are core political activities of a political campaign” — and in performing those activities, RightNow may have “circumvented” the third-party donation prohibition.
This is, of course, preposterous. On what principle would we allow members or supporters of third parties to volunteer in election campaigns — as any healthy democracy ought to — while prohibiting spending so much as a dime to recruit said volunteers? “Training” or “coordinating” could be defined as narrowly as telling people what sorts of things to say on people’s doorsteps and what sorts of things not to. You don’t just turn people loose with your campaign materials, like sheep on a grassy meadow, and hope for the best.
