Why RoboCon matters to me, and Conservatives

I keep encountering Canadians who think the illegal robocalls scandal is no big deal. They suggest that many of the ridings that were won by Conservatives, were in bigger margins than the alleged number of misdirected non-CPC voters, so there’s no need for by-elections. I could not disagree more, and I’ll explain why. A government that comes to power, where its election is tainted by thousands of examples of vote suppression, is not “legitimate”. If you take a political science class, it will help explain why this is a key point, but if you understand it, politics anywhere in the world makes more sense.

Superanne explains what happens when a government uses power, but does not have legitimacy:

I think there’s potential for at least some byelections, AND if this issue continues to show Harper in a spectacularly bad light some of his MPs may bail out under pressure from their constituents. The first one to go could start a little stampede.

If the House of Commons is rendered unworkable and has lost the confidence of Canadians, the GG may have to step in so we can start over.

Harper’s weakness is that whatever judgement he has is neutered by ambition; he’s confused about the power a stolen majority gives him, thinking it will make the populace governable. That’s a fairly big error in judgement, and the longer he persists in it the more pissed off and noisy people will be.

An extreme case of a government losing legitimacy, is the government of Egypt, circa January 2011. The populace there was no longer accepting of its dictatorship, so they removed legitimacy from it. The army there recognized that, stepped in with a coup and told the people they won new elections to restore legitimacy. Do I expect a coup in Canada from RoboCon? No. I expect a judge to order some by-elections, and some Conservative MPs may sit as independents if the Conservative party’s name loses its luster with its members. These outcomes may result in a general election, if the Conservatives fail to take steps to atone for their mysterious robocall supporters, even if they didn’t order them or have permission from the membership to undertake this electoral fraud.

The other reason byelections are a crucial outcome for Canada to remain a democracy under the rule of law (avoid being a dictatorship style country), is to uphold the Elections Act. There are punishments in the Act to deal with people who concoct and implement schemes to physically prevent people from getting to the polls. If the guilty are not caught, and punished, what punitive threat is there to others considering this sort of crime next election? If the punishments are not used now, then when?? What could possibly be more blatantly in massive violation of Canadians’ rights to a fair election than telling thousands of people fraudulently that you’re Elections Canada, and that they must go to a fake location to vote, so they miss their chance to be heard?

If someone (or a party) can concoct a scheme involving burner cell phones, aliases, and young campaign volunteers, while exploiting them as tools to interfere in dozens of ridings, and thousands of voters, what’s the point of having an Elections Act, and punishment that is severe for even knocking down a lawn sign? In a country with a majority government won on the vote-difference of ~6300 random people, what sort of legitimacy does the government have?

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This isn’t about my dislike or distrust of the Conservative Party, although my passion in writing about it is certainly fueled in part by that. It’s actually about restoring the now tarnished reputation of our electoral system, and thus our democracy. If the Conservatives manage to win byelections or another majority, I could accept that Canadians, rightly or wrongly, in a new fair election accepted them as legitimate.

Canada recently spent $5M in Haiti to prevent these sorts of election violations. Canadians have long recognized the importance of fair elections, and was regarded worldwide as an expert in running them here and abroad. Pierre Poutine/Jones has ruined the legitimacy of our $350M election, and our national electoral reputation, and their punishment had better darn-well fit that crime against all of us.

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I should also note that the way Canadian law works, indictable (felony level for you Americans) offenses like #RoboCon need two ingredients:

• intent
• act

There are fancy Latin names for each, mens rea, and actus reus (my Grade 12 law class paying dividends today, more than a decade later). They mean that someone can think of a crime, but not be guilty, or they can do something bad, but if they don’t have the legislated level of intent, they are not guilty.

Clearly the people who conspired to bring us RoboCon, had the guilty act (actus reus). The phone calls were the act. Clearly they had the intent to defraud Canadians, when they bought a burner cell phone, cooked up Pierre Poutine/Jones’ aliases, and used a gift-credit card to pay for the calls — guilty mind (mens rea).

If you start dismissing crimes that impact thousands of Canadians during the most sensitive political period outside of actual war, are you defending democracy, or are you arguing for something less? Democracy is under siege here, and it’s as serious as any murder story in the news. I do not exaggerate this point. If democracy isn’t as precious to you as life itself, as a Canadian, what is?

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ADDED:

“offences were committed by everyone who made such [robo]calls and by everyone who knowingly aided or abetted the making of them. Moreover, an attempt to commit an offence is an offence.
[…] We have to hope Elections Canada does a thorough investigation, identifies those responsible and prosecutes them vigorously. “