Roundup: Involving Elections Canada?

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The Chief Electoral Officer is talking about approaching parties about monitoring nomination races, which I have some mixed feelings about. While the impetus around this is of course the ongoing paranoia about foreign interference and the notion that Chinese agents are trying to stage-manage these contests, that’s really the least of our concerns, because more often than not, the real problem is party leaders gaming these races in order to get their own preferred candidates on the ballot. Mind you, that is increasingly becoming a quaint notion as many parties are increasingly just foregoing nomination races entirely, and the leader is simply using their powers to appoint people to nominations, which betrays the whole mechanism of grassroots politics, and the Liberals have become some of the absolute worst about this.

But seriously—Samara Canada did a study on this a couple of years ago, and it’s shocking just how much parties have put their thumbs on the scales of these contests. (It’s actually worse than the report describes because the researchers credulously believed the NDP around their own claims around open nominations, ignoring everything that had been printed about all of their paper candidates who won in 2011, who absolutely did not even visit the ridings they had been assigned to beforehand, let alone face an actual nomination battle). The drama with the current by-election in Oxford is because the retired Conservative MP is outraged that Poilievre and Scheer put their thumbs on the scale to get their friend parachuted and nominated against someone from inside the riding, which is why he’s now supporting the Liberal candidate.

The big drawback, however, is that Elections Canada monitoring these contests is likely to become even more intrusive, because parties are essentially private clubs, which is not an especially bad thing. But we also have a huge volume of registered parties in this country who will never win a seat, and if Elections Canada has to monitor all of their nominations as well, that could be a giant swelling of their bureaucracy in order to have people who can monitor every one of these contests, particularly in advance of an election call, and in the time between the election being called and the cut-off date for names to be on the ballot. I’m not sure how feasible that’s going to be. The way our laws are currently structured were done in a way to explicitly keep Elections Canada from getting involved (which is why we developed a system of leaders signing off on nominations, which in turn became abused and a tool of blackmail). So while I’m cognisant that we have a problem with nominations in this country, I’m not sure that involving Elections Canada is the right solution.

Ukraine Dispatch:

There was another round of fire against Kyiv early on Sunday, which was largely repelled in the city but a regional airfield was hit. Russian forces struck the city of Dnipro, killing a child and wounding at least 25 others in what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says have been five hundred child deaths so far. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces keep up their operations around Bakhmut, preventing Russian forces from solidifying gains in the city itself. Russians claim to have thwarted Ukrainian attacks in Donetsk province. This as Zelenskyy says that they are ready to begin the spring counter-offensive. Elsewhere, that survey of air raid shelters across Ukraine found that a quarter of them were locked or unusable, which is resulting in some charges.

Good reads:

  • Speaking at a Singapore conference, Anita Anand says that Canada plans to significantly increase its military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.
  • Jonathan Wilkinson makes the point that the government is committed to sticking to their 2050 targets, even if they are trying to find ways to accelerate it.
  • Marco Mendicino says he was “shocked” by news that killer Paul Bernardo was moved to a medium-security facility.
  • The Privacy Commissioner says that COVID programmes by and large conformed to privacy standards, and that most complaints were not founded.
  • Here is a look at the meltdown that happened within the Patented Medicines Price Review Board over consultations on new regulations.
  • The Chinese diaspora community is calling for faster action and fewer public hearings on foreign interference, because they know about it already.
  • A Chinese warship had a near-collision with a US warship during a joint US-Canadian pass through the Taiwan Strait.
  • The first Black Muslim CSIS operative is telling the story of the discrimination she faced within the service.
  • Here is the tale of how Liberal MP Ken Hardie and his Conservative challenger noticed attempted foreign interference in the last election and tried to alert CSIS.
  • Government House Leader Mark Holland talks more about his depression post-defeat, and how other MPs can be traumatised losing an election.
  • Conservatives are grousing that the provisions around “ghost guns” in the gun control legislation is just a cynical ploy to distract from its previous problems.
  • Nova Scotia appears to have been hit hard with the global cyber-security breach of the MoveIt file transfer service, with health and justice records affected.
  • Ontario pushed back against using maximum security for an immigration detainee, forcing CBSA to put him in their own facility, where his situation improved.
  • Stephanie Carvin and Thomas Juneau offer some suggestions for how to fix our culture around security and intelligence without new legislation.
  • Chantal Hébert looks at how Poilievre is squandering his momentum, particularly in Quebec, where he is leaking support to the Bloc.
  • My weekend column points out that while David Johnston was the wrong choice to be special rapporteur, he is now the only one who can finish the job.

Odds and ends:

There was a look at the excavation in front of Centre Block open to the public for Doors Open in Ottawa this weekend.

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