The Unfair Elections Act and the Republican Connection

He has always been more of an American style politician than a Canadian one.

The closest thing to Richard Nixon and his dirty trick Republicans this country has ever seen.

He brought their disgusting attack ads to Canada.

And his foul Unfair Elections Act is right out of the Republican playbook.

Stephen Harper would make a good governor of Arizona. In addition to the lies and sleaziness his government has been serving up during its majority, its sickening reliance on marketing over truth, its dishonest use of technology in political matters, and its shameful abuse of language, the prime minister is blighting democracy in the name of political advantage.

Because in Arizona and other states the Republicans have mounted a  campaign to try to suppress the vote. For the same phony reasons the Cons are using in Canada. 

Like a lot of Republican states, Arizona claims the legislation is designed to battle massive voter fraud.

Except there has been no massive voter fraud, not in Arizona, not in Texas, not in Kansas, nowhere in the United States. The only fraud is the legislation itself, passed by nine Republican states since 2013 looking ahead to congressional elections, and ultimately to the presidential election of 2016.

And as Obama pointed out the other day, making it harder to vote.

Last Friday, the president of the United States spoke out against the real reason these Republican states are passing restrictive electoral reform — to suppress the vote in swing states for political advantage. Obama told the National Action Network Convention that the right to vote in America was gravely “threatened” under state legislation that was “making it harder, not easier, for people to vote.”

Just like the Cons are doing in Canada.

With Pierre Poilievre, the most Republican looking MP in Parliament, leading the charge...



One of Poilievre’s bigger whoppers in selling his snake oil, C-23, is that the new restrictions are needed to deal with voter fraud. Apart from the minister’s fear-mongering, he had no facts to back up his stated reason for restricting access to the vote. There is no massive voter fraud in Canada. Perhaps that’s why two of his colleagues faked it about personally witnessing cheating, only to later recant.

And the good news? When the Republicans tried that in the last U.S. election it backfired badly. The same thing could happen here.

And to make matters even better, Poilievre doesn't know what he's doing.

For he is proposing to eliminate vouching, even though his government used it in a recent BC court challenge to claim that vouching would guarantee voter's rights.

A constitutional challenge to voter-identification rules brought in by the Harper government in 2007 may be on its way to the Supreme Court of Canada — where the latest Conservative electoral reforms would create an awkward legal backdrop. That's because the government of Canada has successfully argued in B.C. courts that its previous round of ID requirements were protected, in part, by the "failsafe" of voter vouching.

And by eliminating vouching, and disenfranchising voters, the government is undermining both its court challenge AND its foul bill.

Elections experts say the measure will disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in 2015. And constitutional experts say the legislation doesn't pass muster. Pierre Lortie, chairman of a 1992 royal commission on electoral reform, testified to a House of Commons committee last week that eliminating vouching "undoubtedly contravenes the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms."

And making it almost certain that the Supreme Court will eventually quash the Unfair Elections Act.

Which of course hands us even MORE ammunition to use against the Cons in the next election.

For not only can we now label their foul bill an attack on the Charter of Rights and use their own words against them.

Or use it to motivate Canadians to vote.

We can also use the whole controversy to portray Stephen Harper as more American than Canadian...



The beast who would kill Canada and its democracy.

Yup, as I've said before, the universe is unfolding as it should.

We have all the angles covered.

Canadians are rebelling.

And the RepubliCons are going down...

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