There's a lot about this scandal that annoys me. Mostly, though, I'm concerned about the fact that there are two significant areas of concern at work here, and most people seem intent on only talking about one.
Problem number one is whatever happened in Guelph. Pretty clearly, someone actively attempted to prevent people from exercising their democratic franchise. This is a serious problem. The right to free expression of democratic will is one of the most important, fundamental, and necessary laws we have. Whoever is responsible for this, and I fully expect it will be tied to people involved in the local campaign in Guelph (and not anyone to do with the national campaign), should be nailed to the wall.
Problem number two is bigger than that, though.
There are a great many people petitioning Elections Canada to say that someone interfered with them during the writ period. The number being floated at present is somewhere north of 31,000. This is almost certainly pure unadulterated bullshit. The bushes are being beaten by extremely partisan organizations who are interested only in inflating the number as much as possible for the purposes of generating ammunition for their pet causes.
The media is (probably unwittingly, although not universally so) fuelling this hysteria. It is a well documented and well understood fact that people are more likely to report problems that the media is talking about obsessively, even if there is no real problem to report; they will convince themselves that there is. Human memory is a notoriously unreliable agent in these sorts of circumstances.
Some of these stories are real, to the extent that something actually did happen. In all the cases outside Guelph which I've seen and believe, these are not actual violations of the law. They are annoying phone calls, and little more, and even those cases are a subset of the total reported problems.
The facts of the matter are that this most recent election saw a greater use of machine dialing than any election previous, and all indications suggest that the number lists used were a hodge-podge of Elections Canada information (usually years out of date and poorly maintained) automatically referenced through Canada 411 and similarly unreliable telephone references. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 million Canadians were called in the election period. If all 31,000 complaints are valid, and you have to be a considerable grade of stupid to believe they all are, then that represents an accuracy rate of 99.85% in the dialing lists. And that only considers the possibility that the calls were the result of wrong numbers. It doesn't take into consideration the stupidity, bored mendacity or unreliability of call center workers, poor and inaccurate memories, or politically motivated mis-reporting, just to name a few.
The simplest explanation is the best and the simplest explanation is that, outside of Guelph, there is no organized machiavellian conspiracy at work here.
The fact that a kernel of legitimate complaints are being mummified in layers of nonsense, hysteria, unreliable memory and partisan vindictiveness isn't the other thing I'm concerned with, though. There's four years for that to sort itself out and nobody outside of the most partisan circle-jerk ring seriously believes that the Conservatives are going to lose power before 2015.
What concerns me is the way that so many people on the left have seized upon this as a means of validating their own personal dislike for the Conservatives. They look on Stephen Harper and see someone who doesn't represent their values, doesn't protect their interests, and doesn't represent their country in the manner in which they have chosen to consider it. As such, they tell themselves, this government is not and can never be legitimate.
I spent a great many years living in this country under a government that didn't represent my values, didn't protect my interests, and had no interest in the things I valued in my country. I never claimed they were illegitimate. I never suggested throwing them out via the courts, or by the use of force. I frequently criticized the sorts of people who unthinkingly voted them in time and again, but I never suggested those people didn't have a right to do so.
But there are vast swathes of partisans on the left who will not recognize that a government can be distasteful to you and yet still be legitimate, or that people can vote for such a government, rejecting or ignoring the left's view of what it is to be Canadian, without being something less than a real Canadian.
These people are swarming out of the woodwork to denounce the government and call for all manner of action against it. Go watch #cdnpoli on twitter and see if you can last more than five minutes before someone starts talking about using violence to solve this, and denounces the government and anyone who has the temerity to support them as traitors.
These people have already decided that the government can't be legitimate because it doesn't agree with them and they've just been waiting for an excuse to storm the bastille.
This is concerning to me. I also find it vaguely amusing, especially when the power of wishful thinking takes these people out of the real world and into a domain of fantasy. I give you a woman who wrote to the Queen asking her to take Harper out of power, as an example, or the people on Twitter seriously suggesting the UN should come and force new elections in some manner which defies explanation.
Whatever is at the bottom of all this will be exposed in due course, through the existing legal processes which are already underway. But when it is determined that the election was fair and no one is in power inappropriately, a lot of people on the left are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the law of the land, through a fair and legitimate election, produced a legitimate government with whom they personally disagree.
Or they can try to follow through on their threats of violence, and see where that gets them.
Problem number one is whatever happened in Guelph. Pretty clearly, someone actively attempted to prevent people from exercising their democratic franchise. This is a serious problem. The right to free expression of democratic will is one of the most important, fundamental, and necessary laws we have. Whoever is responsible for this, and I fully expect it will be tied to people involved in the local campaign in Guelph (and not anyone to do with the national campaign), should be nailed to the wall.
Problem number two is bigger than that, though.
There are a great many people petitioning Elections Canada to say that someone interfered with them during the writ period. The number being floated at present is somewhere north of 31,000. This is almost certainly pure unadulterated bullshit. The bushes are being beaten by extremely partisan organizations who are interested only in inflating the number as much as possible for the purposes of generating ammunition for their pet causes.
The media is (probably unwittingly, although not universally so) fuelling this hysteria. It is a well documented and well understood fact that people are more likely to report problems that the media is talking about obsessively, even if there is no real problem to report; they will convince themselves that there is. Human memory is a notoriously unreliable agent in these sorts of circumstances.
Some of these stories are real, to the extent that something actually did happen. In all the cases outside Guelph which I've seen and believe, these are not actual violations of the law. They are annoying phone calls, and little more, and even those cases are a subset of the total reported problems.
The facts of the matter are that this most recent election saw a greater use of machine dialing than any election previous, and all indications suggest that the number lists used were a hodge-podge of Elections Canada information (usually years out of date and poorly maintained) automatically referenced through Canada 411 and similarly unreliable telephone references. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 million Canadians were called in the election period. If all 31,000 complaints are valid, and you have to be a considerable grade of stupid to believe they all are, then that represents an accuracy rate of 99.85% in the dialing lists. And that only considers the possibility that the calls were the result of wrong numbers. It doesn't take into consideration the stupidity, bored mendacity or unreliability of call center workers, poor and inaccurate memories, or politically motivated mis-reporting, just to name a few.
The simplest explanation is the best and the simplest explanation is that, outside of Guelph, there is no organized machiavellian conspiracy at work here.
The fact that a kernel of legitimate complaints are being mummified in layers of nonsense, hysteria, unreliable memory and partisan vindictiveness isn't the other thing I'm concerned with, though. There's four years for that to sort itself out and nobody outside of the most partisan circle-jerk ring seriously believes that the Conservatives are going to lose power before 2015.
What concerns me is the way that so many people on the left have seized upon this as a means of validating their own personal dislike for the Conservatives. They look on Stephen Harper and see someone who doesn't represent their values, doesn't protect their interests, and doesn't represent their country in the manner in which they have chosen to consider it. As such, they tell themselves, this government is not and can never be legitimate.
I spent a great many years living in this country under a government that didn't represent my values, didn't protect my interests, and had no interest in the things I valued in my country. I never claimed they were illegitimate. I never suggested throwing them out via the courts, or by the use of force. I frequently criticized the sorts of people who unthinkingly voted them in time and again, but I never suggested those people didn't have a right to do so.
But there are vast swathes of partisans on the left who will not recognize that a government can be distasteful to you and yet still be legitimate, or that people can vote for such a government, rejecting or ignoring the left's view of what it is to be Canadian, without being something less than a real Canadian.
These people are swarming out of the woodwork to denounce the government and call for all manner of action against it. Go watch #cdnpoli on twitter and see if you can last more than five minutes before someone starts talking about using violence to solve this, and denounces the government and anyone who has the temerity to support them as traitors.
These people have already decided that the government can't be legitimate because it doesn't agree with them and they've just been waiting for an excuse to storm the bastille.
This is concerning to me. I also find it vaguely amusing, especially when the power of wishful thinking takes these people out of the real world and into a domain of fantasy. I give you a woman who wrote to the Queen asking her to take Harper out of power, as an example, or the people on Twitter seriously suggesting the UN should come and force new elections in some manner which defies explanation.
Whatever is at the bottom of all this will be exposed in due course, through the existing legal processes which are already underway. But when it is determined that the election was fair and no one is in power inappropriately, a lot of people on the left are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the law of the land, through a fair and legitimate election, produced a legitimate government with whom they personally disagree.
Or they can try to follow through on their threats of violence, and see where that gets them.
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