In its rush toward populism and away from discourse, the federal Conservative government in Canada has revealed its vision. Some of that vision was contained in its election platforms of 2006 and 2008, but much of it has been spooled out over the course of the life of the minority government led by Stephen Harper since January 2006.

Canada’s current government is focused mostly on raising the spectre of criminal activity, despite the fact that the government’s own statistics show the national crime rate to have been falling steadily in virtually every area since 2004.¹ Of all the pages detailing policy in its 2008 platform, a full 29% mention crime, violence, punishment, penalties, prison, criminal conduct, or tough laws. The government is also fixated on military engagement and the open encouragement of nationalism.

[Addendum, April 21, 2009: Statistics Canada reports that serious crime was at a thirty-year low before the Conservative anti-crime campaign began.²]

Its actions in these and other areas before the 2006 election and subsequently have demonstrated the Party, and Mr. Harper in particular, to be concerned with populism. As a result, they have shown a remarkable disdain for parliamentary democracy, the traditions of a free media, intellectualism, and for anything that does not on its surface appeal to the basest political appetites of Canadians.

It’s simple to examine this government’s three short years of life to peel away the populist policy promulgations, and begin to reveal that long sought-after hidden Conservative agenda. In a morass of breaches lesser and greater, a few particularly egregious offences stand out. And so, in a series of articles, in neither chronological order nor in any sequence of terribleness, I present the Conservative government’s Shameful Acts.

But let’s begin before it even all got started.

1. Breaking Canada’s election laws

Apparently in order to circumvent national campaign spending limits during the 2006 federal election, the Conservative party engaged in an “in and out” scheme. The Party’s national headquarters transferred money to local ridings, which immediately sent the money back using pre-signed bank transfers, claiming it had been spent on campaign advertising. However, the “local” ads were identical to national campaign ads, with only the addition of local candidate information at the end. The result was not only spending beyond the legislated limits by more than a million dollars, but a loss of almost one million dollars to taxpayers, since sixty percent of the costs of the ads were claimed as refundable expenses by local candidates.³

During routine audits, Elections Canada, the independent body overseeing the election process, uncovered the discrepancies, and in April 2008, the RCMP raided the Party’s national headquarters to seize documents related to the scheme. During its investigation, Elections Canada discovered that local Conservative candidates did not know which ads the payments were for,⁴ presumably because the bank transfers were pre-signed by the national Party.

In other words, local candidates were sent money by the Party to fund their campaigns. The candidates immediately returned the money to pay for their campaign advertising, which they had no part in creating, and which they apparently never saw or approved. The local campaigns then collectively claimed that Canadian taxpayers owed them a million dollars in refunds to be processed by Elections Canada. In other strata of society, this kind of willful flouting of financing rules is known as “money laundering”. The euphemistic “violations of the Elections Act” of which they were accused would, if it were any other piece of legislation and any other component of society, be called “breaking the law”.

There is much more shameful behaviour in this story after the Conservatives came to power, including: the Conservatives’ refusal to cooperate with a House investigation into the matter; representatives being told by the Party not to show up after being summoned by the investigative Committee; the Party’s refusal to express confidence in Elections Canada by voting against a symbolic motion put forward by the Bloc Québécois to do so; and Conservative campaign chair Doug Finley’s bizarre crashing of the Committee, apparently in some Orwellian attempt to intimidate Conservative witnesses.⁵ After refusing to leave, he was forced out by security personnel.

The entire “in and out” episode has been described by critics as “disdain for democracy”, and by some Conservatives as a betrayal of the Party’s vision.

1. CBCNews.ca, Snapshot: Crime in Canada 2007, July 17, 2008. [↩]
2. The Canadian Press, Crime rate hit 30-year low in 2007, The Toronto Star, April 21, 2009. [↩]
3. Richard Brennan, Furor over campaign funds heats up, The Toronto Star, October 27, 2007. [↩]
4. Scandalpedia.ca, The In and Out Scam. [↩]
5. Peter Zimonjic, Conservative candidates felt betrayed, Northern News, August 2008. [↩]

Louis Politics, Shameful Acts Canada, Conservatism, Government, Parliament, Stephen Harper