The Fair Elections Act has turned into a political pinata for the federal Conservatives. If Stephen Harper thought he could do a wholesale rewrite of the election and voting process in Canada without much scrutiny, he seriously misread the public pulse.
The act itself runs against the Harper doctrine of focusing on jobs and the economy. Instead, the justification for this law is a manufactured crisis (widespread voter fraud - OMG!) to make way for a manufactured solution.
The report commissioned to investigate whether there really was a problem with voter fraud in Canada found that just 1 per cent of votes cast in the last federal election might be problematic. Taken as a whole, that's nowhere near big enough of a voting bloc - even if they all voted en masse for one party - to have a significant impact on almost all federal elections. Unless the election was a virtual tie (think the 1995 Quebec referendum on separation or the 2000 U.S. presidential election), one per cent is simply nothing to get excited about. The other 99 per cent more than makes up for it. Taken both at a national level and on a riding-by-riding basis, it's a small problem hardly worth addressing. Most countries, including our southern neighbours, would be thrilled to have 99 per cent of ballots cast with no issues as to their validity or reliability.
That being said, the Fair Elections Act is sunshine and lollipops compared to some of the nonsense happening in the United States. As the New York Times reported over the weekend, Republican governors have tightened the rules for voter registration in nine states over the last couple of years and those rules are much harsher than what the Harper Conservatives are pushing.
Even under the Fair Elections Act, a utility bill with your name and address on it would still constitute a valid form of personal identification to vote in a Canadian election. In many states, however, pulling out your hydro bills from the last three months would get you laughed out of the polling station. In North Carolina, voters cannot register on voting day and there are fewer opportunities to vote in advance polls and through absentee and mail-in ballots. Most crucially, North Carolina residents without photo ID will no longer be able to vote and a student ID card won't be considered good enough to meet the photo requirement.
In the United States and particularly the South, the debate around these kinds of voting laws are tied to race. The foundation of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was giving rural blacks in the Deep South the right to vote. The same excuses used then to justify denying poor African American entry to a ballot box have been recycled for use half a century later. They can't prove who they are and they can't prove they haven't voted earlier in the day. The only thing missing from the modern-day argument is "those people look all of the same, which not is not like us, so they can't be possibly trusted to make the right political choices."
For good ol' boys south of the Mason-Dixie line, then and now, franchised blacks have enough numbers to challenge the existing political establishment.
That's not an issue in Canada.
The Fair Elections Act targets the people who don't have a wallet to put money in, never mind cards confirming their identity. Yet transients, the poor and the homeless in Canada don't form a significant bloc of voters the way poor, rural and mostly black residents of Dixie do.
The federal Conservatives are on the verge of passing a surplus budget next year, just in time for the next election. Harper has brought in important free trade deals with Korea and the European Union. The Conservatives are also trying to get Canadians to pay down some of that record amount of consumer debt they're carrying.
This is the kind of work he and his MPs need to continue doing, instead of getting distracted fixing a problem that didn't exist before and shows no sign of becoming a problem in the near future.
Drop the Fair Elections Act and move on to more pressing business, Mr. Prime Minister.
