Del Mastro Charged ... and ... Your Point Is?

All over the news yesterday was headlines about Dean Del Mastro being charged by Elections Canada for misdeeds in the 2008 election.

You'd think I'd be cheering.  I'm not.

Yes, I'm glad that Del Mastro will, at last, have to answer for questionable campaign practices in the 2008 election.

But, it was the fraudulent practices of the Conservatives during the 2006 and 2008 elections that led to the much more widespread fraud that they carried out in the 2011 election - and that election is the one where the greatest damage has been done to Canada.

The fact that it has taken Elections Canada 5 years to bring Del Mastro before a court is a statement about how effectively the Harper Government has stymied the ability of Canada's electoral oversight body to hold politicians accountable since coming to power in 2006.

In 2006, the Conservatives engaged in a lovely little money laundering operation to get away with violating campaign spending rules.  It's gone downhill from there.

In 2011, we were visited with the most blatant abuses of the electoral system in the form of Robocalls misdirecting voters away from correct polling stations - with data from the Conservatives voter information database.  To date, only one charge has been laid in this case, and mysteriously the access logs for the CPC database have been "accidentally destroyed".

How convenient.

Quite frankly, we are seeing a consistent pattern of outright corruption and abuse from the Harper Government.  They essentially lied and cheated through the 2011 election, and in doing so have called into question the legitimacy of our very system of selecting a government.  Since then, they have moved quite deliberately to hamstring Elections Canada's ability to investigate and prosecute these crimes effectively by strangling their budget resources.

Yes, Del Mastro needs to be prosecuted.  So do a lot of other people in the CPC - starting at the top.  It disappoints me that it has taken 5 years to bring Del Mastro before a court, and it angers me that Harper will have gotten away with even more by the time 2015/16 elections rolls around while a hobbled oversight system struggles to bring all of these misdeeds to justice.

On The Ongoing Senate Scandal

As the summer wears on, more keeps dribbling out about the misdeeds of various Senators.  Whether we are talking about Wallin, Duffy or Brazeau the outrage that we direct towards these senators for their individual misdeeds should be directed in equal measure towards the man currently residing at 24 Sussex Dr. in Ottawa - Stephen Harper.

Remember, the key figures in this scandal were all appointed by Harper, and two of them served key roles during the 2011 election campaign - a period when it is suspected that Duffy was billing the Senate for the bulk of the travel expenses that could rightly be considered campaigning, and I have little doubt that Ms. Wallin's expenses are equally suspect during that same timeframe.

There is little doubt that Wallin and Duffy were appointed to the Senate by Harper because of their "star power" as part of the party fundraising apparatus.

The 2011 election is among the most controversial to ever take place in Canada.  Not only do we have an election where voters were deliberately misdirected away from the correct polling stations by "robocalls" which are widely understood to have been driven by data from the CPC's own voter information database, but now we are learning that Canadian taxpayers were effectively bankrolling CPC campaigning and fundraising efforts during the campaign through CPC Senators charging campaign related travel back to the Senate (presumably for "meeting with the community" over dinner or some other nonsense to justify the "Senate Business" aspect of their trip).  There have also been a number of CPC candidates whose campaign finances have been deemed suspicious - at least one a former cabinet minister who has since resigned and lost a byelection bid to regain his seat.

In short, the 2011 election gave Stephen Harper a majority not because he had the better platform, but because he lied, cheated and ultimately stole victory - and democracy - from Canadians.

My point?  Mr. Harper has fostered a culture of deception and entitlement within his party.  His "power at any cost" approach to things has created fertile ground for avarice and greed to become the dominant forces in his party.  Is there any surprise that we are finding CPC Senators with their snouts firmly in the public trough?  Mr. Harper is plainly responsible, and Canadians should rightly be absolutely furious with him for duplicity, dishonesty as well as picking our pockets.

While Senate Reform is a laudable objective to pursue, it cannot be credibly pursued by Stephen Harper - a man who has so clearly abused the trust of Canadians to such an extent.

Remember this next time you stand in a polling both with a pencil in hand and a ballot before you.

Conservatives and Electoral Reform

Ever since 2006, the Conservatives have been squabbling with Elections Canada.  What precisely the problem the HarperCons have is something of a mystery to me.  Regardless, they seem to have ongoing and serious problems with the government agency that is responsible for overseeing elections in this country.

So, after seeing Del Mastro's crocodile tears over his 2008 campaign spending issues yesterday, I decided to do a little bit of historical analysis to see what that turns up.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, there is quite a list of issues with the Conservative campaigns starting in 2006.

In 2006, the big, smelly, issue was the "In-and-Out" scandal where the Conservatives essentially engaged in a money laundering scheme to hide advertising spending.  For the most part, Harper managed to shrug this bit of crooked chicanery off.  (apparently, electoral fraud didn't register on voters in 2008)  However, it should be noted that the issue is still before the courts.

The 2008 election was triggered by Harper, no doubt with the idea that he could garner a majority on the heels of a "successful" minority that had been in place since 2006.  Harper claimed that he called the election because parliament was deadlocked - of course he conveniently ignored the fact that it was deadlocked by the very tactics that he instituted.

To be honest, I'm actually a little surprised that issues from the 2008 election are still being wrangled over - in particular Del Mastro's campaign spending.  However, if Del Mastro paid for campaign activities out of his own pocket and tried to subvert the accountability side of the elections process in doing so, that would be very much in character.

Additionally, there was a very suspicious set of events in Toronto where a number of Liberal supporters found the brake lines on their cars cut.  While this was not specifically investigated by Elections Canada, it is a rather overt form of harassment of voters which I have often thought was a clumsy attempt at voter suppression.

Then in 2011, we have seen a plethora of MPs whose election spending reports have been questioned by Elections Canada.  Interestingly, it always seems to be Conservative MPs who are getting caught out overspending or violating other rules.  I actually would have expected a bunch of these types of reports to be surfacing regarding NDP MPs from Quebec - not out of a sense of corruption, but more out of inexperience.

Moving beyond that, we have the infamous Robocalls scandal, which remains an ongoing point of contention which I believe calls into question the validity of the government as it stands today.

The real issue, when you distill it down, is that the Conservatives have a culture of "The Rules Don't Apply To Us", and they keep getting called out on it.  It wouldn't be so bad if it was relatively minor overspending infractions, but when you combine it with voter suppression, it becomes an evil that must be excised from our political system.