Balance. Balance. The Chief Electoral Officer, The Speaker Of The House Of Comm

The Speaker of the House of Commons is an interesting figure. Rising out of the very development of Parliamentary democracy, he (she) has only been elected in Canada by secret ballot of the members of the House of Commons for the last three speakers. The current speaker is Peter Milliken, who, in his present second term, was elected by acclamation. Until 1986 the speaker was nominated by the prime minister, usually after consultation with the leader of the opposition. But times change…. There is even talk of having a permanent speaker, but – needless to say – that is a very thorny question. On the one hand, it seems reasonable. But, on the other hand, a person might argue that each Parliament has its own needs and so needs to have the power to elect, each time, its speaker. What would be the situation if a speaker was permanent and – after a time – had not been elected by any of the MPs in the House of Commons? Could he then be said to be suitable? Balance. Balance. The present chief electoral officer is Jean-Pierre Kingsley. My experience with him and his office has not been pleasant. The Chief Electoral Officer is usually put in place without term, until he (she) is 65 years old or resigns. That is to assure that he (she) is independent of any political force. Sounds as if things are the way they should be with the appointment of the chief electoral officer. But if the chief electoral officer is not very good, he (she) may do quiet harm decade after decade for a long time. Canada’s chief electoral officer is what might be called a half-way appointee. Jean-Pierre Kingsley was appointed during the regime of Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government. But he was “appointed by a resolution of the House of Commons,” and he reports to Parliament, not to the prime minister or Cabinet. While an overwhelming majority could force anyone in as chief electoral officer, that would not be wise. For, say, if the opposition roundly declared the potential appointee a political hack of the party in power, of the “government,” that government would be unwise to force him or her in. For obvious reasons. The chief electoral officer is responsible for the administration of elections, referendums, and such like things. He is assisted by some others – that is how he is described formally. One of the people who assists him is the Commissioner of Canada Elections who “enforces the Act.” That’s where things got sticky when I and about twenty other people from several places in B.C. asked the chief elections officer to investigate fraudulent political party membership gathering in B.C. around the time of the last federal election. In some places in Canada (and most certainly in B.C.) complaints were being uttered publicly about dirty membership gathering. (Sheila Copps in Ontario, for instance.) Such activity literally destroys the democratic electoral system. With a suitcase of money, operatives go into a constituency, gather names (and sometimes contact people), pay for their memberships in a party, and then use the memberships to get victory for a prospective candidate who would not gain the victory without the fraudulent manipulation. That may involve hiring buses, gathering up the stooge party members, delivering them to the meeting that elects the candidate, and telling the stooges how to vote. In B.C. one of the allegations surrounding the December 2003 raid on legislative offices in Victoria was that some people implicated in the raids were – among other shady activities – engaged in fraudulent party membership gathering. Indeed, the problem was spoken and written about so often in Canada the chief electoral officer made a public statement that the buying of memberships fraudulently could mean that election spending was not being reported correctly and could be a serious breach of procedures. As I remember, he said such behaviour could constitute criminal activity. And so our request for investigation did not exactly come out of the blue. As I have reported before, the Office of the Chief Elections Officer stalled, fumbled, passed the buck, and then the Commissioner of Canada Elections, the enforcer, wrote to tell us that if we could get evidence of wrong-doing, Elections Canada might act. As far as I was concerned that was an insulting brush-off. If he had told me the budget was very limited, money wasn’t available for such investigations, but that Elections Canada was watching with concern, and it was going to call upon government to provide, as soon as possible, serious funding for investigation, and that, moreover, it was going to announce that intention to the press and media, my group would have been very happy. Instead, the impression the offices of the chief electoral officer gave was that they did not want to have to face the fact that a threat has arisen to the democratic system in Canada. As one digs into reports and allegations in B.C., one finds suggestions that Gordon Campbell’s leadership may have involved bogus party memberships. The same with Ujjal Dosanjh’s winning of the B.C. premiership after Glen Clark’s unseating. And, of course, Liberals in the last federal election in B.C. were alleged to have been involved in serious bogus party membership acquisition. Are Jean-Pierre Kingsley and his assistants preparing to be very hard overseers of the coming election? Or are they going to go on pretending the gathering of fraudulent party memberships is of no real significance. If they do the latter, then the time may come to have to question the appointment of the chief electoral officer from his (her) time of appointment until he (she) is 65. Balance. Balance. The governor-general presents a high-profile case full of problems of balance. On the website concerning the governor-general, that person is described as the Queen’s representative in Canada, usually for a term of five years. The governor-general's standard, moreover, is described as “the symbol of the Crown’s sovereignty in Canada.” While the Crown is not exactly always the queen, the queen is almost always exactly the Crown. The position of the governor-general, obviously, has slipperiness. The governor-general, like the queen, has many formal, constitutional roles, such as opening Parliament, signing state papers, reading the speech from the throne, and expressing the identity of the country without having an overtly political role – in fact, supposedly refusing political activity. But the position of the governor-general has slipperiness. For instance, when the Chretien government sent Canadian troops to Afghanistan (not thought a good thing by all Canadians), the governor-general went to Halifax to see the soldiers off, giving them encouraging words. The governor-general is obviously – at one level – the creature of the government in power, though not completely so…. In the formal description of the governor-general, one reads that the queen appoints on the advice of the prime minister. In fact, the prime minister appoints; the queen pretends she does it. That has happened because until the middle of the twentieth century the governor-general of this country was actually appointed by the monarch and was not Canadian. Vincent Massey was the first Canadian appointed governor-general, in 1952. That began the taking over of the appointment, in fact, by Canadians. A good thing, that takeover; but, alas, the appointment became increasingly political, and some governors-general have been appointed as almost baldly political pay-offs to loyal hacks. Not a good thing for the reputation and role of the governor-general. Balance. Balance. An example of the slipperiness of the governor-general's position was recently given fairly high profile. An announcement appeared in the press that the queen’s name was now removed from certain diplomatic accreditation documents where it had formerly appeared and it was being replaced by the name of the governor-general. A small thing, except that the Liberal Party has been seen historically as anti-monarchist and the move was seen by some as another blow to Canada’s system of constitutional monarchy. In addition, some allege that Adrienne Clarkson, the present governor-general, is a Liberal and is an anti-monarchist, and so the change would be quite satisfactory to her. At any rate, she made no comment whatever about the change to she and the queen’s positions. A friend asked me if I would write to Ottawa on the subject. I did. Among the people I sent my letter to, the governor-general was one. The letter I received from Rideau Hall (the residence and office of the governor-general) was on the same level as the letters I received from the chief electoral officer and his assistants. The letter was not, of course, from Adrienne Clarkson. That is traditional. Governors-general rarely write to Canadians on questions of dispute. Pretending that the governor-general would have nothing whatever to do with, and would have no opinion on the change I described, someone in the Office of the Secretary to the Governor-General wrote to me plainly stupid things. She wrote things that plainly show the Office of the Secretary to the Governor-General and (one has to assume) the Governor-General herself believe that Canadians to whom they write have the intelligence level of cretins or slightly less. The writer informed me (in highly inflated and pompous language) that the people’s representatives make such changes and that the governor-general “respects” such decisions. Everyone of course knows that no government would meddle with traditions as this government has just done without telling the governor-general her status was changing. Everyone knows the governor-general would have to have an opinion on the change. Everyone knows it would not just be a situation where the people’s representatives would act and the governor-general and the queen would be acted upon. What a person has to conclude is that the moving of the queen’s name from certain state papers is a hot issue. One has to conclude that the members of the Liberal cabinet wanted the change and so did Adrienne Clarkson, even while they all knew there would be many Canadians who would not like the change. As with the letters from the chief electoral officer and his assistants, I might well have received a very different letter. It might have been one saying that the decision was not easy, and that the people making it have come to think the governor-general (who we know has been too often a mere hack getting a pay-off for political loyalty) has to assume more “regal” duties so that Canada will look independent to other countries in the world. The letter might even say that, consulted (as she surely was), Adrienne Clarkson agreed the move was the right one. Put simply, Rideau Hall might just have assumed that the people being written to on the subject weren’t idiots. The governor-general, we are told, must be closer to the people than heretofore, must more truly reflect Canadian values. But that person is appointed, in fact, by the prime minister who is not necessarily interested in someone who will best represent all Canadians. In this case we have a governor-general who allows pompous, pretentious nonsense to be written on her behalf (in fact supporting Liberal government policy). She hides behind letters that are patently insulting to the people who receive them. How do we get Canadian governors-general who are intelligent, direct, and willing to be frank about their involvement in the policies of the government in power.? How do we get governors-general who everyone recognizes as wonderful Canadians who genuinely care about the things all Canadians care about? Adrienne Clarkson doesn’t have to agree with Canadians who don’t want the place of the Queen diminished in Canada. She simply has to have the guts to lay her own position on the line to other Canadians. The governor-general has to have a demeanour of graciousness, a quality of reserve, and a sense of being somehow special. At the same time the governor-general has to be recognizably Canadian, has to have Canadian openness, and has to address other Canadians as someone who respects them. If the governor-general's position is to last and to have meaning to the country, it must contain genuine balance – which the letter I received shows none of whatever. Balance. Ah yes. Balance. Balance. [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on May 9, 2005]