Revenge of the bean counters

Last week history was made when the RCMP executed a search warrant on the national offices of the Conservative Party of Canada. Acting on an affidavit sworn by Canada’s election commissioner, the Mounties removed a number of boxes of documents as well as computers from the Party’s headquarters.

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The election commissioner felt that the Conservatives had overspent by a cool $1 million on national advertising, which apparently is a criminal offense. The alleged crime was committed when Tory candidates ran ads and commercials they were provided by the national party without sufficiently changing them to assume a local flavor. But wait! Didn’t some Liberal and NDP candidates do the same thing, run ads provided by their respective national parties with only minimal changes? Well, yes, they did, but then the Liberals and the NDP have never pissed off Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer and now it’s payback time. The payback comes in the form of having Conservative-hostile media types accompany the Mounties to the Conservative Party headquarters to document their rummage feast and paint those knuckle dragging Conservative troglodytes as criminals. Interestingly, Elections Canada is also investigating alleged overspending on the part of the other parties, but for some reason they’ve forgotten to inform their domesticated media lapdogs of this. But then again, neither the NDP nor the Liberals are suing Elections Canada over disallowed election expenses the way the Conservatives are and the general feeling around the campfire is that the law suit had a lot to do with the RCMP’s raid. Right on cue, the hapless Liberals are claiming that the Conservatives’ “breach” of Canada’s election laws amounted to a coup d’etat. Liberal house leader Ralph Goodale (of leaked income trust information fame) claimed that had the Conservatives not overspent nationally, then there is a strong possibility that the current minority government might well be Liberal, rather than Conservative. Get it? By spending a million bucks more nationally rather than locally, those evil Conservatives stole the election, not that the Liberals’ loss had anything to do with the incompetence of the Paul Martin “government” or the theft of millions of dollars from the federal treasury through the corrupt Adscam affair or Shawinigate or peppergate or any of the other of the Liberal Party’s many foibles. Goodale made it sound like Harper had taken lessons from Robert Mugabe in how to steal elections. Clearly the Libs are making the most out of this miscarriage and briefly taking the spotlight off their weak and incompetent leader. The fact is that back when Stephen Harper was president of the National Citizens Coalition he had a major dispute with Elections Canada over the so-called gag laws, which Harper claimed amounted to restricting free speech. And in those days Mr. Harper wasn’t particularly diplomatic about how he characterized the work of Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer. To get even, Elections Canada eventually charged the NCC with breaking Canada’s election laws through a 15-second commercial that was critical of the election laws. It’s the kind of move one might expect from a corrupt police department that hassles critics of the police. Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with Elections Canada investigating political parties to make sure that they follow the rules. What’s so disconcerting about this case is the fact that someone at Elections Canada advised the media and members of the Liberal Party of Canada of the raid in advance to make sure that the search would receive maximum press coverage. That’s more than just investigating or enforcing the law. That’s a clear attempt to engineer the defeat of a government that the bean counters dislike.