Friday, January 27, 2006

OTTAWA - Today, Democracy Watch called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and the leaders of the other three federal political parties with elected MPs, to make changes to the federal Elections Act to encourage voter turnout, and ensure fairness for voters, in all future elections.

In their election platform, the federal Conservatives have pledged as part of their planned “Federal Accountability Act” to ban secret, unlimited donations to election candidates, to further limit donations, and to ensure party leadership and nomination races are “fair, transparent, and democratic”.

However, these specific changes and vague promises are not enough to fix the many flaws with Canada’s federal election law and system.  In addition, the parties must correct the following flaws:

• require “honesty-in-politics” with high fines as the penalty for breaking promises or misleading voters during and in between elections (this has been partially proposed by the NDP);
• require the media to give equal prominence to all numbers in survey result reports, to end the misleading hype of polls seen in the past two elections;
• ban secret donations also to nomination race candidates;
• as party leadership campaign candidates are, require all candidates and parties to disclose publicly all their donations, and the status of any loans, during the week before election day, so voters know who is bankrolling campaigns;
• reduce public subsidy for parties from $1.75 per vote to 75 cents to encourage parties to reach out to Canadians more in order to prosper financially;
• as the Bloc Québecois proposed in its election platform, take away the power of the Prime Minister to appoint the front-line regulators of federal elections (called returning officers) and give it to the head of Elections Canada (to prevent partisan decisions concerning who is eligible to vote, and vote counting);
• require poll clerks and returning officers to ensure that each person is actually qualified to vote (to address the many examples cited by observers across the country that people are voting twice, or non-citizens are voting because they received a voter registration card);
• require Elections Canada to conduct more door-to-door enumeration audits to correct errors in the current permanent voters list, and;
• give voters the right to “refuse” their ballot (as is legal in Ontario elections) so that voters who do not support any candidate in their riding can vote for “none of the above” and have their voted counted separately from spoiled ballots (and require Elections Canada to feature this right in all of their election materials).