A Critical Gap in Democracy? ‘Yawn,’ Say Canadian Politicians.

2024/07/22 Leave a comment

NYTimes focusses on the weakness of party nomination process that no major Canadian party appears willing to address:

It is the “Wild West” of Canada’s political system, a “critical gap” in its democracy. But Canadian political leaders — and some foreign nations — are big fans.

Canadian elections have long rested on what many experts say is an undemocratic foundation: opaque nomination races in which political parties select their candidates for general contests in a process mystifying to most Canadians.

Party bosses enjoy an unshakable grip. Money flows, often unaccounted for. Rules tend to be lax, with no impartial judge in sight.

“After Tammany Hall, the U.S. went through a series of reforms that resulted in the modern primary system,” said Michael Chong, a high-ranking lawmaker from the Conservative Party. “But our system is largely based on a 19th-century system.”

Though the machinations behind nominations have long been an open secret among insiders, they have recently come under a harsh spotlight with Canada’s continuing sweeping investigation into foreign meddling in its political system.

Nominations have been singled out as glaring weaknesses in the country’s democratic system that some foreigners — primarily China and India — are increasingly exploiting to back certain candidates and oppose others.

Lawmakers from Canada’s major parties passed a bill last month to help fend off and prosecute foreign meddling, including with the creation of a registry of foreign agents.

But the new law did not address how parties choose their candidates despite increasing calls to overhaul nominations — including by placing them under the oversight of Elections Canada, the nonpartisan agency responsible for conducting federal elections.

The holdouts? Parties themselves.

“Party leaders want to have a level of power so that they can abuse their power and not be held accountable,” said Duff Conacher, a founder of Democracy Watch, an Ottawa-based watchdog organization.

In each federal electoral riding, or district, parties hold nomination races to choose candidates for parliamentary elections. Those vying to win try to sign up as many party members as possible and then must ensure they show up for the nomination vote.

A yearlong public inquiry into foreign interference describednomination races as “gateways for foreign states who wish to interfere in our democratic processes.” A special parliamentary committee’s redacted report concluded that nominations were “a particularly soft target” and “a critical gap” in Canada’s democracy, recommending that they be regulated the same way general elections are.

The findings were of little surprise in the immigrant-rich suburbs of Toronto that, along with similar neighborhoods around Vancouver, have been the main targets of foreign interference.

In Brampton — home to a large Indian diaspora, including Canada’s biggest Sikh population — Sikh activists have warned for years about interference by Indian government officials and their proxies in nomination races.

India uses pressure and money, activists say, to sideline Sikh candidates — especially those critical of the Indian government’s policies toward the Sikh minority population in India and those who advocate a separate Sikh homeland in India.

“In Brampton, the Indian Consulate decides who they want to help and who will be a party’s candidate,” said Jarmanjit Singh, a mortgage broker and Sikh activist who ran unsuccessfully in 2017 for a nomination for a provincial election. Community organizations with ties to the consulate then back the candidates on the ground, he added.

Sikh activists say the Indian government tries to curtail the influence of Canadian Sikhs, who otherwise have had an outsize impact on Canada’s political system through elections and appointments to senior government positions.

The parliamentary committee described India as the second-biggest perpetrator of foreign meddling after China.

Sanjay Kumar Verma, India’s ambassador to Canada, said in an email that the Indian government “does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries” and has not been given “concrete evidence” backing up the accusations.

“These allegations appear to be based on hearsay,” he said, “possibly originating from anti-India extremist and terrorist elements based in Canada, who have a vested interest in undermining Canada-India relations and interfering in India’s internal affairs.”

Last year, Canada accused the Indian government of being behind the killing in Vancouver of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Canadian Sikh leader and supporter of a separate homeland. India has denied any involvement.

Jaskaran Sandhu, a criminal lawyer and former leader of the World Sikh Organization of Canada who has been involved in political campaigns for several parties, said he had observed widespread foreign meddling in nominations.

“Parties are not very inclined to speak about nominations publicly,” he said, “because nominations are messy, nominations are often corrupt. Nominations are the dirty laundry of every political party.”

Nominations are a mystery to most Canadians and even to party members because each party has different rules, said Fred DeLorey, a former national campaign manager for the Conservative Party who said he had overseen more than 1,000 nominations.

“Political parties in Canada are private clubs,” Mr. DeLorey said, allowing them to carefully screen candidates and choose the strongest ones.

“At the end of the day, political parties are about winning elections,” he said.

Still, Mr. DeLorey does not believe party nominations need to be regulated, arguing that foreign meddling in Conservative nominations was not “something that’s happening widespread, if anywhere.”

In many districts, local party associations are often inactive, and candidates form committees only during nomination contests, said Jack Heath, a former deputy mayor of Markham, a suburb north of Toronto, and a veteran of Liberal Party campaigns.

“This is the Wild West,” Mr. Heath said.

In the past, buying memberships was a “relatively widespread” practice, he said. A candidate, he added, would gain instant supporters before a nomination vote by paying for their annual party membership fees — $10 before the Liberals made membership free in 2016.

In the continuing public inquiry, evidence also indicated how China and its proxies had capitalized on nominations’ freewheeling nature.

In a 2019 Liberal Party nomination race in Don Valley North, a Toronto district with a large Chinese diaspora, China “had a significant impact in getting” nominated a preferred candidate, Han Dong, according to the parliamentary committee’s report.

Buses transported 175 to 200 foreign students from China to vote, and the Chinese Consulate told them “that they must vote for Mr. Dong if they want to maintain their student visas,” according to the report.

Mr. Dong won the nomination by “a small margin” and cruised to victory in the general parliamentary election.

Nominations are an appealing target for foreign meddling, according to the report, “because the number of votes required to sway riding nominations is so small.”

And while all parties require members to be residents of a district to vote there, it is “relatively easy to show an altered phone bill with the wrong address, or a fraudulent letter from a school, in order to vote in a nomination,” the report said.

“You can fake it in five minutes,” said Bob Mok, a Hong Kong-born Canadian who has campaigned against Chinese government interference in the Toronto region. The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, which has denied interfering in Canadian politics, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Mok, who has been active in Conservative politics, said buying party memberships remained common. An individual pays for membership but is reimbursed later by a candidate, Mr. Mok said.

Still, party leaders are reluctant to tighten the system, Mr. Mok said.

“That would take away the absolute power of the absolute dictator of each party,” he said.

The Liberal Party — which has the loosest rules, allowing even foreigners living in Canada to become members and vote in nominations — did not make anyone available for an interview. A party spokesman, Parker Lund, said in a statement that “when it comes to nominations, the Liberal Party of Canada’s rules for electing a candidate are the most robust in Canadian politics.”

Good governance groups say the parties can no longer act as private clubs, especially with mounting evidence of foreign states’ exploiting the parties’ weaknesses.

The parties effectively control who gets into Parliament and receive significant public support through tax credits and reimbursement of election expenses, said Sabreena Delhon, the head of the Samara Center for Democracy, a Toronto-based organization that has studied nominations.

“It stands to reason that there be a higher standard for accountability in the interest of our democracy’s integrity,” Ms. Delhon said, adding that Elections Canada should be given oversight over the nominations.

Only the Green Party has shown any openness toward the idea.

Elizabeth May, the Green leader, said in an interview that all nomination races should be regulated.

“It’s obviously a threat to democracy, and it’s easily fixed,” Ms. May said. “We need to act as leaders and send the message loud and clear that, no, Canada’s not a soft target.”

Source: A Critical Gap in Democracy? ‘Yawn,’ Say Canadian Politicians.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , , ,

Indo-Canadian leaders say Elections B.C. oversight would end questionable tactics in party races

2022/01/19 Leave a comment

Of note. Look forward to comments from British Columbia readers:

Leaders in the province’s Indo-Canadian community say the recent controversy surrounding B.C. Liberal party memberships would not be happening if a third-party organization such as Elections B.C. was given an oversight role in political party leadership elections.

Several long-time Liberals and New Democrats of Punjabi heritage are concerned that the blame for questionable memberships is being unfairly placed on racialized communities, instead of on the parties’ membership and voting rules.

“Punjabi-Canadians are a demographic that loves their politics, and you have the traditional loyalty to family and friends, so that is why this community is able to sign up large number of members in a very short period of time. It does not mean their memberships are illegal,” said long-time B.C. Liberal Barj Dhahan.

“Whenever this question comes up, it is Punjabi-Canadians who get stereotyped that they are not following the rules. The real question is: Are the rules being followed by the candidates and their campaign teams and volunteers?”

The controversy came to a head last month, after six of the seven B.C. Liberal leadership campaign teams demanded the party audit close to half of its new memberships over concerns that rules were not being followed. They pointed to addresses that were not residences, including one on a forest service road. One campaign said its canvassers found one residence where only one of the five people signed up using that addressed lived there. The campaigns questioned whether the party was capable of catching potential cheaters.

Since then, the party has been accused of singling out members from the South Asian and Chinese communities for review and audit.

Former NDP MLA Harry Lali said there is a long history of groups, including lawyers and teachers, that launched large membership campaigns for their favoured candidates, but those campaigns were never questioned. He believes all leadership elections over the past two decades in every party have been tainted by dubious membership recruitment tactics.

Lali said when that happens, the party suffers.

“What ends up happening is the old-guard membership is pitted against the new membership, so it often becomes white people being pitted against non-white people,” he said. “It’s time that political parties were dragged into the 21st century.”

That is why Lali recommended that Elections B.C. take over the process of vetting memberships and overseeing leadership votes more than a decade ago, when he was running for the NDP leadership.

Vikram Bajwa also supports calls for involvement by Elections B.C. Bajwa has been a member of the B.C. Liberal party for more than 20 years, and was one of the whistle-blowers in the so-called “quick wins” scandal in 2013, when the party under former premier Christy Clark planned to use government funds to target ethnic support.

Bajwa now claims more than 6,000 international students from India and China have been signed up as Liberal party members in the current leadership race. Bajwa said he and several other party members have sought legal advice and have written a letter demanding the party take action.

“The Liberal party membership form does not ask you to state your citizenship or permanent resident status,” explained Bajwa. “It was overlooked during Christy Clark’s time, and this time we want to put a stop to this.”

Bajwa said if the issue is not properly addressed at the final Liberal leadership debate on Tuesday night, as promised by the party, he and several concerned members will be filing a judicial review of the memberships in B.C. Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the party has not responded to a request for comment about foreign student memberships.

The leadership election organizing committee issued a public statement last week, saying that more than 3,000, or six per cent, of the party’s 43,000 current active members have been flagged for an audit. It said some audits were triggered when a non-Canadian IP address was used to buy a membership.

It added that, so far, no membership has been rejected.

Critics say they are not working for any of the B.C. Liberal campaigns and their only agenda is to rid the system of the abuses within it. They say it will take political will not seen so far to introduce legislation allowing Elections B.C. to oversee all party leadership elections.

“Not doing something about it, for all political parties, it ends up creating a schism and that erodes to less and less participation in the political process,” said Lali. “And on a wider scale, when you’re talking about someone who wants to be the premier of the province, you want to make sure that individual has won fairly and that the general public can have that confidence.”

Source: Indo-Canadian leaders say Elections B.C. oversight would end questionable tactics in party races

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Nomination process for federal election candidates ‘uncompetitive’ and ‘biased’: report

2019/07/18 Leave a comment

Another interesting and relevant report by Samara. Found the observation that appointed candidates less likely to be visible minority or Indigenous than contested nominations, but this may reflect in part whether or not the riding was deemed competitive or not:

Just a small portion of federal candidates go through competitive nomination contests, according to a new report from the Samara Centre for Democracy which describes the nomination process as “a weak point in our democratic infrastructure.”

Wednesday’s report — entitled ‘Party Favours: How federal election candidates are chosen’ — looked at the more than 6,600 candidates who ran to represent one of Canada’s five major political parties during the last five federal elections.

It found that just 17 per cent of those candidates competed in nomination races.

Parties directly appointed more than 2,700 candidates — and out of the 3,900 nomination contests monitored by the centre, more than 70 per cent saw just one person run.

“Nomination contests remain too short, uncompetitive, unpredictable, untransparent and exclusionary,” concludes the report.

Michael Morden, the centre’s research director, said he was stunned by the results.

“It’s kind of crazy … some of those competitive races are themselves skewed to favour one candidate. So it’s an even smaller number than that, likely,” he said.

“The fact that so few are real contests suggests fairly shallow democracy in these parties.”

Nomination contests remain too short, uncompetitive, unpredictable, untransparent and exclusionary– Samara Centre for Democracy

While in theory nearly any adult Canadian can run for office, few make it to the House of Commons without the backing of a party. Less than half of one per cent of those elected to Parliament since 1993 won as independents, notes the report.

“In recent decades, these contests have increasingly come under the control of the central party, and many cases have emerged where nomination meetings appeared to be biased in favour of one candidate or another,” the report says.

Push for more transparency

The two largest parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, held more nomination contestants than the NDP, Bloc Québécois or Greens, according to the data.

Just over a quarter of nomination contestants are women, says the report; the Conservative Party had the lowest percentage of women contestants, while the NDP recorded the most.

The report also suggests appointed candidates were less likely to come from a visible minority or Indigenous background than those chosen through nominations.

“Parliament can only ever be as diverse as the pool of candidates that run for it. Nominations designed primarily for insiders, those already plugged into the party and political system, are a major obstacle to achieving a more diverse political class,” said the report.

The report recommends that the parties establish new standards for their nomination processes by setting opening and closing dates for nomination contests, reporting how many members cast ballots in each contest and how many votes each contestant received, and releasing the total number of people the parties “vet out” — or prevent from running — in each election cycle.

“The public has stakes in how parties choose who ends up on the ballot,” said Morden.

“It’s the first link in a chain of democratic processes that lead to how we elect a Parliament. I think the general public should care about how parties are approaching these processes and whether or not parties are meeting Canadians’ expectations of what a good democratic process looks like.”

The Samara Centre said it compiled nomination meeting reports filed with Elections Canada between 2003 and September 2015 and combined them with existing datasets on federal election candidates and candidate ethnicity.

It also said it asked the major parties to report the number of contestants they rejected during the run-up to the 2015 election.

“Only the Green Party replied to our request, indicating that they vetted out seven per cent of the applicants they received in 2015, and five per cent of those received so far in the run-up to the 2019 election,” said the centre.

Source: Nomination process for federal election candidates ‘uncompetitive’ and ‘biased’: report

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Almost 300 people nominated under new senate appointment process

2016/04/06 Leave a comment

Senate Appointments - with nominations.001Strong level of diversity among those nominated to fill Senate vacancies in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. But Quebec had a surprising low-level of nominations: only 39 compared to Manitoba’s 51 and Ontario’s 194:

Almost 300 Canadians were nominated to become the first senators appointed under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new process aimed at turning the Senate into a less partisan, more independent chamber of sober second thought.

Trudeau named seven new senators last month, all chosen from a short list of 25 recommended by a newly created, arm’s length advisory board.

In its first report on the fledgling process, the board says it received 284 nominations from a host of groups representing a broad cross-section of Canada’s diverse population.

The nominees were 49 per cent female, 51 per cent male; 10 per cent identified themselves as indigenous, 16 per cent as visible minorities and four per cent as disabled.

The board’s first batch of recommendations were for vacancies in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba.

Overall, 72 per cent of the nominees were anglophones but the vast majority of nominees for the open Quebec slots were francophone.

However, the report suggests interest in the new Senate appointment process was lowest in Quebec: just 39 nominations were to fill vacancies in that province, compared to 51 for Manitoba and 194 for Ontario.

Source: Almost 300 people nominated under new senate appointment process – Macleans.ca

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,