Over 200 protesters braved the cold weather on Parliament Hill March 5 to speak out against the federal robo-calls scandal.
More than 31,000 voters have filed complaints with Elections Canada after receiving harassing or misleading phone calls during the last federal election.
Protesters said they’re outraged because this scandal has compromised the democratic electoral process.
Canadians Against Electoral Fraud (CAEF), a group founded by sixth-year political science and human rights Carleton student Arun Smith, organized the protest.
“Even if these are not committed by a particular party, the idea of having fraudulent calls redirecting people to non-existent polling stations . . . it means the state of our democracy is in trouble,” Smith said.
CAEF is calling for three solutions: They want an independent investigation, a full nullification of the federal election results in all 77 affected ridings and byelections called, and full accountability from the current government.
Smith said students would have been among those most affected by vote suppression techniques like robo-calls.
“We already know that students, youth, and ‘the economic underclass’ vote in disproportionally low numbers because of things like disengagement processes,” he said. “We want to have more legitimacy and more than 61 per cent of Canadians voting; these things need to stop.”
The Conservative government has been “silencing” people who speak out against robo-calls, said Steve Macintosh, a fourth-year law student at the University of Ottawa. That’s why he said he came to the rally.
“The Conservatives, possibly through implication, were involved in a systematic attempt to shut down Canadians’ ability to vote and that is fundamentally against everything I stand for as a Canadian,” he said.
Several activists and politicians spoke at the rally, including former Senate page Brigette DePape and Green party leader Elizabeth May.
In her speech, May pointed out that no one has been found guilty of the robo-calls.
“I don’t know who paid for an orchestrated national co-ordinated attempt to defraud thousands of Canadians,” she said. “We need to get to the bottom of it and Stephen Harper as the leader of the Conservative party and moreover as the prime minister of this country should be just as upset about this as I am. He should be calling for an inquiry.”
It will become clearer how important these robo-calls are to Canadian politics when we find out who did it, said Carleton political science professor William Cross.
“I think this is kind of a juicy story that catches people’s attention . . . because it reeks of dirty tricks and unfair politics,” he said.
The significance of this case will be based on who is really behind it, Cross said. If it’s something that was centrally orchestrated from the top levels and widespread it could be very serious.
“There is enough suggestion of wrongdoing that there really is cause to get to the bottom of it and find out just what happened because the allegations are quite serious, infringing on people’s right to vote,” he said.
Despite the allegations, the Conservatives have maintained they had no involvement in making the calls.
Peterborough MP Dean Del Mastro, parliamentary secretary to both the minister of intergovernmental affairs and the prime minister, said in the House of Commons March 5 that the opposition was simply upset by the results of the election.
“In our campaign, as our campaign manager said yesterday and has been repeated by others who have come forward, we were absolutely punctilious in following all the rules of Elections Canada,” Del Mastro said.
No matter what the outcome, Smith said the climate of politics in Canada needs to change.
“It’s time to do some soul searching about our electoral processes, about our democracy and to do some re-understanding of what the systems are and how those need to change if at all,” he said. “The culture of politics in our country has become so vituperative, has become so damaging, so dangerous that it risks alienating an entire segment of the population.”
