Glad he's gone (Canada's Chief Electoral Officer resigns)

National Pos ^ | 2006-12-30 | Gerry Nicholls

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The Liberals are trying to turn Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley's sudden resignation into some kind of political scandal. But the only true scandal here is that Kingsley wasn't fired years ago.

Simply put, Kingsley was a terrible chief electoral officer, more interested in pushing his own ideological agenda than in administering the law.

And I should know. My organization, the National Citizens Coalition (NCC), has had many run-ins with Kingsley over the years on issues related to freedom of political expression. The problem was that Kingsley never seemed to understand the value of this freedom.

Indeed, six years ago, he pushed the government to enact an "election gag l aw," which places severe restrictions on how much money private citizens and organizations can spend on election advertising.

Then when my group challenged the constitutionality of such institutionalized political censorship, Kingsley, in a stunningly partisan act for a supposedly impartial official, demanded the right to intervene so he could argue in favour of the law.

His courtroom rhetoric was so strident and so politically charged that one of the journalists covering the case dubbed him, "Canada's Chief Ideologue."

To make matters worse, Kingsley used his power to go after groups or individuals he didn't like -- groups like the NCC.

In 2000, for instance, Elections Canada charged the NCC with violating the election gag law. Our supposed crime was that we ran a 15- second TV ad condemning, ironically enough, the election gag law.

The charge was a sham. The NCC ad was not election advertising. It didn't tell anybody who to vote for; we didn't support or oppose any political party or candidate. Yet Elections Canada maintained it was election advertising. Why? Because the ad took a stand on the gag law, an issue associated with the Liberal party, which brought the law into being. And according to Kingsley, that's enough to qualify it as election advertising.

Eventually, the charge was withdrawn, but not before the NCC was forced into a long and costly criminal trial. Meanwhile, Kingsley was much more tolerant of groups that ran ads which seemed to favour the Liberal party.

For instance, during the 2004 federal election, the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) -- a government agency -- ran newspaper ads extolling the virtues of the board's monopoly. The ad featured pictures of two bulls. One bull was labelled, "This is the CWB"; the second (this one castrated) was labelled, "This is the CWB in an open market for wheat and barley." The bottom of the ad said, "No one has the right to tell you which one is right for your herd."

Doesn't that seem like an election ad? After all, the Liberals had a position on the Wheat Board monopoly. They supported it. And the Conservatives opposed it.

You would think Kingsley -- who enforced the gag law with the fanatical zeal of a Spanish Inquisitor when it came to the NCC -- would have jumped on this. He didn't.

Even after some anti-monopoly farmers lodged a complaint, Elections Canada refused to press charges against the Wheat Board.

Was this a case of Kingsley allowing his own political prejudices to interfere with his job?

Or maybe he just enjoyed playing the bureaucratic bully. Like the way he used his powers to bully Paul Bryan, a British Columbia software developer who on election night 2000 posted real-time Atlantic Canada election results on his Web site while the polls were still open in B.C.

This violated Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act, which bans the "premature transmission" of election results.

Now Bryan wasn't the only person who prematurely posted voting information. Yahoo! Canada, ABCnews. com and various other Web sites were also posting election results. Yet only Bryan was charged. Kingsley dispatched the "speech police" to raid his home, where they seized two of his computer hard drives.

To his credit, Bryan fought back in the courts, and his case recently went before the Supreme Court of Canada. Fortunately, Kingsley won't be around as chief electoral officer to see how it resolves.

And for the sake of our democracy, I hope whoever next holds that important post does the job in a competent and unbiasedmanner.

I also hope he or she understands the value of free political speech.

- Gerry Nicholls is vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition. www.nationalcitizens.ca.

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