Merci beaucoup.
I'm honoured to be here, although it does strike me that coming to a committee of the House of Commons to talk about democracy is a bit like telling Prince Edward Islanders how to grow potatoes. However, I understand that the emphasis is on democracy in other places and on the practical support that Canadians can provide.
A few years ago I summarized the hemispheric portion of my experience in an article entitled “Election Monitoring in the Americas--Benefit or Boondoggle?” The benefits far outweigh the boondoggle. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Since 1990, the year that Canada joined the Organization of American States, 19 of its 34 members have had one or more of their elections monitored by international observers. In this period, the OAS alone has conducted over 80 observations. Millions of dollars, a lot of that money Canadian, have been invested, and hundreds of Canadians have been involved. This is clearly a major undertaking. But has it done any good? Has it changed the course of democratic evolution in the Americas? If you compare the dictatorship-dominated political landscape of the Americas in the pre-eighties period with the present, the answer is that the investment has been amply rewarded.
Unfortunately, there has been slippage. Very troubling in Latin America is evidence that popular confidence in the democratic system is eroding. That has little to do with the electoral process and much to do with the failure of expectations engendered by the promotion of democracy in the eighties and the collapse of respect for political parties—a bad situation, as political parties are of course the indispensable machinery of democracies.
Canada, especially through parliamentary networking and through the OAS, can do more to help parties and parliaments rebuild. CIDA has good governance programs in many countries. They need to be applied to political systems, not just to bureaucracies.
The usual mandate of an observer mission is to assess whether an election can be endorsed as genuinely free and fair. The approval of international observers helps to establish legitimacy both internally and externally. For countries undergoing a transition from authoritarianism to the beginnings of a democratic system, the observer process has been critically important, and if accompanied by long-term technical assistance has been shown to play a decisive role in facilitating that transition. In countries where a democratic culture has been all but extinguished by dictatorship or has never matured, expert technical assistance must start from scratch to build reliable voter registration lists and all the other electoral infrastructure.
The most spectacular vindication of this process was the Nicaraguan election of 1990. Another was South Africa.
In Nicaragua, the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega had agreed to invite observers, in the firm expectation that they would be endorsing a Sandinista victory. When it became apparent that he had lost, Ortega had second thoughts and was eventually persuaded to accept the victory of Violeta Chamorro through the diplomacy of Jimmy Carter and Venezuelan president Carlos Andrez Perez. However, these individual efforts would have been futile if the observers and the advance preparations had not delivered a highly credible verdict.
More groundbreaking occurred in the Dominican elections of 1994, when the OAS mission of which I was the leader blew the whistle on election manipulation that had deprived the opposition of victory. A similar pattern was followed when the OAS withdrew from President Fujimori's rigged elections in the 2000 elections in Peru.
Not all observations have moved the democratic process forward; however, the evidence demonstrates that advanced preparation and election monitoring have contributed significantly to embedding a democratic culture. What is less understood is that these successes could not have taken place without disciplined attention to the professionalism of the observers and of the technical experts.
For several years the OAS would not accept Canadian candidates for observer missions, because they had been selected by ministers, often without regard for qualifications.
The present system works because international missions have developed high credibility. Success has meant that traditional electoral observation in many countries is becoming obsolete. Of course the objective is just that: to make observation by foreigners obsolete. Hence the importance of supporting local civil society organizations.
As a caveat here, we already work with civil society, but too often it is the civil society of well-educated and well-heeled elites. We must connect more effectively below these levels.
In those countries where uncertainties, corruption, or instability still call for outside observation, the approach is being rethought. The focus should include counts of what is happening at polling stations on election day, but sharpen on pre-identified weak spots in the process, such as abusive government control of the media, election transport, computer fraud, election financing, intimidation, the lack of transparency in the registration, and the improper security of ballots.
The principal observer organizations are sending in teams months in advance to determine the tilt of the electoral playing field and to locate the major deficiencies. In places where a democratic culture has not taken hold or is tenuous, the role of a few long-term observers can be more important than the activities of large numbers of observers who spend only a week in the country.
A major challenge for observer organizations is to find resources up to a year ahead of time. CIDA has begun to provide funding for election missions on an annual basis, and this helps enormously with planning. There are lessons learned from our participation in the Ukraine elections of 2004—and Mr. Goldring is certainly an authority on that and on other election observations—and earlier this year in Palestine.
One lesson is the absolute necessity of maintaining the impartiality of the observers. It is a mistake to recruit observers who have strong links to one side in a political contest. In Ukraine, the government party, with active support from Russia, was looking for opportunities to discredit the western observer missions by pointing to partisan links and behaviour. Some observers in the Canada Corps observers mission came very close to falling into that trap. Evidence of partial observation could have been disastrous, as the reporting of the western observer missions was one of the critical factors that allowed a peaceful transition to take place.
Twice in the last two years, the Canadian government organized election missions that were exclusively Canadian. There is a temptation to look upon these missions as opportunities to burnish the Canadian image at home and abroad. We go down this road at our peril.
Election missions must have credibility built on a cumulative track record to enable them to endorse or repudiate an election process. National missions inevitably carry political baggage or are susceptible to political baggage that can compromise that credibility.
What would have happened to the mission in Palestine if The Globe and Mail or Le Soleil had published religiously insensitive cartoons while we were in Palestine? Multilateral missions are better insulated from this predicament.
Of course elections are only one part of the process; other parts deserve more attention than they traditionally receive. We have successfully exported our access-to-information model to Mexico. This is a vital tool of the democratic process. We should do more of this. But it has not helped that a succession of prime ministers have been messing up our own model. Our image in this area and its value overseas would be greatly improved if we could reverse the steady erosion by governments of the powers of the Office of the Information Commissioner.
Some of the most basic lessons learned are about sensitivity to cultural differences, but that was covered before and I will leave it.
To conclude, I have been moving across a large waterfront and have not addressed one of your key questions: Where is the greatest need for our support? It's a tough question. There's a lot that we've done that's useful and we still should do in the Balkans, eastern Europe, Africa, and Central Asia, such as help with party architecture, including finance rules; governance at the municipal level; transparency; access to information; and support for civil society organizations. These are generally not high-cost operations, but with our limited resources I believe we should be guided also by knowledge of where we have credibility and potential to make a difference.
Here I will expose a professional bias. The logical area is Latin America and the Caribbean—places like Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Ecuador, Jamaica, and Guyana—neighbours in our hemisphere.
Some of this we can do bilaterally, some by supporting the work of the President Carter Center on the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Much should be done through the Organization of American States. No regional organization outside western Europe has struck out so boldly for the values of democratic governance. The OAS should nudge the region toward better governance, greater accountability, and more attention to the horrors of drugs and human rights abuse. It needs more support to do its job as the bulwark of hemispheric democracy.
Thank you.
