Rococo is like baroque, only more baroque than baroque....
Count Chocula? Oh, the McGuintys always provide interesting interventions.
I think what we have here is that they're now saying that if I promote a candidate....and let's continue to take my riding as an example. If we are promoting Scott Reid--“Vote for Scott Reid, he's a stand-up guy”--that's okay. But this talks about “taking a position on an issue with which a registered party or candidate is associated”.
By way of example, I'm associated with the widespread dissemination of defibrillators to local hockey rinks. We put them into the trunks of police cars in two of our independent police forces. I've had a fair bit to do with that, and I'm quite proud of it. I have multiple constituency offices, three of them throughout the riding.
If I promote that stuff, that's okay. If we promote the side I'm on with regard to an issue like the long gun registry--which, I assure you, everybody in the riding knows I oppose--that's cool.
But it mentions here “a position on an issue with which a registered party or candidate is associated”. So if we promote the position taken by my party on the GST, which we've cut from 7% to 5%, or if we draw attention to the fact that the Liberal Party of Canada wants to raise the GST back up to 7%, then that's okay, I assume.
However, if I promote the party itself, that's a no-no. I guess I have to mention the GST in a party-free environment. It's okay to say, “There's another group out there, we can't say who they are, led by a guy, we can't say who he is, and they want to raise the GST back up.” But if I say, “It's Stéphane Dion and the Liberals”...? Oh, can't do that.
I have to assume that this is what the interpretation means. It's a nonsensical interpretation, and I would hazard a guess that it's also an unconstitutional interpretation, quite frankly. It's certainly nonsensical.
Even if it weren't nonsensical, it's still an after-the-fact interpretation. It doesn't apply to the 2006 election. It wasn't in force then.
This is the original wording going back to 1988:
Compliance with these guidelines will ensure no prosecution will be initiated by the Commissioner on matters related to the guidelines.
I guess this is saying, “We didn't really mean that. What we meant is no prosecution unless we feel like it, unless we start feeling like it tomorrow, or ten or twenty years from now.”
I actually don't know--I'm not a lawyer--to what degree words like this would be found to be binding.
They're issued by someone who presumably has administrative control over his agency. The Chief Electoral Officer has a legitimate and realistic expectation that he will comply in his administration of the law with what he says he'll do.
It may be the case that these words actually are binding on the Chief Electoral Officer, in which case the whole thing is over right now, on that basis. I'm not sure that's actually a legal case that can be made. That's something I assume is going to be argued in court.
Certainly, if we're talking about the equal application of the law and the impartial application of the law, changing your interpretation after the fact has clearly been established. To say that this is a bad administrative practice is the least of the things we could say.
The deletion of the references to promotion of the party are, frankly, the main changes. As I say, it's almost as though a typographical error occurred. To make that point, you can repeat the entire text over again putting the words “registered party” in, and you'll see it's as though it's been popped out. You could read it this way: “election advertising means the transmission to the public by any means during an election period of an advertising message that promotes or opposes”—