Quebec’s ‘stolen’ elections

Quebec has always held a special status in Canada. Bill 101, introduced in 1977, made French the official language of workplaces, government and courts, required that all signs be written in French and made it mandatory for most children to attend French school. Over the years the bill has been criticized and and at times mocked for restricting the rights of the anglophone community, but it was an attempt, albeit a coercive one, to unite Quebecers around a common language and culture.

Today the province stands as an island of sorts — the only French-speaking jurisdiction in North America. Surrounded as it is by an anglophone sea, there is much justified attention paid in Quebec to protecting and preserving our distinct language and culture. But the Parti Québécois (PQ), the historic vehicle of Quebec’s sovereignty movement, has evolved over the years from a progressive, underdog vehicle of social change into a collection of careerists who seem to have forgotten why they wanted an independent Quebec in the first place. And now the downward spiral of the party has come to include underhanded tactics to keep itself in power.

The PQ was voted into power in 2012 by a narrow margin and is struggling to maintain its government after breaking many of its election promises. With April 7 elections looming, ones that will determine weighty issues such as whether Quebec holds its third referendum on sovereignty, the party has doubled down on efforts to win by dividing, rather than uniting, Quebecers. After proposing a bill similar to the French ban on headscarves and other religious symbols in public schools, it began targeting minorities and nonfrancophones in an attempt to make it harder for them to exercise their right to vote. Last week reports surfaced of many voters, particularly students but also anglophones and minorities, being refused when they tried to register to vote, despite presenting all the identification and documents required.

The PQ claimed that an abnormally high number of minorities had been registering to vote in five ridings and that this pointed to voter fraud. By raising these allegations, they sent a not so subtle signal to election workers that minorities seeking to register should be regarded with suspicion.

“This coming week will be crucial for democracy,” PQ Justice Minister Bernard St.-Arnaud said. “Will the Quebec election be stolen by the people from Ontario, by the rest of Canada?”

It may sound ridiculous to those from other countries to listen to a provincial minister talk about Canadians stealing a Canadian election, but they don’t call Quebec and the rest of Canada the two solitudes for nothing. Distrust of the other runs deep on both sides of the border, such that this type of fearmongering found an eager audience.

What’s more, there are semantic disputes over voters’ eligibility. In order to be eligible to vote in Quebec, an elector must be a Canadian citizen, must be at least 18 years of age, and must have been domiciled in Quebec for at least the past six months. The PQ interprets “domiciled” to mean having some sort of nebulous commitment to remain in the province long into the future. Most others read it to mean having the province as your principal residence. In the PQ conception, no student from outside Quebec could be considered domiciled in the province, and this is the bogeyman to which St.-Arnaud is referring. 

The manufactured scandal blew back on the PQ, but it nonetheless achieved its objective of suppressing minority votes. To my knowledge, this appears to be one of the first instances of voter suppression in Canada — and it sets a terrifying precedent.

Voter suppression is a tactic perfected by the Republican Party in the United States. The general principle is to claim widespread voter fraud — conservative journalist John Fund is a leading propagandist on this score — and insist that measures are needed to address this epidemic. These measures, passed by Republican state legislatures, invariably make it harder to vote, demanding greater and greater levels of identification. Not so coincidentally, minorities, who tend to favor the Democratic Party, often have a harder time meeting these enhanced thresholds.

The problem is that, just as in the United States, there is no evidence, from any Canadian jurisdiction, that voter fraud is a problem. St. Arnaud’s claim was bogus. Within a couple of days the director general of elections released data showing there was no flood of new registrations, and in some of the ridings named by the PQ, there were fewer registrations than in 2012.

This is happening not just on a provincial level. It’s happening countrywide with Stephen Harper’s so-called Fair Elections Act — a proposed vote-suppression bill that has drawn fire from a nearly unanimous chorus of experts and editorialists, who say its zeal to crack down on so-called irregularities will make it harder for people to identify themselves and vote — again, an echo of Republican tactics farther south. 

In 2011, Harry Neufeld, a former Elections Canada executive and eight-year chief of Elections BC was commissioned by Elections Canada to write a report on election irregularities in the 2011 Canadian election. He found no substantive evidence of voter fraud.

“I’ve never in my 33 years of election administration seen in Canada any level of systematic fraud by voters. What I have seen is that fewer and fewer and fewer people are voting,” Neufeld told the Vancouver Observer. The threat of voter fraud is illusory, yet the Canadian and Quebec governments are remorselessly peddling it for electoral advantage.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that these tactics are beginning to make an appearance in Canada. They will always be tempting for parties that draw their core support from older, more settled voters and that hold little appeal for minorities and other marginalized communities.

But that doesn’t make it any less offensive to the very idea of free and fair elections. As voter turnout plummets around the world, the snake-oil salesmen of suppression measures want to make it harder for people to vote — all in the name of maintaining the status quo.

Canada’s democracy deserves better.