Bill C-65 - Canada's Election Act and MP Pension Greed

Canada's Trudeau government recently introduced Bill C-65 entitled "An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act".  Here is a summary of the bill:

 

"This enactment amends the Canada Elections Act to, among other things,

(a) provide for two additional days of advance polling;

(b) authorize returning officers to constitute polling divisions that consist of a single institution, or part of an institution, where seniors or persons with a disability reside and provide for the procedures for voting at polling stations in those polling divisions;

(c) update the process for voting by special ballot;

(d) provide for the establishment of offices for voting by special ballot at post-secondary educational institutions;

(e) provide for new requirements relating to political parties’ policies for the protection of personal information;

(f) establish new prohibitions and modify existing prohibitions, including in relation to foreign influence in the electoral process, the provision of false or misleading information respecting elections and the acceptance or use of certain contributions; and

(g) expand the scope of certain provisions relating to the administration and enforcement of that Act, including by granting the Commissioner of Canada Elections certain powers in respect of any conspiracy or attempt to commit, or being an accessory after the fact or counselling in relation to, a contravention of that Act.

The enactment also provides that the Chief Electoral Officer must make a report on the measures that need to be taken to implement a three-day polling period, a report on the measures that need to be taken to enable electors to vote at any place in their polling station, a report on the feasibility of enabling electors to vote at any polling station in their electoral district and a report proposing a process for the determination of whether a political party has as one of its fundamental purposes the promotion of hatred against an identifiable group of persons."

 

Of course, Canada's taxpayer-funded, bought and paid for media was all gaga about the benefits to Canadian voters of the changes to Canada's voting laws as shown here:

..and here:

 

Making it easier for Canadians to vote and more secure for the nation's democracy.  Who could possibly find any fault with these wonderful ideas?  It's nice to see that the Trudeau government has moved to improve Canada's voting ecosystem.

 

Bill C-65 is an attempt to modernize Canada's Election Act which was originally passed in 2000 which states this:

 

(2) Subject to subsection (1), each general election must be held on the third Monday of October in the fourth calendar year following polling day for the last general election, with the first general election after this section comes into force being held on Monday, October 19, 2009.

 

This was an effort to codify Canada's election dates and ensure that governments didn't use election dates to benefit their own agendas, an effort which has been an utter failure.

 

There is, however, one aspect of the recently proposed Bill C-65 that received almost no attention from the media.  Hidden in amongst the mind numbingly boring legalese, we find this innocuous little paragraph:

 

Election dates:

(2) Subject to subsection (1), each general election must be held on the third Monday of October in the fourth calendar year following polling day for the last general election. Insertion start However, if Monday, October 20, 2025 would be the day fixed for voting at a general election under this subsection, that general election must instead be held on Monday, October 27, 2025 .

 

Now, you may think that there is no big deal with the Trudeau/Freeland Liberals moving the fixed election date for 2025 by one week from October 20th to October 27th but you couldn't be more wrong.

 

According to Canadian law, Members of Parliament must serve for six years before they qualify for their gold-plated, taxpayer-funded MP pensions as quoted here:

For pensionable service accrued prior to January 1, 2016, a plan member with 6 years of service may receive their pension as early as age 55. 

For pensionable service accrued on or after January 1, 2016, a plan member with 6 years of service may receive an unreduced pension at age 65.  

 

Canada's election in 2019 was held on October 21, 2019 meaning that MPs who were first elected in 2019 won't qualify for their MP pensions until October 21, 2025.  If the election were to be held on October 20, 2025, a significant number of MPs would not receive their pensions.

 

In 2019, 27 percent of MPs elected were rookies; 38 were Conservatives, 24 were Liberals, 21 were Bloc Québécois, 7 were NDP and 1 was Green.  Among the Liberals first elected in October 2019, we have Steven Guilbeault, Canada's current Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Adam van Kouverden, Parliamentary Secretary to Steven Guilbeault and Helena Jaczek, former Receiver General for Canada and Minister Responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario.  Although he was first elected in a by-election on February 25, 2019, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh who is single-handedly responsible for the supply and confidence agreement which is keeping the Trudeau/Freeland government in power, will qualify for his pension on February 26, 2025 which explains his desire to keep the current government alive until at least that date.

 

So, while B-65 has the appearance of making Canada's electoral system fairer, in fact, I would suggest that it's entire purpose is to ensure that certain Members of Parliament receive their taxpayer-funded pensions.

 

Three words - greedy, corrupt bastards.

Joe Biden, Corruption in Ukraine and American Power Peddling

With the Ukraine controversy swirling around Donald Trump and the actions taken by the Democrats to impeach him, a look back at some relatively recent comments by the Democrat's top presidential candidate are in order.  Rather that focussing on the potential conflict of interest between Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden and the justice system in Ukraine, I am going to take a different approach to recent events that play to a wider narrative, that of the use of political power  peddling on the international stage by Washington. 

Let's look at a bit of background first.   Thanks to a timeline created by Just Security, we can look back and see key events in Ukraine prior to the time that Joe Biden was visiting the nation.  In November 2013, Ukrainians began protests against their government in Kyiv's Maidan, against the government of President Yanukovych.  By February 2014, the pro-Russian Yanukovych government fell, President Barack Obama appointed Joe Biden as his point man on Ukraine and the ongoing war in the eastern Ukraine regions of Donestsk and Luhansk began in April 2014.  In April 2014, Joe Biden's youngest son, Hunter Biden, joined the board of Burisma Holdings, the largest private natural gas producing company in Ukraine.  Here is the announcement: 

At the time, there was a perception of a conflict of interest given Joe Biden's position in the Obama Administration and his appointment as the lead person for Ukraine.

In April 2014, the United Kingdom's Serious Fraud Office blocked all accounts of Burisma's majority shareholder, Mykola Zlochevskiy and then unblocked them on January 21, 2015 after the found that there is no evidence to suggest that the assets were unlawfully acquired during his term in public office.  It is this event that has created a kerfuffle since it is believed that Ukraine's Prosecutor General did not supply the U.K. with the documents needed for a complete investigation.

On September 24, 2015, United States Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech at the Odesa Financial Forum, scolding Ukraines's Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin for not cooperating with the British investigation and even undermining it.  Here are some of his comments:

"That problem (corruption) threatens everything that the Rada, the Cabinet, the National Reform Council, and others are doing to push political and economic reforms forward and make life better for Ukrainians, and it flies in the face of what the Revolution of Dignity is trying to achieve. 

That obstacle is the failure of the institution of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine to successfully fight internal corruption. Rather than supporting Ukraine’s reforms and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General’s office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform.

In defiance of Ukraine’s leaders, these bad actors regularly hinder efforts to investigate and prosecute corrupt officials within the prosecutor general’s office. They intimidate and obstruct the efforts of those working honestly on reform initiatives within that same office. 

The United States stands behind those who challenge these bad actors…. 

I encourage all of you to speak up in support of these brave investigators and prosecutors. Give them the resources and support to successfully prosecute these and future cases. 

We have learned that there have been times that the PGO (Prosecutor General’s Office) not only did not support investigations into corruption, but rather undermined prosecutors working on legitimate corruption cases.

For example, in the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized 23 million dollars in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people. Officials at the PGO’s office were asked by the U.K to send documents supporting the seizure.

Instead they sent letters to Zlochevsky’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result the money was freed by the U.K. court and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus.

The misconduct by the PGO officials who wrote those letters should be investigated, and those responsible for subverting the case by authorizing those letters should – at a minimum – be summarily terminated. " (my bolds)

On December 8, 2015, Joe Biden gave a speech to Ukraine's Rada (Ukraine's parliament) regarding what it needed to do with regards to battling corruption:

"As the Prime Minister and the President heard me often say, I never tell another man or another nation or another woman what’s in their interest.  But I can tell you, you cannot name me a single democracy in the world where the cancer of corruption is prevalent.  You cannot name me one.  They are thoroughly inconsistent.  And it’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption.  The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.  The judiciary should be overhauled.  The energy sector needs to be competitive, ruled by market principles -- not sweetheart deals.  It’s not enough to push through laws to increase transparency with regard to official sources of income.  Senior elected officials have to remove all conflicts between their business interest and their government responsibilities.  Every other democracy in the world -- that system pertains. 

Oligarchs and non-oligarchs must play by the same rules.  They have to pay their taxes, settle their disputes in court -- not by bullying judges.  That's basic.  That's how nations succeed in the 21st century. 

Corruption siphons away resources from the people.  It blunts the economic growth, and it affronts the human dignity.  We know that.  You know that.  The Ukrainian people know that.  When Russia seeks to use corruption as a tool of coercion, reform isn’t just good governance, it’s self-preservation.  It’s in the national security interest of the nation.

Russia is trying to undermine the stability and sovereignty of Ukraine any way they can't, including squeezing Ukraine financially, trying to undermine your economy.  They view that as a cheaper way than sending tanks across the line of contact."

There's the key point - the Obama Administration is clearly blaming Russia for the corruption in Ukraine.

Now, let's move forward just over two years.  Back in January 2018, Joe Biden appeared at the Council on Foreign Relations, a highly influential non-profit think tank which has numerous former federal government politicians and prominent members of the American intelligence community among its members.  In a question and answer exchange with Richard Haas, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, we find the following comments from the former Vice President on his relationship with Ukraine during his term in office between 2014 and 2016, keeping in mind that this followed a lengthy exchange on Russia and its relationship with Washington:

"Do I think they’re—I think the Donbas has potential to be able to be solved, but it takes two things. One of those things is missing now. And that is I’m desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of Kiev in terms of corruption. They made—I mean, I’ll give you one concrete example. I was—not I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got. I got all the good ones. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to—convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.

So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.

Well, there’s still—so they made some genuine substantial changes institutionally and with people. But one of the three institutions, there’s now some backsliding." (my bolds)

I'm certain that the "backsliding" that has taken place can somehow be blamed on Russia.

I realize that the story is extremely complicated and I have tried to simplify it as much as possible.  In my opinion, at the very least, we can take one thing from the aforementioned events in Ukraine and comments by key members of the Obama Administration; Washington is completely hypocritical when it comes to corruption in government and how Russia uses coercion and other means of control to get its own way in the domestic affairs of other nations and how it uses corruption as a means of warfare.  A great deal of energy has been spent blaming Russian and Vladimir Putin for the woes of the world when, in fact, much of the blame for various geopolitical issues around the globe can be laid at the feet of Washington, the driving force behind Ukraine's current situation.   

Government Corruption and the Threat to Democracy

Transparency International, a non-partisan global movement that has a vision in which government, business, civil society and the daily lives of people are free of corruption, has recently released the most recent version of its annual Corruptions Perceptions Index for 2018.  This index ranks 180 nations by the perceived level of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople that deal in each nation.  Given that high levels of government corruption are often accompanied by a poor quality of life and threatened democracy, this measure is an important aspect of life around the world.

Let's open by looking at this video which gives you some background on this years Corruption Perceptions Index or CPI:

The 2018 CPI draws on 13 surveys and expert assessments to measure public sector corruption with scores ranging from zero (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).   In 2018, more than two-thirds of the 180 nations in the study scored below 50 with the average for all 180 nations being 43.  

Here is a map showing the scores for all nations in the study:

The top ten nations (least corrupt) and their respective scores are as follows:

Denmark - 88

New Zealand - 87

Finland - 85

Singapore - 85

Sweden - 85

Switzerland - 85

Norway - 84

Netherlands - 82

Canada - 81

Luxembourg - 81

The bottom six nations (most corrupt) and their respective scores are as follows:

Libya - 17

Afghanistan - 16

Equatorial Guinea - 16

Guinea Bissau - 16

Sudan - 16

North Korea - 14

Yemen - 14

South Sudan - 13

Syria - 13

Somalia - 10

As a whole, the highest scoring region is Western Europe and the European Union with an average score of 66.  The lowest scoring region is Sub-Saharan Africa with an average score of 32.  Over the last seven years, only 20 nations have improved their CPI scores and 16 nations have seen significant decreases in their CPI scores 

There is an interesting relationship between CPI scores and the degree of democracy as measure by Freedom House in each of the 180 nations; there are no democracies that score below 50 and very few autocratic countries that score higher than 50 as shown on this graphic with every dot represents a nation's CPI score:

Government corruption is something that you are highly unlikely to hear about from your elected representative no matter what nation you are from.  High levels of corruption slowly chips away at democracy to produce a reality where democratic institutions are completely undermined and citizens experience declining civil rights.

What is rather surprising is how poorly the United States fared in this analysis.  The authors of the study scored the United States at 71, putting them in 22nd place, just ahead of the United Arab Emirates and down from 16th place in 2015.  The U.S. CPI score in 2018 is a drop of 4 points since 2017 and is the lowest score that the U.S. has garnered over the past 7 years.  The authors attribute this drop to leadership styles that involve the following tactics:

1.) an undermining of free and independent media, especially when coverage challenges leaders’ messaging

2.) a silencing and control of civil society and international organisations

3.) an increase in voter suppression and disenfranchisement

4.) an increase in anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-indigenous and racist language

5.) a rise in public promises for simplistic and “strong hand” approaches to solving deep-rooted and complex societal problems, including corruption

6.) an interference with or blunt use of national institutions to weaken the system of checks and balances and increase executive power

7.) an increase in conflicts of interest and private influence 

Let's look at the scores of some other nations that we see in the media on a regular basis:

Germany - score of 80 - 11th place (tie)

United Kingdom - score of 80 - 11th place (tie)

Japan - score of 73 - 18th place (3 place tie)

Israel - score of 61 - 34th place

Saudi Arabia - score of 49 - 58th place (tie)

Cuba - score of 47 - 61st place (tie)

India - score of 41 - 78th place (five place tie)

China - score of 49 - 87th place

Iran - score of 28 - 138th place (6 place tie)

Russia - score of 28 - 138th place (6 place tie)

Iraq - score of 18 - 168th place (tie)

Venezuela - score of 18 - 168th place (tie)

I find it rather interesting that nations that have been subjected to America's nation rebuilding and rebranding exercises (i.e. Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan) score among the lowest of all nations in the study, indicating that very little has been accomplished when military intervention is measured in terms of reduced government corruption. 

As we can see from this analysis by Transparency International, government corruption is a widespread problem outside of Europe and Canada.  With the close relationship between high levels of government corruption and lack of democratic freedoms, many of us, particularly in the United States, should be concerned that our basic rights as members of what was once a relatively untarnished society are under threat.  We need look no further than the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee to see the source of at least one aspect of political corruption in the United States.