Public ignorance of our political system is a scourge. Tackling that is the first step to meaningful electoral reform in Newfoundland and Labrador. The second priority is to make sure the players do not set the rules for everyone, as they have done repeatedly, and disastrously, since 2003. Most of all, we need to get on with reform, as soon as possible.While there are many good reasons for electoral reform in Newfoundland and Labrador, most of the recent talk of changes to how elections run in the province is from people who want to give an advantage to a party they like.
Take the decision in 2015 to slash public representation
in the House. The Conservatives who were
behind the notion, figured it would be easier to win a majority of 20 seats
instead of 48. They knew they couldn’t get 24 but hoped they could cling to
power with 20 or 21. Depending on how
the count goes on Thursday, they might be right.
The Liberals who backed the cuts, like Dwight Ball, were
concerned only that the idea appeared popular.
They thought that by siding with a popular initiative they would gain
favour with voters.
Lots of popular things don’t drive votes and this was one
of them. If they thought about the
electoral math – and there’s no sign they did – then they likely hit on the
same self-serving reason the Conservatives did.
Depending on how the count goes on Thursday, they might be as right or as
wrong as the Conservatives when they last held power.
Then there’s the business of fixed election dates.
Unfixed
Election Dates
The Conservatives changed the election rules in 2004
purely for the sake of ego and brain farts.
Danny Williams was pissed off that he had to wait three years to become Premier,
so he introduced what he claimed were fixed election dates. He also buggered around with the law to try
and force an election so no future Conservative demi-god would have to be held
back from power by lesser mortals.
And just to really drive home the way brain farts work
their evil, the changes to the fixed election dates introduced in 2015 along
with the cut to representation did set an alternate date for the election unless
the Premier had a concern on a particular day. Since the new section came after
the first one, the whole exercise was moot anyway. That this mess went through
the House with the support of the Liberals and Conservatives - and no one
noticed or cared - is a good example of why we need more substantive changes in
the House of Assembly than just buggering around with numbers and dates.
Legally, fixed election dates in Newfoundland and
Labrador have been nothing more profound than an agreement among the parties
about when an election would take place next, all things being equal. That’s not different from what happened
before 2007 or what happened in 2015. Parties
knew an election would come at any time, but in practice, they could count on
every three years or so. The people in
the parties understood the rules of the game, even if they weren’t written
down, and everyone played.
For all the people – to a soul, New Democrat activists
– who blamed their poor performance this time out on the supposed snap
election, it is useful to look at the facts.
In elections before 2007, that is, the first “fixed” date, the NDP routinely
fielded twice or three times as many candidates as they did in this election
and with far less advance notice.
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In this instance, the NDP knew an election as coming as
long ago as 2015, arguably as long ago as 2007, and at the very least since
some time last fall. One of the reasons
the party insiders fired former leader Gerry Rogers out through the door was
that she had done absolutely nothing to put money in the bank, recruit
candidates or anything else for an election *everyone* knew was coming sooner
rather than later.
So, yeah. The
NDP are not in sad shape this time because of a snap election compared to the
time of fixed dates before.
Nosireebob.
It’s about
data
In this election, a few people have called for a ban
on robocalls. The people who dislike robocalls are Liberals and New
Democrats. Their opposition to robocalls
in 2019 is because they are not the ones using robocalls to reach voters. The
cause of their anger is an outfit calling itself NL Proud. It used to be NL Strong like the Ontario
outfit it is related to.
The idea is simple. They can spread pro-Conservative
messages while at the same time building up a tidy database of people who like
their messages. Knowing who your voters
or potential voters are is the most useful piece of information any political group
can have.
They might help push a few Conservative voters to the
polls and make the difference in this election.
But NL Strong will finish the election cycle with a great database they
can use in the fall against the federal Liberals. That’s the big prize.
The key thing to remember is that the people upset
about robocalls on social media are not the target market for the folks making
them. There is nothing improper about
the robocalls and the purpose to which they are being put is an exercise in
free speech and democracy. We might want
to consider some rules about financial and other disclosure, since this is a group
not officially affiliated with a political party, but otherwise we need to
think hard about any suggestion to ban the activity altogether.
After all, campaigns are driven by data. They always have been. What the Strong or Proud groups are doing is
basically the same as what the Liberals and others have been doing recently and
parties always did. The change is in the technology. The data used to be in people’s heads. Then it
went on three by five index cards. Then
it went onto Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets.
Then it went into Access or something custom-built along the same
lines. And now it is LiberaList or
whatever the party brand name is for their data management technology.
Look at it this way:
before 2015, the Liberals amassed a huge amount of information on voters
in the province. They had a competitive
advantage but not an unfair one. The
Conservatives or New Democrats could have done the same thing. They chose not to.
Robocalls and similar techniques allow parties to
engage more voters directly. That is a very good thing at a time when turn-out
is dropping like a stone. It allows parties
to contact voters using technology at a time when individuals are less and less
involved in political parties. They
allow small parties to compete with larger ones. It *should* be a technology the provincial New
Democrats embrace precisely because it lets them fight in the big leagues as they
otherwise haven’t been able to manage.
There’s also no inconvenience. People can screen their calls using caller ID
and just not answer calls from a number they do not recognize. And if they answer the phone and don’t like
the message, callers can hang up. It’s a
machine. You can’t hurt its feelings.
The real
story about database management and technology is not that the Conservatives
are using it but that the governing Liberals squandered it. Coming out of their
leadership race of four years ago, the Liberals had the best data advantage
ever held by a political party in the province.
Ever.
They squandered
it.
They didn’t use
it for fund-raising.
The didn’t use
it to recruit.
They didn’t use
it to elicit feedback on their performance.
The Liberals
went from being the data leaders in the province to a party that has completely
ignored research and data, facts and information about political views and
about policy.
That is why they are scrambling to win a majority
government after only four years in office and despite making some significant
changes to the way government works.
They have done plenty to deserve a second run, but you’d never know it
from the current campaign. That’s on the people currently running things just
like the NDP or Conservative faults and failings are purely on the people
running those parties.
We need to change a few things about elections in this
province. The most urgent need is to change
how little people know about the system.
Public ignorance is a scourge. People cannot make good decisions about how to make things better if they know nothing
of how things run now.
The second thing we need to do is make sure that the
players do not set the rules for everyone. Since 2003, every single change to
elections has produced an unmitigated mess. One of them went to court and the
courts found that the way special ballots ran was a violation of the
constitution. It denied fundamental rights.
Special ballots aren’t the only feature of our elections system that
violate basic rights or that disadvantage individuals in favour of groups. The lesson is that if we let the players set
the rules, they will rig the game for themselves.
And the third thing we must do is just get started on
reform. It is overdue by decades.
-srbp-