Article content

When the B.C. Liberal government amended the Election Act in 2015, the focus of most people’s attention was on its elimination of the pre-election spending limits.

That change paved the way for both the unprecedented fundraising and spending that has foreshadowed the election campaign that officially begins Tuesday.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Daphne Bramham: How the B.C. government quietly gained access to the non-voter list Back to video

But what was also tucked into the eight-pages of stricken sections and subsections was a change requiring Elections B.C. to provide parties and candidates not only with the list of people who voted in the last election, but the list of those who didn’t.

The government’s reason for wanting that information was that it could be used to try to boost voter turnout, which over the past decades has steadily eroded.

But others begged to differ. Among them were: the privacy commissioner Elizabeth Dunham, Independent MLA Vicki Huntington, Green Party leader Andrew Weaver, and Moira Stilwell, a former Liberal cabinet minister relegated to the backbench due to differences with Premier Christy Clark (not least of which was being identified with a group that planned to oust Clark after what was widely expected to be an electoral defeat in 2013).