Canada has been one of the largest donors to Haitian elections since at least 2006. But insiders and policy analysts have revealed that in recent years Canada, along with the United States and France, see their funding not so much as a donation but a purchase.

For instance, Pierre-Louis Opont, Haiti’s elections overseer, recently said that Haitian President Michel Martelly did not legitimately win the last election in 2010. With Haitians scheduled to go to the polls on Sunday, Opont is wise to attempt to avoid a repeat of the last presidential ballot.

After the last vote was cast, the Haitian electoral council arrived at an initial count showing that Martelly had lost. But the result was soon modified by the Organization of American States (OAS). Not only had the OAS oddly tasked itself with an election review when its role was supposed to be that of election observer, but a Center for Economic and Policy Research analysis showed that the OAS recount was statistically unsound. The OAS’s own special representative would soon reveal that he attended the meetings at which Canada, France, and the United States dominated the process to alter the first-round result.

The flawed OAS review kept Martelly in the game by the narrowest of margins. He would take the presidency in the second round in a vote that had the lowest turnout in the western hemisphere since the Second World War.

The Canadian-backed 2006 Haitian presidential election was host to its own irregularities. That year, Canada was an election observer in its own right. Despite the fact that Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, was banned from participating altogether, and that its leading figures had been made political prisoners, the Canadian mission ignored this critical information altogether throughout its reporting.

Nor did the Canadians note that on election day, hundreds of apparently uncounted ballot boxes were discovered in a dump north of Port-au-Prince. Instead, the mission simply gave the race an overall “positive assessment.”

How bad do things have to get for Canada to lose faith in the procedure of a Haitian election? The election in 2000 showed that all that’s required is a winning candidate who Canada sees as undesirable.

In 2000, a landslide 92 per cent of ballots in the presidential race were cast for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, widely seen as unsympathetic to Canada’s business interests in Haiti, with 50 per cent voter turnout. But Canada seized on minor irregularities to discredit and embargo the government. These were not related to the presidential election itself, but rather to a handful of parliamentary seats. The electoral council had used a method to calculate run-off votes that the OAS chose not to object to until after the results came in.

In 2003, the same year Aristide’s party announced that it would double the minimum wage, Canada hosted a meeting of foreign officials at Meech Lake, which decided that, “Aristide must go.” By February 2004, Canadian army commandos were securing the Port-au-Prince airport while the U.S. military removed the president from the country. Debate soon raged about whether Aristide had left voluntarily or been deposed, although many of the foreign policy analysts who initially dismissed the idea of a coup have since recognized that “Canada supported the forced removal of President Aristide in 2004, and rather uncritically supported the unelected transitional government in 2004—2005.”

During the upcoming elections this year, however, Canada has a chance to change its approach. Although the electoral council disqualified a number of candidates based on a formalistic reading of the country’s election law, the eliminations have at least touched all parties similarly, and no party has been excluded across the board.

The Canadian government owes it both to Canadians and Haitians to respect Haitian voters, to promote Haitian institutions working to administer and oversee elections in accordance with the law, and to ensure that they proceed without undue external interference.

When I spoke with a Haitian human rights lawyer last month while in Port-au-Prince, I asked him if he still felt he could hope for a fair election this year despite the outside manipulation. Noting the influence of money on North American politics, he offered a measured reply: “Not even in the United States do they have elections that are completely fair. What we hope for in Haiti is much more modest: elections that are credible.”

Mark Phillips is a Legal Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and a graduate of McGill University’s Faculty of Law