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Great: can that part happen first the next time someone in the agency gets a promotional idea? It is not just that every political journalist saw the danger Perrault didn’t; it is that every Conservative with two brain cells to rub together saw the opportunity coming, and that they would not have been serving their electoral interests if they hadn’t raised hell when it arrived.

But the implicit view of Elections Canada seems to be that this tension must actually be accepted because of the agency’s responsibility to reduce “barriers to voting.” The money they wasted is, under this theory, almost a species of investment.

Perrault told the Canadian Press: “We remove barriers for seniors without asking ourselves whether seniors vote one way or another. We remove barriers for Indigenous (people) without asking ourselves whether they vote one way or the other.” And healthy normal young people, the idea goes, are in the same position. The alleged proof that they face “barriers,” of the sort that a wheelchair user does in physically getting to a polling place, is simply that they vote in smaller numbers than the elderly.

Now, you might take the view that any barrier you can remove with a mere advertisement is not really a barrier, but a predisposition. The decision not to vote, perhaps made by someone who is not well informed, not interested in politics, or not convinced of the necessity to vote under the circumstances of his own life, is being treated by Elections Canada as a species of illness. This leads Elections Canada to conclude that it cannot be content with running elections and keeping them fair. The illness of having better things to do on election day must be extirpated. Elections Canada must promote voting as a public virtue: it must advertise, or attempt to advertise.

This involves targeting demographic categories of voters who are less likely to vote, and that is an editorial choice involving a lot of freedom, of precisely the sort that a political cartoonist or a city editor exercises. If you think this is a risky position for the Chief Electoral Officer to adopt, his answer to you would seem to be “Too bad. We have no choice but to keep playing this game of Whack-a-Mole. And, P.S., trust us anyway.”

National Post

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