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Opinion: Alberta's new election bill silences UCP government's critics

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Minister of Justice and Solicitor General Kaycee Madu provides details about Bill 81, the Election Statutes Amendment Act during a news conference in Edmonton, November 4, 2021.
Minister of Justice and Solicitor General Kaycee Madu provides details about Bill 81, the Election Statutes Amendment Act during a news conference in Edmonton, November 4, 2021. Photo by Ed Kaiser /Postmedia
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As Jason Kenney and the UCP circle the drain of public opinion, they’re making one last desperate attempt to stack the deck in their favour by introducing a law to silence their critics.

The law in question is the innocuous-sounding Elections Statutes Amendment Act, or Bill 81. But it should really be called the “Anti-Democracy Gag Law.”

As many pundits have observed, the bill removes caps on money that can be donated to nomination campaigns. It then allows those nomination campaigns to forward the excess cash they’ve raised to their parties, thereby creating a backdoor mechanism to bypass donation limits.

This makes a mockery of the UCP claim that Bill 81 is about “getting big money out of politics” — it does the exact opposite.

Sadly, this is by no means the only problem with Bill 81.

The other, equally alarming, aspect of the bill is that it introduces a devious gag law, aimed at silencing civil society groups who want to run public advocacy campaigns that criticize the government.

Here’s how the bill works:

  • This isn’t just about silencing unions. If any group, from any point on the political spectrum, wants to spend more than $1,000 on public advocacy campaigns that includes criticism of the government or government policies, they must first register as a so-called third-party advertiser (TPA).
  • This isn’t just about elections or promoting one party over another. The Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) has been forced to report campaigns as “political advertisements” when simply commenting on government policies that they think are counter to workers’ interests.
  • If civil society groups don’t register as TPAs — or if their applications to register as TPAs are rejected by the chief electoral officer (CEO) —they will be subject to fines of up to $100,000 per day if they decide to flout the law.
  • Applications to form TPAs will be rejected if the CEO determines that a group is “affiliated” with a registered political party.
  • Civil society groups will be deemed to be affiliated with a registered party if the group is mentioned in the “founding documents” of any registered party (this is a clear attempt to silence the AFL, which is recognized as the voice of labour in the Alberta NDP’s constitution.)
  • Civil society groups will also be deemed to be affiliated to a registered party if any of their leaders also hold positions within a registered party (even if a civil society leader is volunteering for a party on their own personal time).
  • Finally, and this is the kicker, groups will be deemed to be affiliates of a registered party — and therefore ineligible to register as TPAs — if they have “made public statements in support of or in opposition to a registered party.”

There you have it: if a civil society group wants to run a campaign that publicly criticizes the government, they first have to register as a TPA; but their application to register as a TPA will be rejected if they have publicly criticized the government.

Trying to suggest that all government critics are “agents” of other parties is a strategy used by authoritarian governments. So too is the establishment of government commissars to determine what is constitutes acceptable “political speech.” None of these rules have any place in a true democracy.

Having said that, most Albertans would agree there is a need to do something about all the money that has been sloshing around Alberta’s political stage since the former NDP government banned corporate and union donations six years ago.

However, while we need rules to ensure that “big money” doesn’t distort elections, we also need to make a clear distinction between public campaigns run by legitimate civil society groups — whose job is to hold government to account — and purpose-built, American-style political action committees (PACs), which exist only to promote or oppose the election of a particular political party.

Bill 81 fails to make this crucial distinction, thereby turning a law that purports to protect democracy into a law that does the opposite. We can’t let Jason Kenney and the UCP get away with this blatant attempt to take civil society out of our democracy.

Source: EdmontonJournal

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