Elections Canada goes big-tech woke

Vincent J. Curtis

8 June 22

RE: Making false election claims should be illegal, report says.  By Marie Woold The Canadian Press.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 8 Jun 22.

I wonder if alleged policy makers and experts even read the stuff they put their names to.  Is some anonymous staffer writing crazy things just to prove that the expert doesn’t vet his own alleged opinion before he utters it to the press?

The example in this case is Chief Electoral Officer Stephane Perrault’s report on electoral reform.  He claims that changes in law are needed to “protect against inaccurate information that is intended to disrupt the conduct of an election or undermine its legitimacy.”  Until the 2020 U.S. presidential election, nobody would have thought of this as a need.  The question is, why is this now a need in Canada?

The call would formalize in law the technique of suppressing “misinformation” and “disinformation” conducted to support the political ends of the COVID crisis response.  What sensible person over 40 would think of such a thing?  A bloodless technocrat who thinks he’s keeping up with the times might, or a woke staffer worming his way into the system.  I favor the latter theory.

If Elections Canada runs elections with the openness and integrity that it always has, and Elections Ontario just did, there will be no need for a new legal hammer.

If a disinformation campaign sufficient to undermine an election occurred, it would have to be organized and funded by a major political party, one that stood to benefit from the campaign.  No one would employ that law against important politicians, like, say, a Hillary Clinton.

Only small fry dissenters stand to be hammered.  Like weak political enemies of the regime.  Just like during the pandemic when panic overrode our civil rights.

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