The Work of CPC(M-L) in the Field of Electoral Reform |
1. The high level
of disaffection among the people about the
political process;
CPC(M-L)
explained that its concern coincided with that of an
ever-increasing number of Canadians, to ensure the broad
participation of the people of this country in debating the
problems of an economic, and political, military, cultural,
social and environmental nature. Most importantly, it is to
ensure their participation in the decision-making process. As
long as people are represented politically by political parties
and members of political parties who, by definition, represent
special interests and must do their bidding, and swear allegiance
to a fictitious person of state, and as long as their
participation in the decision-making process in the country is
limited to casting a ballot every four to five years, the people
will remain marginalized and dissatisfied. The present system
does not afford the people of any way to participate in setting
the direction of the economy or policy on any front, in the
debate or in decision-making. This makes the system called a
representative democracy not in the least representative of the
people and what they want.
The Party's work of democratic renewal was further developed in the 1992-1993 period with the creation of the first Committee to Vote No to the Charlottetown Accord in September 1992 and the publication of three important books concerning the Charlottetown Accord and its consequences, the concepts of 19th century liberalism vis à vis democratic rights, and presentation of the case for democratic renewal of the political process.[2]
CPC(M-L) spearheaded the creation of the Canadian Renewal Party in late 1992 in order to have in Canada a non-partisan instrument for democratic renewal in the 1993 election. There were also important internal forums and consultative conferences held which centered on the issue of democratic renewal.
April 24, 1993. Founding
convention of the Canadian Renewal Party is held in Toronto.
Meanwhile, in 1992, the Royal Commission's recommendations were reviewed by the Hawkes Committee, a special eight-member panel that produced additional recommendations concerning the Canada Elections Act. Both reports were reviewed by Parliament, with advice and support from the Chief Electoral Officer. One of the outcomes was the passage of Bill C-78 in 1992 and Bill C-114 in 1993 -- which together brought about significant changes in the way electoral law dealt with access to the vote, all of which were challenged by CPC(M-L) as self-serving on the part of the parties with seats in the House of Commons.
The Sixth Congress of the Party was held in 1993, in the midst of the federal election, by which time the Party's approach to the need for democratic renewal was fully elaborated. During this period, the Party did considerable work providing rights with modern definitions consistent with the demands of the times.[3]
Since its Fifth Congress held in 1987, important developments had taken place which served to confirm and highlight the objective need for democratic renewal. The first was the defeat of the establishment in the Charlottetown Referendum in October 1992. The significance of this was captured in the books cited above in terms of the advance in the consciousness of the Canadian people.
The 1993 federal election also resulted in a political disequilibrium from which the ruling circles have yet to recover. The Bloc Québécois, a regional party, formed the Official Opposition; the Conservatives were reduced to two seats and the NDP lost seats to the Reform Party. The election of an opposition party which did not have the capacity to be the "government in waiting," as required by 19th century liberal political theory, ended the equilibrium required by the system of representative democracy which claims that those who are not represented by the governing party are represented by the opposition. Analyzing the results of the 1993 election, Hardial Bains pointed to the political disequilibrium brought about by the election results and said that a new people's opposition was the order of the day.
In January 1995,
CPC(M-L) launched a nation-building project
based on its program in defence of rights and for democratic
renewal. It called this project a Historic Initiative. At the
centre of its concerns it put the work to activate the human
factor/social consciousness based on the working class organizing
itself politically to elaborate its independent politics so as to
put initiative in its own hands at a time the ruling class had
taken the offensive.
Other initiatives included identifying the work for democratic renewal as the key task of the People's Front/East Indian Defence Committee (PF/EIDC) at its 18th National Convention held in 1995. The Party also called on women to put themselves in the leading ranks of the fight for the rights of all and recognized that the working people and ghettoized national minorities must put themselves in the vanguard of the fight to abolish the notion that rights are abstractions and privileges which can be given and taken away at the whim of self-serving ruling elites.
Since then the work to create the organizational forms to affirm the rights of all has been a constant preoccupation of the Party. In the period leading up to the 1995 Ontario Election, consideration was given to advancing the work of democratic renewal through the creation of the Ontario Renewal Party. Independent candidates were fielded instead and Ontarians were encouraged to become worker politicians and independent candidates themselves.
In 1997, in the course of the Ontario fight-back against the anti-social offensive of the Harris government, the Party adopted its political program Stop Paying the Rich; Increase Funding for Social Programs. It also took the initiative to establish an All-Parties Political Forum to raise the level of political discourse. Definite headway was made in establishing collaboration among small parties.
May 1, 1998.
Banner Stop
Paying the Rich! Increase Funding for Social Programs! at
the St.
Catharine's day of action.
The 1997 federal election resulted in the same parliamentary crisis as had existed before. This time the Reform Party formed the Official Opposition, replacing the Bloc Québécois.
On the eve of the 1997 election another amendment was introduced to the Canada Elections Act through Bill C-243. This amendment disqualified parties that received less than two per cent of the national vote, or five per cent of the votes in the ridings in which they fielded candidates, from receiving public funding. This was essentially to deal with the situation that between them the National Party and the Natural Law Party had received some $1.2 million in state subsidies. The changes to the law showed once again how the parties which had seats in the House of Commons amended the electoral law for self-serving reasons. It did nothing to raise the prestige of politics, politicians or the House of Commons.
The Party's work for democratic renewal was further developed through its intervention in the Charter challenge launched by the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) to provisions of the Canada Elections Act after it failed to meet the 50-candidate threshold to maintain its official registration. The CPC sought a court injunction against the application of the newly amended electoral law, which would have meant its deregistration. On deregistration all the assets of a party go to the state. The CPC also argued their right to have their name on the ballot even with fewer than 50 candidates. CPC(M-L)'s factum, delivered as a "friend of the court," supported the case with substantial arguments which highlighted the manner in which various provisions of the Electoral Law violate the rights of the people -- the right to freedom of conscience and to freedom of association, as well as the principle of equality before the law.[4]
On May 10, 1999, Justice Anne Molloy of the Superior Court of Ontario (General Division) rendered her decision in which she upheld the claim of the CPC and found certain subsections of the Canada Elections Act to be in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Justice Molloy described the case as "the most important Charter challenge to the Canada Elections Act to date." The government appealed Molloy's decision and the Charter challenge made its way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where the majority ruled against the government’s main defence, according to which the 50-candidate threshold served to keep out parties that could not form a government. The Supreme Court did not agree. It found that legislation informed by the aim of giving rise to a particular form of responsible government was "problematic." "Legislation enacted for the express purpose of decreasing the likelihood that a certain class of candidates will be elected is not only discordant with the principles integral to a free and democratic society, but, rather, is the antithesis of those principles," the Supreme Court stated. The Court gave Parliament 12 months to fix the law.
The ruling of the Supreme Court had far-reaching implications because the entire election law is informed precisely by the aim of giving rise to a party government. There were many calls from various quarters for a full review of the Canada Elections Act in light of the ruling. This has never happened. The 50-candidate threshold was changed to one and the requirement for proof of 100 members was increased to 250. A new definition of political parties with which registered parties must comply was added to the law: an organization "one of whose fundamental purposes is to participate in public affairs by endorsing one or more of its members as candidates and supporting their election."
However, neither the government nor parties with seats in the House of Commons used the ruling to strengthen the democratic process by enshrining the principle of equality. It proceeded to make sure the smaller parties are more marginalized than ever, calling them fringe and irrelevant. Even the state broadcaster no longer sees fit to give them token interviews in prime time during an election or considers them worthy of being heard in any state-organized debates at any level.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has gone so far as to present this with a justification by declaring small parties extremist and unworthy of any recognition at all. Answering questions on his government’s reversal on electoral reform at a Yellowknife Town Hall on February 10, 2017, Trudeau is quoted in a CBC report: "If we were to make a change or risk a change that would augment individual voices -- that would augment extremist voices and activist voices that don't get to sit within a party that figures out what's best for the whole future of the country, like the three existing parties do -- I think we would be entering a period of instability and uncertainty."
Other court challenges to the Canada Elections Act have had to be dealt with by the federal government. These included the Alberta Court of Appeal ruling on third party financing (Somerville, 1996), and the ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada on the enforced black-out of election advertising and polls (Libman, 1997 and Thomson Newspapers, 1998).
In the aftermath of the June 2, 1997 federal election, the House of Commons initiated another electoral review, this one carried out by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, headed by Peter Adams. It was clearly prompted by the contradictions within the ruling circles on the conduct of that election, particularly on the issues of the publication of opinion polls and third-party spending. It is worth noting that the review took place in a situation in which there was increasing public debate and demands from various quarters for proportional representation, including from the NDP and the Conservatives. With more and more people becoming aware of the small percentage of the popular vote which puts a party into power, and the continued disequilibrium in the House of Commons with no "Official Opposition" which could be said to represent whoever is not represented by the party in power, proportional representation was presented as a mechanism which would allow the popular support for the parties to be more accurately reflected in the allotment of seats in the House of Commons.
A year prior to this, CPC(M-L) had already pointed out in the book A Power to Share, that the key problem with the 1993 Bill C-114 was its failure to deal "with those aspects of the electoral law which are in contempt of both the democratic principle of equality and the vesting of sovereignty in the people. These concern such matters as the privileged position of a political elite." No matter how many court challenges, rounds of "consultation" and "review," the political crisis continued to deepen as did concern amongst the people as they saw such things as Canada's participation in the war of aggression against Yugoslavia and the increasing use of Rule by Decree to push the anti-social offensive. The problems with the political process remained.
Recommendations by the Chief Electoral Officer paved the way for major reforms to electoral finance regulation, most notably through Bill C-24 in 2003, but all of them were only attempts to curb the corruption of the parties with seats in the House of Commons through increased policing, which just increased the tendency to make registered political parties appendages of the state -- a fundamental violation of democratic principle.
The Party's interventions in the Broadcast Allocation meetings demanding equal treatment of all registered parties, as well as its submissions to various commissions, have also shown that CPC(M-L) is a political party which is seriously tackling the problem of democratic renewal by dealing with the issue at hand. CPC(M-L) consistently elaborates the approach which serves the interests of the working class under all conditions and circumstances. It not only puts forward a vision, it puts forward concrete demands which can actually solve this critical problem facing the polity.
Notes
1. Presentation of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) to the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing on behalf of Hardial Bains and the Central Committee of CPC(M-L), September 20, 1990. HBRC Archives.
2. During the referendum on the Charlottetown Accord, the Committee to Vote No on October 26 published two books by Hardial Bains dealing with the constitutional problem in Canada, The Essence of the Consensus Report on the Constitution and A Future to Face -- A Non-Partisan Approach to Canada's Post-Referendum Problems. A third book, A Power to Share -- A Modern Definition of the Political Process and a Case for its Democratic Renewal, published in October 1993, focuses on the renewal of the political process and is a further contribution to this work.
3. Hardial Bains delivered a paper at the Seminar on "Theoretical and Political Aspects of the Struggle for Human Rights in India" in May 1992 under the title The State of Human Rights after the Cold War -- A Theoretical and Political Treatment. As National Leader of the Party Hardial Bains also presented a series of briefs to parliamentary committees on social policy, foreign policy, citizenship and immigration, Canadian unity and identity, the future of Quebec and a new direction for the economy, articulating the demand for a binding referendum on the direction of the economy. Throughout 1994 CPC(M-L) published a weekly review called Discussion Weekly as well as Discussion -- Quarterly Review of Contemporary Marxist-Leninist Thought which discussed the need for modern definitions of rights, democracy, political parties, citizenship and society.
4. Factum of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada in Figueroa v. The Attorney General of Canada, Ontario Court No. 93-CU-71797, submitted November 30, 1993. HBRC Archives.
This article was published in
Volume 50 Number 48 - December 12,
2020
Article Link:
The Work of CPC(M-L) in the Field of Electoral Reform
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca