Rob Clarke has now been on both the giving and receiving ends of “gotcha” partisanship.
Clarke, the Conservative MP for northern Saskatchewan, was recently accused of breaching parliamentary ethics by voting for the Fair Elections Act.
You see he, along with another Tory MP named Rod Bruinooge, have a stake in a company that developed an app known as ProxiVote.
ProxiVote can aid political campaigns by organizing data such as which voters support which party, and where volunteers and candidates are campaigning.
Among many other things, the Fair Elections Act removes a federal ban on the use of mobile devices at polling stations.
That means campaign officials of any stripe can now conceivably use ProxiVote on site. Conceivably.
It’s a bit of a leap to suggest that all of this means Clarke and Bruinooge had a conflict of interest in supporting the
Fair Elections Act.
Nonetheless, Liberal MP Scott Simms made that very claim in a December 2014 letter to the federal ethics commissioner.
The commissioner last week decided there simply isn’t enough meat here to warrant an inquiry. The matter is now closed.
You can’t blame Simms for trying. In the oven of Canadian politics, pols are increasingly looking for any opportunity to vilify their opponents.
If something happens that can be twisted for partisan purposes, there seems little hesitation to do so. Throw a handful of mud and hope some of it sticks.
Clarke isn’t innocent in this regard. In 2011 he baselessly argued that the NDP violated election laws with a pre-writ Reminder ad touting his New Democratic challenger.
At the time Clarke claimed the ad breached Elections Canada policy on acceptable advertising outside of designated campaign periods.
But Elections Canada deemed the ad perfectly okay. Even the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, no friends of the NDP, scoffed at the notion that the ad was illicit.
There’s another story that comes to mind. I remember attending the grand opening of Flin Flon’s Northern Manitoba Mining Academy in 2012.
At least one of the provincial NDP government reps there appeared to bristle when it came time to honour the federal Conservative government’s contribution to the academy.
In actual fact, the feds contributed more money to build the academy than did the province, but the idea of giving Stephen Harper credit for anything good is anathema to his opponents.
I’m not saying Harper is any better. He’s not. And that’s the problem – inflated partisanship is a multi-partisan phenomenon.
People tell me there’s a big difference between the way we do politics in Canada and the way it’s done in the US.
Honestly, I’m not seeing it.
Jonathon Naylor is editor of The Reminder.
