‘Nobody wants to blow up the party’: Trudeau staying, despite resignation calls

VANCOUVER – A British Columbia political scientist says social media questioning of the provincial election’s integrity is an “inevitable” result of political “toxicity” and a tight race.

University of British Columbia professor emeritus Richard Johnston says questions about mail-in votes and the handling of ballots also reflect circumstances south of the border.

He said other factors include use of more complicated voting apparatus and social media platforms where anyone can publish doubts.

“There is a relationship between the closeness of results and the toxicity of the commentary around it,” Johnston said.

“I mean, we’re describing almost exactly the situation in the U.S., right? Basically a 50/50 result, so close that each side might have suspicions about the other.”

The British Columbia election came down to absentee ballots on Monday, after neither Premier David Eby’s NDP nor the B.C. Conservatives, led by John Rustad, secured a majority.

After a count of mail-in votes over the weekend saw prospects for an NDP victory increase, online posts questioned the number of mail-in and absentee votes, the ballots’ origins, the wait between the initial and final counts, and how the votes were handled during that time.

In a written response, Elections BC spokesman Andrew Watson said the voting authority has “observed misinformation about the electoral process online” and it urged voters to go to its website to get accurate information.

“Initial count takes place on election night,” Watson said. “Final count takes place one week later and lasts three days. This timing is established under the Election Act and has long been the process in B.C.

“At the end of each day of advance voting, cast ballots are secured in a ballot box that is sealed and signed by election officials and scrutineers,” he said. “All election officials swear an oath of office to administer the provisions of the Election Act faithfully.”

Watson said any election official convicted of an offence may face a fine up to $10,000 and a prison term of up to a year.

B.C. Conservatives president Aisha Estey said in a post on social media platform X on Sunday that she “spent the last two days in a warehouse watching the transcription and counting of mail-in ballots,” and saw nothing problematic.

“Elections BC staff have been working tirelessly and doing their best within the confines of the legislation that governs their work,” Estey said in her post.

“Would we have liked mail-ins to be counted closer to E-Day? Sure. But I saw nothing that caused me concern.”

Premier and B.C. New Democrat Leader David Eby also took to X on Sunday to express support for Elections BC staff “making sure every vote gets counted.”

Johnston said Elections BC’s efforts to make voting more accessible and counting more efficient had actually been feeding integrity doubts.

He said increased use of advance voting, mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as digital vote tabulation, were being compared unfavourably by some with more basic voting and hand-counting systems used in the past.

“Basically, the whole voting process was simpler,” Johnston said. “You had to turn up on election day. You had to have a reason for voting in advance polls … and you really had to basically make a declaration that you were going to have either a surgical procedure or you could not avoid being out of the constituency on election day.

“The count may take a long time on election day if it’s a particularly close riding,” he said. “But … there’s a sense in which all the players who were on the ballot were in a position that was easily interpretable as verifying the facts. Everybody had an interest in defending its side, and the result would be in a sense accurate and fair.”

Dominion Voting Systems, which manufactured the electronic tabulators used in the B.C. election, referred questions to its website page dedicated to misinformation about the company and its technology. It addresses concerns about misinformation that emerged after the U.S. presidential election in 2020.

Fox News agreed last year to pay Dominion nearly US$800 million to avert a trial in the company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the election.

“All Dominion systems are based on voter-verifiable paper ballots or paper records for auditing,” the company said on its web page. “Dominion systems comply with all requirements for system updates and election records retention.”

Johnston also said the very idea of making voting more accessible could create a “background for paranoia,” as doubters questioned the nature and origins of people who would not otherwise have been able to vote.

“Historically, paranoia about the conduct of elections has hardly been peculiar to the right wing of the political landscape,” he said. “It’s also been a feature on the left. It kind of depends on who wins and who loses.

“If you were to go back 20 years and look forward, I think a lot on the left would be shocked that it would be people on the left who are defending the integrity of the establishment, so to speak.”

One major difference with discourse in the United States, Johnston said, was that B.C. party leaders, such as Estey, had so far not engaged in “delegitimization tactics.”

Whether that changes would be something to watch for, he said.

“It’ll be interesting to see whether there’s blowback from the fringes of the Conservative Party against the party’s own leadership,” he said.

He added, “Let’s see whether there are any dynamics inside the Conservative Party over the next few days that makes John Rustad worried that perhaps the party president’s acceptance of the process was premature from a political point of view.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 28, 2024.

OTTAWA – The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has granted Google a five-year exemption from the Online News Act, ordering it to release the $100 million it now owes to Canadian news outlets within 60 days.

Google agreed last year to pay Canadian news publishers $100 million a year, indexed to inflation, in order to be exempt from the law, which compels tech companies to enter into agreements with news publishers to pay for content reposted on their platforms.

The Canadian Journalism Collective has been tasked with distributing the money to news outlets.

The CRTC said in its decision Monday that it believes Google has met the requirements for an exemption, but has added stipulations including that it must allow more news businesses to join the collective.

“After reviewing the public record, the CRTC is granting a five-year exemption from the act to Google. Google must pay $100 million to the (Canadian Journalism Collective) within 60 days of this decision. The CJC will then distribute the funds equitably to eligible Canadian news organizations,” the CRTC said in a news release.

News Media Canada, which represents hundreds of publishers, said in a statement that it is “very pleased” with the CRTC’s decision.

“The Online News Act is a world-leading regulatory framework that addresses the significant bargaining power imbalance between platforms and publishers when it comes to content licensing,” said the group’s president and CEO Paul Deegan.

He said it’s now time for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to follow Google’s lead.

“We now call on Meta, whose platforms are more valuable with real news produced by real journalists, to follow Google’s socially responsible lead,” Deegan said.

The Canadian Journalism Collective submitted plans for its governance structure to the CRTC in July.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 28, 2024.

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OTTAWA – A Conservative government would scrap the federal sales tax on new homes sold for less than $1 million and push provinces to do the same, Pierre Poilievre said Monday.

He made the case for the cut in a six-minute video published online, arguing governments are partly to blame for high home prices because they’re charging too much in sales taxes.

“The number 1 cost for a home is government: government bureaucrats, government taxes, government gatekeepers,” Poilievre said in a news conference in an Ottawa suburb on Monday morning.

The Conservatives estimate the new measure will reduce the cost of an $800,000 home by $40,000 and spur construction of another 30,000 homes per year.

Since becoming the Conservative leader in September 2022, Poilievre has gone after the Liberal government over the rapid increase in home prices and rents since Trudeau came into power in 2015.

That message appears to have resonated with Canadians who are fed up with the high cost of living.

The Conservatives have enjoyed a double-digit lead in polls for more than a year, putting the Liberals on the defensive.

Poilievre said Monday that he would pay for the tax cut by scrapping Liberal housing policies.

That includes the housing accelerator fund, which offers homebuilding money to cities if they adjust bylaws and regulations that are considered barriers to new construction.

Poilievre said a Tory government would also abolish the housing infrastructure fund, which sets aside $5 billion for agreements with provinces and territories in exchange for adopting certain housing policies.

The Conservatives expect income tax revenues to increase due to the boost in homebuilding spurred by the policy.

“And of course, we’re going to get billions of dollars in additional revenue from the fact that construction workers and businesses are making more money building more homes,” Poilievre said.

The Liberal government scrapped GST charges on new apartment builds last year to encourage more rental construction, but the NDP and Conservatives said they would only keep that cut for affordable or below-market price rentals.

Housing Minister Sean Fraser criticized the Conservatives’ plan to pay for the tax cut by ending existing housing programs that he says are delivering results.

Fraser said recent zoning changes by municipalities have legalized denser homebuilding as a result of the housing accelerator fund and suggested cutting the program would hurt low- and middle-income families.

“It’s unacceptable to me to advance a program if the result is going to be that middle-class families and low-income families pay more, if the benefit of the program is then opened up to the investor class who might have five or six homes and suddenly gets a tax cut paid for by ordinary Canadians,” he said on Monday.

New policy ideas to tackle the national housing shortage are very welcome, said Josh Morgan, chair of the big city mayors’ caucus at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the mayor of London, Ont.

But if Poilievre were to abolish the housing accelerator fund and other existing programs, the federal government would need to have a conversation with cities about what would replace it, he said.

“There’s a lot of front-end cost to growth that municipalities tend to get on the hook for,” he said, but he added that municipalities don’t have the revenue to build or maintain infrastructure without support from federal or provincial governments.

If Poilievre’s Conservatives were to put a sudden stop to the housing accelerator fund, Morgan said the impact would differ greatly city to city, since each has been using the money in different ways.

In London, the city plans to convert vacant office space into residential units, he said.

Mayors have called for property tax reforms to allow cities to generate more revenue on their own and become less reliant on the government of the day.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 28, 2024.

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