Would you trust these guys with democratic reform?

In the continuing saga of the Rob Anders nomination fiasco, we find that the Conservative Party of Canada has changed the nomination rules yet again. It seems that in Calgary-West, you can only vote in a nomination meeting if you were a member as of August 2006, unlike in every other riding in Canada where if a Tory nomination meeting were to be held, you really only need to have been a member three weeks. It would seem that the Tories will stop at nothing to keep Rob Anders in his seat. Given that Rob Anders is pretty much a do-nothing backbencher it makes one wonder why the party is so hell-bent to keep him.

Now why the Tories want to keep Anders is pretty much irrelevant. It could be he has dirt on some of the higher-ups, or that he's being rewarded for being the blind ideologue that he is. Whatever the reason, the scary part of all this isn't that the Tories want to keep him, it's the way they're going about it. So far a court has found that the Tories violated their own rules in Anders' last nomination meeting so a new meeting was ordered. The Conservatives have fought that one up to the appeals court with no luck. So since they have to have a new meeting, they're now changing the rules, for this one riding only, as to prevent any challenger from succeeding in any nomination race. At least now they won't run afoul of the courts, but it still leaves one questioning their integrity.

Now for a party that was elected on a platform of ethics, accountability and integrity, the Conservatives aren't doing to well in that regard internally. Now I know some of you out there are saying "well, why should we care how they run their own house?" and to some extent you'd be right. The part where I'm concerned is this: if this is the contempt they have for their own members, imagine the contempt they have for the public at large. Since the Tories are willing to fix a nomination meeting, how do we know they're not going to try to fix an election? This is an important question. We've already seen the Conservative dislike of democracy in the way they ran the Wheat Board barley plebiscite, and in the way they ran the London-North Centre and Calgary-West nomination processes. When it comes to democracy, real democracy, the Tories are showing that they are the last party you want in charge of democratic reform.

If the way the Conservatives have run their nomination meetings as well as Wheat Board plebiscites and elections are used as a guide, here's a possible outcome of Conservative democratic reform:

• Non-Conservative candidates are disqualified without reason from running in federal elections by Elections Canada, allowing the Conservative candidate to run uncontested.
• Those non-Tories that do manage to not be disqualified will not be given the voters list like the Conservative candidates.
• If a voter wasn't on the list, or on the list for their new riding as of nine months before polling day, they will be ineligible to vote.

Now I don't honestly think it would get to these extremes, but it does give one pause to think about how dedicated to democratic reform the Tories really are since through their actions they don't seem too keen on the whole democracy thing in the first place. It does lead to the point where I wouldn't be surprised that any "reform" the Tories come up with will be solely designed to allow more Conservatives to be elected, without any corresponding increase of the Tory vote. It almost seems like the Tories are wishing for the halcyon days of the Soviet Union, where only one party was allowed to run. In twenty first century Canada, replace Conservative Party of Canada for Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

All this further emphasizes the image and credibility problem the Tories have. They swept to power on a "we're not the corrupt Liberals" message, only to become just as bad, if not worse in record time. Harper and his merry band had better start practicing what they preach in terms of real accountability and real openness and democracy, because as it stands, their actions are showing different.