Given the uncertainty of the day’s election outcome, the best possible result for Canada’s 42nd federal election occurred on Monday evening — a stable Liberal Party of Canada majority government, led by Justin Trudeau.
Heading into Monday, October 19th, rumours were rampant that unless Justin Trudeau secured a majority, Stephen Harper would hold on as Prime Minister — as is his constitutional right — until he lost a confidence vote in Parliament next spring. Imagine — seven more months of Stephen Harper. The only possible way that Canadians could be assured that Mr. Harper would step down involved Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada securing a majority of seats in Parliament, as occurred on Monday evening.

Tom Mulcair and the New Democratic Party of Canada, on the other hand, suffered a devastating defeat in Monday’s election, losing dozens of seats across Canada — down from 95 seats at the dissolution of Parliament on August 2nd, to the bare 44 seats that the party achieved on Monday evening — seeing its bedrock Québec support collapse as a sea of red carried the Liberals back into power after 10 lost years in the wilderness.
NDP deputy leader Megan Leslie and longtime St. John’s East MP Jack Harris, as well as respected Parliamentarian Paul Dewar, Veterans Affairs critic Peter Stoffer, former interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel, Yellowknife MP Dennis Bevington, the always feisty Pat Martin, and high-profile candidates Peggy Nash, the NDP’s Industry critic, and veteran politico Olivia Chow were among the dozens of New Democrats who lost their seats.

In respect of the Conservative party, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq, Finance Minister Joe Oliver, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, Associate Minister of Defence Julian Fantino, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, Multiculturalism Minister Tim Uppal, Economic Development Agency Minister of State Gary Goodyear, Minister of State John Duncan, Minister of Natural Resources Greg Rickford, Minister of National Revenue Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Minister of State (Sport) Bal Gosal, Minister of State (Atlantic Opportunities) Rob Moore, Fisheries Minister Gail Shea, and Minister of State (Science & Technology) Ed Holder suffered respective crushing defeats at the polls, almost all of whom were virtually unknown to most Canadians, given that Stephen Harper operated the mechanism of government solely and unilaterally out of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

What does Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau’s victory on Monday evening mean for Canadians? As written previously on VanRamblings …

• A government that will address the long overdue problem of child poverty in Canada;
• A more open and accessible government in Ottawa;
• Moving 650,000 Canadian seniors out of poverty with a commitment of $750 million annually to raising the Guaranteed Income Supplement, not to mention lowering the pension eligibility age from 67 to 65;
• Strong, independently-minded Ministers of Government, at least half of whom will be women;

• A fairer tax system that will close tax loopholes and see corporations pay their fair share of taxes;
  

• Implementation of an immigration policy that will focus on family reunification, doubling the number of applications allowed for parents and grandparents to 10,000 each year, changing immigration rules to allow spouses immigrating to Canada to receive immediate permanent residency, as well as elimination of the current 2-year waiting period;
• An additional $380 million in funding for the arts, and the undoing of Conservative funding cuts to the CBC;
• Reducing wait times for a first EI payment to one week from two, and implementation of a six-month family care employment insurance benefit similar to the EI parental leave benefit;
• First, decriminalizing the use of marijuana in Canada, and then legalizing the administration and use of marijuana across our country;
• $100 million a year to create more than 40,000 jobs, paid internships and co-op placements for youth over four years, as well as the expenditure of $1.5 billion over four years on a youth job strategy to help 125,000 young people find a job;
• Funding affordable and co-operative housing, and for those 111,000 Canadians who live in co-ops, a renewal of the $2 billion subsidy for tens of thousands of Canadians requiring a subsidy on their housing charge.

All of the above barely scratches the surface of the commitments made to Canadians by the incoming federal Liberal administration, not the least of which is a plan to fund needed transit and infrastructure across Canada.
Make no mistake, on October 19th, 2015 Canadians elected a government that will be on their side — a day of deliverance for each & every one of us.

Today VanRamblings will forego our usual partisanship, and simply urge you to get out to vote today (that is, if you were not one of the 3.6 million Canadians who voted at the advance polls), to exercise your hard fought for democratic franchise, and vote for the political party and candidate of your choice, be they Tory, NDP, Liberal, Green, Independent, or “other”.
Lineups at your polling station are likely to be longer than you experienced in the past, the wait even longer, given the provisions of Canada’s new Fair Election Act, given Royal Assent on June 19th, 2014, which eliminates the use of vouching — the practice of allowing a voter with proper identification to vouch for the identity of another individual who lives in the same polling area — and Voter Information Cards as a form of ID, now requiring picture ID from you with your address, as well as your Voter Information Card.

In addition, poll clerks are no longer allowed to simply check your name off a voters list, as was previously the case, but must now hand-write your name into an election book, which you must sign, a process that will likely serve to dramatically slow the voting process at your local polling station.

To vote, you must be registered. However, if you’re not registered, you can register at your polling place, just before you vote.

What To Do If You’re Not Registered at Your Local Polling Station

Have you moved recently? Got a new address? To have your name added to the list of electors at your polling station, you must fill in a Registration Certificate with the registration officer or poll clerk. Once the Registration Certificate is authorized by the deputy returning officer, and you show satisfactory proof of your identity and address, you can then vote.
You may also fill out and print your Registration Certificate at home.
To find the address and location of your local polling station, where you may take in your completed Registration Certificate, click here.
Click here for a list of Elections Canada approved identification, and the three options you have to prove your identity and address.
Note: One representative of each candidate in the electoral district is legally entitled to be present to observe the process at a Registration Desk; or two representatives per candidate to observe the process at a polling station.
Again: when you vote, you must prove your identity and address.
You have three options:

• Show one original piece of identification issued by a Canadian government, whether federal, provincial or local, or an agency of that government, that contains your photo, name and address (for example, a driver’s license), or
• Show two pieces of identification from a list authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada. Both must have your name and at least one must have your address (such as a health card and hydro bill), or
• If you have two pieces of identification but can’t prove where you live, you may have your residence attested to by another elector who knows you, who lives in the same polling division as you, and is on the list of electors or is registering to vote (for example, a neighbour or your roommate who has proof of identification and address). In this case, you must both take a written oath.

Note: Pieces of identification must be in either English or French. Expired documents are accepted. Your passport, with picture, is adequate identification.
Polling hours have also changed across Canada, as per the graphic below.

With the new, staggered polling hours across Canada, for the first time in a Canadian election, we’re not likely to know the outcome of the election until the wee hours of the morning following voting day. As above, polls close in Ontario at 9:30pm Eastern Time, or 6:30pm Pacific Time. We’re not likely to know how Canadians in eastern Canada voted until near midnight eastern time, and 9pm pacific time, keeping us glued to our TVs til late.

Note should be made that in British Columbia, polling stations will close at 7pm, a full hour earlier than has usually been the case in the past; voters lined up at the polls before 7pm will be allowed to vote past the 7pm deadline — but given the changes to the voting procedures in 2015, getting to your polling station early will better serve your interests.
In the 2015 election, there are 66,000 ballot boxes that will be distributed to 20,000 polling locations, with a polling station staff of 250,000 polling clerks retained for the election, at a cost of $375 million, based on the longest-in-a-century 78-day campaign, a cost that could actually go higher.

Today’s the day when you elect a new government to a probable four-year term in power. Today, then, Oct. 19, 2015 is the day to get your vote on!

In less than 24 hours from now — on Monday, October 19th — Canadian voters will head to the polls to elect a new federal government in Ottawa.
As a service to VanRamblings’ readers, we will today present a précis of a trenchant, first rate article published in The Guardian, written by British investigative journalist & documentary maker, Nick Davies, who in autumn 2010 broke Britain’s News of the World phone hacking scandal, and wrote the book, Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch.
The Guardian article on Canada’s election is titled Stephen Harper: master manipulator. Davies asks the question, “Despite several scandals worthy of Watergate over the past decade, Stephen Harper could win a fourth election October 19th. Can the master manipulator work his dark magic?”
Davies goes on to compare Stephen Harper’s politics of manipulation to those of discredited U.S. president Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon, writing …

“In the Watergate scandal, all the president’s men were accused primarily of breaking the law to get Nixon a second term in the White House. In Canada, some of the prime minister’s men and women have been accused not simply of cheating to win elections but of conspiring to jam the machinery of democratic government.”

“Some of these allegations have been proved.”

“In the 11 years since he became leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, the party has been fined for breaking electoral rules, and various members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament, gagging civil servants, subverting parliamentary committees, gagging scientists, harassing the Supreme Court, gagging diplomats, lying to the public, concealing evidence of potential crime, spying on opponents, bullying and smearing. Harper personally has earned himself the rare rebuke of being found to be in contempt of his Parliament.”

“At heart, Harper’s team are not that different from politicians across the developed world who have discovered that democracy is a pretty sweet theory but that, in reality, if you want to get hold of power and use it, there are all kinds of devious moves available that have very little to do with that antique idea.”

For example, when the current Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, recently held an open-air press conference in Ottawa — as has been the case this past week, wherever Trudeau held a rally — he found himself being heckled by a group of young protesters waving placards. The Huffington Post revealed that these hecklers were interns working for the Prime Minister’s Office.
In his October 15th article in The Guardian, Davies expands on the idea …

“In the fortnight before polling day in 2011, Liberal supporters started receiving nuisance calls from people who claimed to be Liberal party workers – calling Jewish voters on the Sabbath, waking up others in the middle of the night. Liberals said this was Conservatives trying to alienate their support. Then, in the final three days before the vote, Elections Canada received a series of complaints about robocalls — recorded messages sent by automatic dialing — that told voters quite falsely that their polling station had been moved.”

“By election day, anxiety was rising among officials, as internal emails recorded: ‘It seems that Conservative candidates are pretending that Elections Canada or returning officers have changed the polling stations … They have actually disrupted the voting process … It’s right across the country except Saskatchewan … It appears it is getting worse.’ This looked like a national campaign to suppress the Liberal vote by scattering it away from the polling booths.”

When a group of voters from the six affected Ontario ridings went to federal court to challenge the results of the election, Mr Justice Mosley issued a devastating verdict, stating …

“I am satisfied that it has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country and that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their preference in response to earlier voter-identification calls.”

Even so, the judge declined to order new elections.

Davies goes on to call Harper a “master tactician” which reflects his “clever and harsh” character, who has turned the democratic process into a sequence of ugly political manoeuvres that hew closely to the philosophy of American political conspirator, himself a master manipulator, Arthur Finkelstein, a senior advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and who has consulted on all five of Stephen Harper’s campaigns for office.
One of Harper’s allies in the 1990s, Gerry Nicholls, captured in his memoirs the special cynicism of Finkelstein’s will to manipulate the electorate in his dictum: “We have to convince Canadians to drink pig’s piss.”
How did Harper go about achieving this far from laudable goal?
Attack ads smearing the opposition, in 1993, a focus on Liberal leader Jean Chrétien’s facial disfigurement, caused by Bell’s palsy, and more recently exploiting “wedge” issues that aim to alienate a section of the opposition support, such as demanding the closure of the unit where heroin addicts in Vancouver may access safe injections, not to mention descending into old-fashioned, U.S.-style pork-barrel politics — as he did prior to the August 2nd election call — pouring public money into ridings that were politically important. A Globe and Mail investigation this year found that 83% of the Harper government’s new infrastructure projects had gone to the 52% of ridings that were in Conservative hands.

Once the election was called eleven weeks ago today, Stephen Harper — having stopped public funding for political parties, yielding the financial advantage to his corporate-funded Conservative party — the prime minister, when he made speeches or held photo ops avoided questions from the press, dragged out Canadian idol Wayne Gretzky — hardly a deep political thinker — to endorse the Conservative party, thereby garnering headlines and nightly television news hours coverage, microtargeted home owners with a tax break on home renovations, and when the party was slipping backwards in the polls, came up with a brilliantly successful wedge issue that devastated the New Democratic Party campaign — where Harper insisted that no Muslim woman should be allowed to take the oath of Canadian citizenship while wearing a niqab, appealing to “old stock” Canadians, who fear Muslim migrants as intruders, and liberal feminists, to whom one of Harper’s ministers appealed by describing the niqab as “a medieval tribal custom that treats women as property rather than people.”
For speaking up in favour of a Muslim woman’s right to choose what she wears, Tom Mulcair, the leader of the New Democratic party, was punished with a disastrous collapse in his poll ratings, while Harper surged upwards.
Davies concludes his article in The Guardian, writing …

“Harper has the natural advantage of an opposition, which is divided between Mulcair’s NDP and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. He also has the advantage of what looks like a form of voter suppression which, unlike robocalls, is legal — a requirement that voters produce an official document in addition to their voter card to prove that they have a home in the riding.”

“Harry Neufeld, who has been running elections in Canada since 1982, said he estimated that at least 250,000 qualified electors would be denied a vote. These are likely to be people who would not vote Conservative — students, the poor, aboriginal people.”

“I believe the legal changes amount to systematic manipulation,” he said. “It saddens me to see this happening in Canada. It reduces the perceived integrity of our national elections. And it damages our reputation as a country with deep democratic values.”