Who could have predicted this would end badly?
Well, other than me and anyone with a pulse.
Elections Canada decided that to get young people voting in higher numbers they would spend more than $650,000 to hire 13 social media “influencers” to encourage young people to cast a ballot in October’s election.
We were promised this campaign would be non-partisan, that they would not be hiring people who supported one party or another.
Except for all those influencers that posted dreamy shots of Justin Trudeau or said how happy they were to have him as prime minister.
Elections Canada is the referee in our democracy. They are there to run the election and must be seen to be conducting it fairly and not favouring one party or another.
It’s already a problem that over the years Elections Canada and the Commissioner of Canada Elections, their enforcement arm, have developed a reputation among Conservatives for having a double standard.
Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro is accused of illegally donating $21,000 to his own campaign and he is prosecuted, taken to trial, convicted and sent to prison. SNC-Lavalin donates more than $100,000 illegally using an elaborate scheme. Most of the money goes to the Liberal Party and yet SNC-Lavalin is allowed to sign a document that they won’t do it again and no one goes to prison.
There are other examples like this as well.
So when Elections Canada said they would hire these influencers to use social media and encourage young people to vote, there was a lot of interest in who they would be.
At first, Elections Canada refused to say who they were. In fact, they only released their names after the project was cancelled.
And why was it cancelled?
“I did not have the necessary reassurances I needed to make sure that Elections Canada would maintain our organizational reputation for unimpeachable neutrality,” Elections Canada CEO Stephane Perrault said in a statement.
Reassurances? What could have made him question the neutrality of these influencers?
Was it Maayan Ziv describing Justin Trudeau as “really dreamy” in an interview?
“He comes in the room and there’s this glow – I can’t really explain it,” Ziv told Flare in 2016.
She also used her social media to post flattering photos of Trudeau and say that she was in his “afterglow.”
What about Lilly Singh who posted a photo of Trudeau and added #mancrushmonday to the end of her post.
Or was it Ashley Callingbull actively campaigning in the last election against Stephen Harper telling anyone who would listen that Canada needed a new prime minister.
Look, you may agree with these women, you may think they are right, but is it right for Elections Canada to hire these women to go out and influence other people to vote?
The Liberal Party maybe, but not Elections Canada.
This was a bad idea from the start and fraught with this very kind of peril.
I wish I could say that the program being cancelled meant taxpayers were spared and we don’t need to go look through the rest of the 13 influencers to see what kind of things they were posting.
Sadly, that isn’t the end of it.
Elections Canada has already paid the influencers quite the sum, more than half of the $650,000 budget has gone out the door to them in payments for work and a video they no longer need to do.
And Elections Canada says they won’t be asking for the money back.
Sad, but true.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
