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Report Card on the Federal Parties’ 2019 Democratic Reform Platforms

Posted on by Bradford

Given lack of honesty-in-politics law, and past pattern of ruling party breaking half of democratic reform promises, voters should be skeptical of all parties’ promises

8 key, written rules needed to have a fair post-election, and minority government

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Friday, October 18, 2019

OTTAWA – Today, Democracy Watch released its Report Card on the Federal Parties’ 2019 Democratic Reform Platforms (See the full Report Card chart below, and click here to see the Report Card Backgrounder).

Voters should be very skeptical of all the parties’ promises given the lack of an honesty-in-politics law, and the fact that Prime Minister Chrétien, Prime Minister Harper, and Prime Minister Trudeau all failed to keep half of their democratic reform promises, and the fact that no party promised an honesty law covering promises in their platforms.

The Green Party received the best grade B- as it promised 25 key, systemic democratic reforms and had good grades in four of the five areas graded in the Report Card.

“Given only the Green Party has a strong democracy platform, hopefully all the parties will get serious after the election and work together to finally make the key changes needed to give Canadians the fully democratic and accountable federal government that many surveys over the past 15 years have shown a large majority of voters want,” said Duff Conacher, Co-founder of Democracy Watch. “The Liberals and the Conservatives especially made a big mistake in this election thinking they could ignore key democracy reforms and still have voters hand them power – voters have clearly been disappointed too many times by past Liberal and Conservative governments abusing their power.”

“Unfortunately, even if the Green Party is able to push through all the changes it promised, everyone in federal politics would still be allowed to lie to voters, politicians would still be allowed to make money from their decisions, secret lobbying would still be legal, wealthy individuals would still be allowed to use money to have unethical influence, and enforcement and penalties would still be too weak to stop wrongdoing,” said Conacher.

Hundreds of thousands of messages have been sent to federal party leaders and politicians through Democracy Watch’s campaigns calling for the 100 key changes needed to ensure fully honest, ethical, open, representative and waste-preventing federal politics, and accountability for everyone who violates any rule.

Democracy Watch and the coalitions it leads will continue to push for all 100 key changes.

The NDP received the next best grade of D+ because it had only a dozen vague promises in its platform, and no promises in the area of open government.

The Conservatives failed to make any promises in three of the five categories measured by the Report Card, and ended up with a D- grade. This is a big change from their 2006 election platform – in that platform the Conservatives promised 60 democratic reform and government accountability changes in their so-called “Federal Accountability Act”, which earned them a B grade.

The Liberals failed to make any promises in two of the five categories measured by the Report Card, and also ended up with a D- grade. This is a big change from their 2015 election platform – in that platform the Liberals promised about 75 democratic reform and government accountability changes, which earned them a B grade.

The Liberals’ 2019 platform is as weak as their democratic reform record since 2015:

  1. they broke most of their open government promises;
  2. Prime Minister Trudeau broke his electoral reform promise;
  3. they failed to make the political finance system more democratic;
  4. they ignored recommendations to strengthen whistleblower protection in a unanimous House Committee report;
  5. they ignored recommendations to stop secret, fake online election ads in a unanimous House Committee report, and weakened a key honest election rule;
  6. Prime Minister Trudeau and Liberal Cabinet ministers have been involved in many secrecy and ethics scandals.

The Bloc received an F as it had no promises in four of the five categories of the Report Card, and the People’s Party of Canada received an Incomplete as it had no democratic reform promises in its platform.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Duff Conacher, Co-founder of Democracy Watch
Tel: (613) 241-5179   Cell: 416-546-3443
[email protected]

Democracy Watch’s Campaigns page

Democracy Watch’s
Report Card on the Federal Parties’
2019 Democratic Reform Platforms

Sources:

Bloc Québécois platform webpage
(NOTE: nothing in platform, just these Oct. 16th proposals)

Conservative Party of Canada platform webpage
(NOTE: See pages 54-55, 71, and 75-76 of platform PDF, and Oct. 16th news release)

Green Party of Canada platform webpage
(NOTE: See pages 31-32, 47, 73-79 of platform PDF, and many other pages containing proposals to strengthen law enforcement and penalties in many areas of platform)

Liberal Party of Canada platform webpage
(NOTE: See pages 39-41, 44, 47, 53-55 of platform PDF, and some other pages containing proposals to strengthen law enforcement in some areas)

NDP platform webpage
(NOTE: See pages 21-22, 24, 32, 54, 94-97, 99-103 of platform PDF

People’s Party of Canada platform webpage