It was a beautiful sunny day in April 2022, the kind of day that gives you an immediate boost because it is so darn nice outside. I walked along a path winding through freshly-ploughed fields to the Kenyan village of Mwaita, singing along to Stan Rogers to try and wake up my tired brain.
It had been a late night making sure “Get Out The Vote” operations were ready and that there was a solid plan in place for our rotation of volunteers who would observe polling stations in case of election day hijinks. It was voting day and by noon I was giddy. My goal throughout the campaign had been to train a large team of people how to run election day operations and, in the early going, things seemed pretty rosy. So rosy that I decided to spurn the yogurt and white bread on offer for campaign staff lunch for some lentil and chicken stew around the corner at my favourite cafe.
When I returned it was chaos. The yard was filled with angry people, and inside my campaign manager office sat a poll station worker from the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (Kenya’s equivalent of Elections Canada) with a busted-up ballot box and a stack of blank ballots. Why the election worker came to the campaign office and not IEBC headquarters will always be a mystery to me, but an hour later I stood at my window staring at cows grazing in the distance with no idea what to do with the ballot box at my feet. I decided to call a friend and ask for advice…
I suppose it is moments like this that explain why people give me odd looks when I talk with so much passion about working on elections in Kenya. Yes, these elections come with passing out money to voters, with the largest campaign expense being the stacks of 50-shilling bills that are passed out one at a time to folks who sit and listen to a speech. They come with bloodied faces and police firing tear gas after two rival tribes clash in anger. They come with drunken mobs that were fed alcohol by political operatives who want to disrupt things at key polling stations. It is democracy in its infancy. It is not pretty and it takes baby steps to make progress.
The same friend I called last spring to get advice on how to handle the situation of being in control of hundreds of ballots, called me last week with their own dilemma. They had just been invited to an event with Premier Doug Ford but were told they had to keep it a secret. Apparently it needed to be kept hush- hush in hopes that the general public wouldn’t find out about Premier Ford’s movements; turns out when you oversee an $8.3 billion transfer of wealth to long-time donors, protesters tend to follow you wherever you go. And Premier Ford isn’t handling the criticism well. The handlers of 10-ply Ford needed to make sure that he wasn’t going to be exposed to criticism and if there was any hint that protesters may show up, the event could be scuttled. While we’d already had conversations about the uncomfortable feelings that can come along with some political campaigns we were now facing a conversation about Ontario, not Kenya. Do we really think that a person who has built a strong man persona that rewards blind loyalty over merit and who requires secrecy from supporters is going to adhere to strong democratic principles and leave our institutions better off than he found them?
Democratic enfranchisement is neither linear or permanent and there is no easy path, no guideposts at crossroads to point us in the right direction. Here in Canada, our first federal election allowed only a handful of residents to vote and those that did have the privilege had to show up at the polling station to verbally cast their vote, a process that opened up electors to intimidation for ‘voting the wrong way.’
Vote buying was happening as recently as 1975, when then Premier of Nova Scotia Gerald Regan admitted publicly to the practice happening in the province. The inclusive democracy that we Millennials have only known here in Canada was not created easily or without sacrifice. It took a suffragette movement decades of fighting tooth and nail for women to vote. Visible minorities petitioned the federal government for the right to vote for years without progress – for instance it took until 1949 for Japanese Canadians to be allowed to vote, despite some being third- and fourth-generation Canadians. Nothing about our past is perfect but it was the belief that perfection was worth building towards that helped drive us to where we are. We live in a society with institutions like the Integrity Commissioner and the Auditor General who work to ensure that, when misdeeds take place, the public is informed. We still have freedom of the press with reporters who will continue dogged work to shine a light in the dark spots. We still have publicly-funded schools and hospitals that ensure, no matter your bank balance, our children can learn and grow. We have an abundance of blessings and with that comes the responsibility to protect and try to grow them further for the future.
Let’s take stock of what the Auditor General and Integrity Commissioner have brought to light at this point. Things that are now public record and cannot be refuted, no matter the spin put out by Lisa Thompson, Matthew Rae, and Rick Byers.
– There are 285,000 housing units that are shovel ready across Ontario’s largest 19 municipalities that developers have chosen not to start building;
– The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area has 88,000 acres already permitted and planned for development, prior to Doug Ford opening the Greenbelt up for his donors;
– The now disgraced former Housing Minister Steve Clark buried his head in the sand while his Ford-appointed Chief of Staff Ryan Amato took brown envelopes from Ford donors containing materials that directly shaped which lands were taken out of the Greenbelt;
– According to Ontario’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs officials, Minister Lisa Thompson has ignored the $14.7 million reduction in annual economic output of the Duffins Ag Preserve while amplifying the lie told by Premier Ford that Greenbelt lands are needed for urgent housing projects.
The greatest tragedy of the Greenbelt scandal is not that we are about to carve up perfectly good agricultural land for vanity projects of the rich, in ways that will do absolutely nothing to impact the current housing crisis. Trust me, I wish that a fragmented land base was the only penalty for this corrupt land transfer process. No, the root of the issue here is something bigger.
The Greenbelt scandal is a signal that we are at risk of backsliding towards the Kenyan version of democracy. The leader of Canada’s largest province has allowed, through either incompetence or worse, a small number of long-time family friends and major donors to directly shape provincial policies that led to their personal enrichment. A cruel twist considering developed countries like Canada are supposed to be setting the standard that emerging democracies can strive towards instead of trying to turn back the clock to a time of graft, bribery, and corruption.
Societal progress is nothing but a collection of imperfect people making individual choices in the hope of leaving things better off than they found them. When it comes to our current governments, they are not living that out for the millions who rely on them to do so. Our public watchdogs have shed light on the corrupt nature of their decisions and still they have made the choice to forge on and hope that Ontarians forget how a couple long-time family friends of the Premier manipulated a governmental process for personal enrichment. Even if we extend Premier Ford the kindness that this is his attempt at progress, it is hard to land anywhere other than incompetence as an explanation for his actions, given he continues to ignore a host of experts who have pointed out how these parcels of land will do nothing for the current, urgent housing crisis. Ongoing work by the Integrity Commissioner and RCMP may shed further light on just how dark this situation got.
Fair elections, good governance and due process is at the core of what allowed our nation to grow and thrive. It facilitates the progress we make as a society and I for one do not want corruption and shady political back dealings to undermine my children’s ability to hold that same foundational belief in their government of the future. Things like voter intimidation, bribery of politicians, and ballot box stuffing is best left for Canada’s history books. My phone call to my friend on that beautiful voting day led to a 20-minute conversation that helped me remember I was working on an election that was only the fourth free and fair election in Kenya’s history. It was akin to jumping in a time machine and working on the 1881 federal election here in Canada. In this specific case, the polling station had been overrun by drunk, young men who were fed alcohol by a competing campaign to disrupt votes, a standard feature in 19th-century Canadian politics.
It was very clear what the rest of our campaign staff wanted to do with the blank ballots as a return salvo and as insurance in case more ballot boxes had been destroyed. So I took the advice of my friend, I shared with our campaign team how important ballot integrity is to Canada’s healthy democracy, grabbed my ear buds and went for another walk. Baby steps indeed.
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This is the conclusion of an ongoing series by brothers Donald and Stewart Skinner following the Aug. 9, 2023 Auditor General’s report on the Ontario government’s decision to remove 15 parcels of land from Ontario’s Greenbelt.
