Face of Nation : The anti-abortion organization Right Now is recruiting and training activists to volunteer for 50 candidates in the upcoming federal election, and a former chief electoral officer believes that raises questions.
RightNow is registered as a third party with Elections Canada — as is any group or individual who spends more than $500 in the federal campaign — but the Elections Act forbids candidates from co-ordinating their campaigns with third-party organizations.
On its website, the group states its mission is “to nominate and elect pro-life politicians by mobilizing Canadians on the ground level to vote at local nomination meetings, and provide training to volunteers across the country to create effective campaign teams in every riding across Canada.”
RightNow’s other co-founder, Alissa Golob, pointed out in a recent webinar that the movement lost half of the 80 members of Parliament who supported the group’s cause in 2015,. She said that shift motivated her to help create a third party to get “more pro-life candidates” elected. In the same webinar, Golob explains the nuts and bolts of volunteering, from door-to-door campaigning to helping get the vote out on election day.
She mentions using the Conservative Party’s Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) as one technique, and explains how to download the data program’s smart phone app, CIMS2Go, to gather key voter information at the door, and how to input constituents’ intentions using the app’s happy face, neutral face or sad face emojis.
Hayward told Radio-Canada RightNow does not have direct access to CIMS, but the volunteers the group recruits to go door-knocking for candidates do. However, Hayward and Golob are themselves volunteers for Conservative campaigns supporting anti-abortion candidates, so they would have access to CIMS.
In an interview with Radio-Canada, Mayrand emphasized third parties can take part in partisan activities, but they have to be careful about their links to political campaigns. “Both the third party and the candidate have to be extremely careful not to be colluding,” Mayrand said. “Both have to remain independent from one another.”
He said a formal investigation would be needed to examine whether the practice in question violates the Elections Act, and that could only be sparked by a complaint.
Even then, Mayrand said, collusion between third parties and campaigns is notoriously difficult to prove: the investigator must find “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the two groups operated in concert, shared resources or information, and had a common strategy to help the candidate, he said.
