Face of Nation : If Pierre Poilievre was a basketball coach, he might be accused right now of “working the ref” — a tactic that has come to be an accepted part of professional sports.
But because he’s an elected member of Parliament, and because he’s casting aspersions on one of the foundational institutions of Canadian democracy, his public remonstrations seem more serious than that.
“Hard to trust the Liberal lapdogs at Elections Canada,” the Conservative MP tweeted on Monday, “who let Liberals-SNC off for $100k donation scam & has paid influencers to intervene in the campaign.”
The reference to “SNC” relates to a compliance agreement signed between SNC-Lavalin and the federal commissioner of elections in 2016. As part of that agreement, the company acknowledged illegally reimbursing some of its employees for political donations — $110,000 to the Liberal Party and $8,000 to the Conservative Party — and agreed to implement measures to ensure its employees behave properly in the future. (According to the agreement, the executives involved in the reimbursement no longer work for SNC-Lavalin.)
One former executive from SNC-Lavalin also pleaded guilty to two charges related to the donations. But when news of that compliance agreement was revived this spring, a lawyer for Dean Del Mastro — the former Conservative MP convicted of three elections offences in 2015 and sentenced to a month of house arrest — suggested SNC-Lavalin had gotten off comparatively easy.
The commissioner regularly uses compliance agreements to resolve violations. In fact, one of the 29 agreements issued in the last four years involved Poilievre, after the Conservative MP wore a golf shirt with the Conservative party logo to a Government of Canada announcement.
The reference to “paid influencers,” meanwhile, relates to Elections Canada’s plan to enlist popular social media users as part of a campaign to encourage younger Canadians to vote. Young people tend to vote at lower rates than other age cohorts, so there’s an argument for making an effort to encourage them to participate.
