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By Lloyd Mackey
 KEEP IN mind, if you will, the names of Lorne Gunter and David Frum.
In the current focus, in Ottawa, on police-assisted "raids" by Elections Canada on the headquarters of the Conservative party, it might be helpful to keep in mind the continuum of principle, policy, strategy and tactic.
Gunter and Frum help drag us back to principle, as an important way to try understanding the "in and out" scheme and all that is floating around it.
People who lead churches and other faith-based organizations will understand what is involved here. Usually, such organizations are rooted in principles -- deeply-held values that shape their activities and the directions they take.
Out of those principles grow the policies: the guiding documents and concepts which actually carry the organizations forward.
The strategies and tactics are formulated within the principle and policy structures, but begin to allow room for pragmatism. And the people who write the strategies, as well as those who design the tactics meant to win outside support and thwart the purposes of the competitors, may have to be reminded, occasionally, of the founding principles of their organizations.
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Gunter is a columnist at the Edmonton Journal and a member of the National Post editorial board. As it happens, as well, he looks at faith from an evangelical Anglican perspective.
Frum is a Canadian and resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He served a stint in the White House in the early years of the current George W. Bush administration. Some of his writing has reflected favourably, from slightly outside the circle, on the constructive influence of evangelical Christians in that administration.
Both these people would be considered to be "movement conservatives", well capable of keeping their eyes on the principles and the policies that grow out of them, leaving, for the most part, the matter of strategies and tactics to others.
The columns relevant to today's OttawaWatch topic, written by Frum and Gunter, appeared respectively, in the National Post on Saturday, April 19 and in the Edmonton Journal, the following day, Sunday.
For tracking purposes, the Frum headline was 'Election Canada's campaign against free speech' and Gunter's was 'The myth of the level playing field: Spending limits don't produce fairer elections, but they do hurt democracy.'
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In this piece, I would like to make particular reference to Frum's comparison of the present controversy with the issues created by the free speech issue. This is an issue which has many writers and journalists, including some serious Christians, concerned about the incursion of human rights commissions (HRC) into what critical analysts may or may not say for the public record -- or even in semi-private situations. Some of the Canadian journals that have been on the receiving end of these HRC prods are the venerable Maclean's, the now semi-deceased Western Standard and Catholic Insight.
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The Frum paragraphs to which I want to make reference reads as follows: Elections Canada is attempting to create a bright political distinction between activities that in fact are not distinct at all. To police that blurry line, Elections Canada finds itself obliged to supervise, monitor and second-guess the speech activities of political candidates . . .
It's the same excuse we hear from human rights commissions as they police speech: We have a mandate to combat harmful discrimination . . .
Canada's human rights commissions did not have to extend the definition of "discrimination" to include speech: That was a choice, a bad choice. And Elections Canada has a similar choice to make about how it treats speech. It could give local candidates wide scope to express themselves in the way that those local candidates think most effective - or it can create a new role for itself as the hall monitor of Canadian elections, adjudicating what candidates can and cannot say in their campaigns.
That is the path that Elections Canada is treading now, and it is a very dangerous one. Soon it will be telling candidates how much local involvement is "enough" and how much is not enough. Does the ad have to be produced locally? Or is it enough if it just features the local candidate? If it features the local candidate, how long must the feature last? Can a group of local candidates cooperate if the national party is not involved? And how many may co-operate before the group ceases to be "local" and becomes "national"? . . .
Free political speech is essential to political freedom. And isn't political freedom the reason we have these elections in the first place? I leave Frum's thoughts with us this week, to draw upon, as the "in and out" controversy continues to emerge.
The question of whether the Conservatives actually broke the law -- as it stands -- will rest on whether the courts find in their favour in their suit of Elections Canada.
If the court agrees with the Tories, that parties -- Conservative, or otherwise -- should be free to allocate their election spending and advertising decisions within overall limits, between local, regional and national campaigns then there is arguably no case to be made that an offense was committed.
But, whatever the outcome, the case will have served to highlight the virtues of free speech and free expression in Canadian life.
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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery and author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006). He can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.
April 24/2008
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