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Alberta's recent move to expand its "gag law" jolted me with a sharp pang of sorrow.

Now, before getting into my pang problems, I should note "gag law" is what I call legislation which restricts citizens or groups from freely and effectively expressing political opinions.

In my view such laws are an attack on the crucially important democratic right of free speech.

And attacking free speech is exactly what the Alberta NDP government is doing with recently introduced legislation.

Of course, it doesn't call this legislation a "gag law", referring to it instead euphemistically as "Bill 32: An Act to Strengthen and Protect Democracy in Alberta", but for all intents and purposes, what this law actually does is make an already-existing tight gag law, a little bit tighter.

Allow me to explain.

Ever since 2008, Alberta law made it illegal for citizens or groups to spend more than $150,000 province-wide, and more than $3,000 in any one riding, on political advertising during provincial elections.

Yes, that's an assault on free speech, but at least, outside of elections, freedom was still safe.

But that's now changing.

Under Bill 32, the same spending restrictions on citizens and groups in place during elections, will now also be in place three months prior to an election.

So essentially, when it comes to political speech, Alberta is becoming less and less free, and that explains my pang of sorrow.

What especially saddens me is I remember a time when gag laws would never rear their ugly heads in Alberta, because that province's judiciary consistently protected the right of citizens to freely express their opinions.

I know this because I once worked for a group called the National Citizens Coalition which had a history of legally challenging gag laws.

And whenever we needed to battle a gag law in court, we made sure that court was located in Alberta.

For instance, in 1983 we went to the Alberta Court of Queen's bench to challenge Canada's first ever election gag law, a federal law which was imposed by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Trudeau's law made it a crime for citizens or for independent groups to spend any money on ads during federal elections which supported or opposed a political party or candidate.

The NCC argued this law infringed on the right to free speech, which is guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

And the Alberta court agreed with us; in 1984 it issued a ruling which struck down's Trudeau's gag law as unconstitutional.

Then in the early 1990s, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's government implemented its own version of an election gag law, a law similar to Trudeau's.

Once again the NCC went to the Alberta courts, and once again the Alberta courts struck down a gag as unconstitutional.

And if you think these court rulings in any way discouraged politicians from enacting other gag laws, think again.

In fact, in 2000 the Jean Chretien Liberal government passed an election gag law.

As usual, the NCC challenged the law's constitutionality, as usual we fought it in the Alberta courts and as usual the Alberta courts threw the gag law out.

Another victory for freedom.

Mind you, even as we basked in our legal victories, we at the NCC were always worried about what would happen if our battle to defend free speech ever left the pro-freedom confines of Alberta.

Then in 2004, we did find out what would happen — it wasn't good.

In that year, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned all the previous Alberta rulings and declared Chretien's gag to be the law of land.

The moment that terrible decision came down, I knew free election speech in Canada was dead forever.

The way I saw it, if the courts wouldn't defend free speech no one would, certainly not our politicians.

After all, from a politician's point of view, gag laws are an efficient and easy way to silence pesky critics, which is why federal and provincial governments will always have an incentive to keep making them stricter and stricter.

This is what's happening right now in Alberta, where the provincial gag law went from stifling free speech during an election to stifling free speech three months before an election.

Of course, it won't be long until in the name of "Strengthening and Protecting Democracy" a gag law will be passed to stifle free speech in Alberta on a year round basis.

The same thing will almost certainly happen in other provinces as well as federally.

Eventually, gag laws will reign supreme from coast to coast.

And if that doesn't give you a pang of sorrow, then either you don't care about free speech or you need to have your pangs examined.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


There has been another round of federal by-elections.  Punditsanalystscolumnists and other media types are busy trying to decipher the tea leaves and explain to Canadians what this all means for the next general election.  The truth is, it doesn't mean much, but it does mean something about what is happening now, which can have an impact on what will happen in the fall of 2019.

Let's look at some historical facts.  Since 1980, there have been one hundred federal by-elections.  48% of the time, the governing party won don't believe those who say that it is harder for a government to win a by-election; they win half of them while the opposition divides the rest two, three or four ways.  Only in 28% of the contests did a party succeed in picking up a new seat.

4 seats changed colour before the 1984 election.  All parties won new seats and lost old seats, but the Liberals were a net -2, the PCs a net +2 and the NDP even: hardly a predictor of Mulroney's subsequent landslide.

Between 84 and 88, the NDP was able to take away 2 seats from the Conservatives.  In the subsequent election, the NDP did the best it had ever done with 43 seats, a mark that remained until 2011.  But Mulroney won another majority.

Before the 1993 election, there was a couple of firsts.   The Reform Party elected its first MP,  Deborah Grey in March 1989.  The Bloc Quebecois did the same in August 1990 with Gilles Duceppe.  Six months prior, the NDP had won its first seat in Quebec ever, with Phil Edmonston.  Two of these seats were PCs, one was Liberal.  If the rise of the BQ and the Reform was predictable to some extent, would you have gambled on the near-death of both the Progressive-Conservative Party and the NDP that ensued?

The Liberal Party picked up one seat during the 35th Parliament at the expense of the Bloc.  The Liberals picked up one from the Reform Party during the 36th while the Bloc grabbed Jean Charest's PC seat when he left for Quebec City.  No real pattern.

In the 37th Parliament, the Liberals took two seats from the Bloc, and the NDP stole one from the Liberals.  Joe Clark's Progressive-Conservatives won 2 by-elections at the expense of the Liberals, but by the time the 2004 election came around, the PCs had disappeared from the federal scene with the exception of the Senate where Progressive-Conservatives remained, like a relic, until the last one became independent in February 2016.

Under the short lived Paul Martin government, the Liberals won the only by-election.  Juggernaut.

There were 9 by-elections during the 39th Parliament.  The Conservatives stole one seat from the Bloc Québécois and one from the Liberals.  The NDP picked up one seat from the Liberals, Tom Mulcair in Outremont.  That win in Outremont eventually led to the Orange Wave, but it certainly didn't happen in 2008.

There were 7 by-elections during the 40th Parliament.  The Conservatives again took a seat away from both the Bloc and the Liberal Party.  The Tories also added a seat when Independent MP Bill Casey resigned to accept an appointment with Nova Scotia's Department of Intergovernmental Affairs.  The NDP lost one seat to the Liberals. I guess you could extrapolate that the signs for a Harper Conservatives majority were there, but not that the NDP would surge to Official Opposition.

There were 15 by-elections held during the 41st Parliament.  The Liberal Party wrestled one seat away from the Conservative Party and one seat from the New Democratic Party.  Every other seat remained with their respective parties.  Do you see the 2015 Liberal majority in these results?

In this current Parliament, there have been 12 by-elections so far.  Justin Trudeau's Liberals kept all their seats and added two from the Conservatives.  Andrew Scheer's Conservatives kept their other 5 seats.  The NDP, the Bloc and the Greens are exactly where they were on election night.  Trudeau is +2, Scheer is -2, Singh is even.  Right?

The problem, of course, is when a narrative sets in.  And when that narrative is negative for you, it makes it harder to overcome it.  Not impossible, as we've seen in the past.  But harder.  And right now, the narrative is negative for Scheer, who has lost two Conservative bastions.  And it's negative for the NDP, who has failed to be a factor in any of the by-elections since Jagmeet Singh became Leader.

Thankfully for the opposition parties, there is another kick at the can on the horizon: a by-election will be held in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord following the resignation of Liberal MP Denis Lemieux on December 1st.  The writ for a by-election has to be dropped no later than June 2, 2018.

Denis Lemieux was first elected in the 2015 federal election, defeating NDP incumbent Dany Morin by 600 votes.  The Bloc Quebecois held the seat from 2004 to 2011, having previously won in 1993.  Before and between the Bloc's mandates, André Harvey won the seat four times thrice for the Tories, once for the Liberals.

In theory, it is up for grabs for anyone.  In practice, this should be the Liberals to lose.  If they do lose it, another party will change the current narrative.  And they all need it to change.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.