Marco Levytsky, National Affairs Editor.
We welcome the news that the Government of Canada has pledged to provide monitors for the 2019 elections in Ukraine. That has been a long-standing and proud tradition of Canadian governments. It was especially significant in 2004 when the record 500 election monitors sent by former Prime Minister Paul Martin and led by former Prime Minister John Turner set both a standard for other nations to follow and a precedent for future governments.
While, according to Adam Austen, a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office, Canada will provide “substantial support” for the 2019 Presidential Election in Ukraine, the details are yet to be announced. So, it will be imperative for our community to look out for these details to ensure they meet the criteria of the past.
How this all came to be an issue is quite interesting however. It started with an OpEd piece in the Ottawa Citizen by Basia Puszkar, a veteran of many Election Observer Missions in Ukraine, on March 26.
Noting that Canada has not sent out any observers for the March 25 Presidential Election in Russia, she stated: “The reason for Canada’s surprising absence is that the federal government has cut all funding for participation in electoral observation. This means that Canada has effectively pulled out of not only the Russian election, but also upcoming Hungarian elections, next year’s elections in Ukraine, and all future elections to be held in partner states.
The following day CANADEM, the non-partisan, non-profit NGO which organizes Canada’s election observation missions, sent out an email stating that “currently no desk at Global Affairs Canada has international elections as part of its mandate”, and asking supporters to contact their MPs and push for such funding.
Two days later, the Conservatives issued their own statement quoting CANADEM and stating that “with the Trudeau Liberals cutting off funding for electoral observation, Canada will be absent from observing Ukraine’s next presidential and parliamentary elections, scheduled for 2019”.
This newspaper then emailed the Conservative statement to Adam Austen, a spokesperson for Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office, asking for a comment. Austen replied: “We are committed to supporting Ukraine, including in democratic capacity building, and will provide substantial support for election observers during its 2019 election.”
He subsequently explained that the funding is provided through the Peace and Stabilization Operations Program (PSOPs), launched on August 26, 2016.
Austen also blamed the Conservatives for the cut in funding for election observers, stating: “Canada’s leadership and participation in international election observation missions was severely damaged when the Conservatives ended dedicated funding for election observation in 2013.”
When asked by NP-UN to clarify that statement, in particular as there were 300 Canadian elections observers at the May 2014 Ukraine Presidential elections, plus 200 at the October 2014 Parliamentary elections as well as 10 long-term and 60 short term ones at the October 2015 municipal elections, he failed to address that question directly.
As for the March 25 Russian Presidential Election, Austen said Canada did provide two staff members from its Moscow Embassy to join the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) team.
While two Embassy staffers are a rather insignificant number, as are the total 500 OSCE monitors for a country the size of Russia, one may nevertheless argue that sending any election observers to Russia is an exercise in futility and a waste of money since it is very clear to every intelligent observer that Russian elections are fixed and no number of international observers is going to make one iota of difference. As Vladimir Putin’s idol and role model Joseph Stalin famously stated: “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.”
But Ukraine is not Russia. In fact, despite the “fraternalism” of the two nations as expounded by Moscow propagandists, no two countries could be more different as far as their historic political cultures are concerned. Whereas Russians have historically demonstrated a slavish subservience to despotic rule, Ukrainians have historically demonstrated a reckless disdain for any authority whatsoever.
Russia today remains a dictatorship, Ukraine however is a fledgling democracy, imperfect at this stage, but slowly inching its way to becoming a functional one.
And it is precisely because it is a developing democracy that Ukraine deserves all the support it can get to become a mature democracy. That is why a substantial amount of international election observers make a huge impact, as opposed to Russia where they are functionally useless.
If our readers find the various statements that we are citing here as contradictory and confusing, so do we. However, whatever the current status of funding for election observers is, we nevertheless have the pledge from an official government spokesperson that: “We are committed to supporting Ukraine, including in democratic capacity building, and will provide substantial support for election observers during its 2019 election.”
But given the confusion that surrounds this funding, our Ukrainian Canadian community must remain vigilant and follow this issue closely. We need to ensure that support for Ukrainian election monitoring in 2019 will indeed be “substantial”, as promised.
One way to do that will be to join the debate and sign a petition to the Parliament of Canada, that CANADEM announced in an April 9 email. The petition can be found at the House of Commons website.
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