The Shopping Aisles of Democracy

In late February of this year, two reporters from Postmedia rocked the Canadian political world with news of an Elections Canada investigation into misleading “robocalls” in the 2011 federal election. Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher had doggedly pieced together a disturbing tale of misleading, often automated phone calls in Guelph, Ontario, directing voters to the wrong polling stations.

The alleged fraud appeared to work in favour of the ruling Conservative Party and threatened to put a shadow over the election results that had given Prime Minister Stephen Harper his much-desired majority government on May 2, 2011. Subsequent reports, in the days and weeks to follow, would only widen the investigation, so that by the end of March Canada’s chief electoral officer, Marc Mayrand, told a House of Commons committee that investigations were under way in no fewer than 200 ridings across the country.

It all seems like the stuff of political fiction—a dark...