When Michael Sona faced a guilty verdict on Thursday in the infamous robocalls trial, the federal Conservatives were quick to deny any involvement, insisting they ran a "clean and ethical" campaign.
Then what defines a "clean" campaign might mean something different to politicians than it does to the rest of us.
Sona was a Tory staffer who was using the party's closely guarded database of voter identification and he was convicted largely on the testimony of other Conservative campaign workers.
Despite the party washing their hands of the staffer who misled voters in the 2011 federal election, the fiasco is part of a larger trend of our elections and politicians getting noticeably dirtier.
Shortly after, when the Tories admitted to hiring a firm to call up random homes in Montreal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler's riding to make the totally untrue suggestion the MP was about to resign, the party defended their actions as "freedom of speech" and "only spreading rumours." Even the Conservative Speaker of the House called the campaign reprehensible.
Attack ads, campaign budgets financed by vested interests and misleading rumour campaigns are all vile, at every level of government, no matter who is perpetrating them. And they're driving people away from the polls.
In the last federal election, 61.1 per cent of Canadians voted, while 55.9 per cent of British Columbians cast their own ballots.
But legislation allows this dirty pool to continue. The trouble is: the job of cleaning up elections currently falls to the people who have benefited most from the status quo.
Glacier Media