robogate: vote suppression must be investigated, by-elections must be held

What will be done about RoboGate? Has Stephen Harper's well-documented pattern of giving democracy the finger finally gone too far?

Thanks to an excellent election post-mortem by Matt Peters and Ryan Boldt on rabble.ca last year, we know that the Conservative Party won by a very narrow margin in dozens of ridings, in some cases beating out NDP and Liberal candidates by only hundreds of votes (some within dozens).

The scope and breadth of RoboGate has yet to be known, but every day more ridings are reporting robo-calls and deceiving messages from the 2011 election. Could the Conservatives have, in fact, stolen their majority victory?

Even before what I call RoboGate (or, as other media have coined, 'RoboCon'), we had a litany of abuses --from the Conservatives pleading guilty to illegal election spending (the 'in-out' scandal), to being found in contempt of Parliament, pork-barrelling millions in G20 cash into cabinet minister Tony Clement's personal riding, and deploying military brass to find dirt on opposition members.

But a scan over current federal legislation on the books shows an insidious and systemic rightwing worldview -- one that threatens Canada's (potential for) democracy.

We need an investigation. We need a do-over.