Lawstudents.ca

I did my BA and MA in political science, with my MA focusing on a specific area of electoral law. I could see myself wanting to work as a consultant during elections for political parties on election and financing rules, but am curious as to whether any law schools even offer courses in electoral law. I'm going to UofWindsor in the fall, and would maybe like to make a case for the university to look into creating a course in electoral law (I know of a prof at the school who is an expert in the area). I just think that with the increasing complexity around electoral/financing laws, political parties and candidates have been more reliant on hiring legal consultants, especially during elections, and maybe law schools can start offering courses in this area of law.

Thoughts?

I don't know anything about electoral law, and I don't recall seeing courses available specifically related to that. (I'm not at Windsor). What type of practice do these legal consultants who are hired during elections have? One thing you might want to investigate, if there is no course available at Windsor, is to see if you would have an opportunity for a directed research project. These are available at U of T so perhaps Windsor has a similar offering, where you write up a proposal for your project and the number of credits you want. You must have a prof who is willing to supervise. A committee will have to approve your proposal. Here's the course description for how it works at U of T:

http://www.law.utoronto.ca/students_con ... =coursespg

Chances are that this type of arrangement will be more of a possibility for you than trying to convince the school to offer a course you want.

McGill has student-initiated seminars in which the course content is mandated by the seminar organizers. You just need a prof to sign on to grade your final papers. The course is pass/fail. Windsor might have something similar set up.

Booooooooring!

Electoral law is one of the most interesting directions in which the law is progressing. Every year there are more are more elections, more and more citizens have to suffer being elected. The law must step in and stop this. Only recently has the Electoral Law Act been passed, the first law to be passed in which the victims of a crime, the elected in this case, have been given the opportunity to make a law to stop their victimization.

Do you like municipal politics?

I do like municipal politics. My main interest is Federal, but living in Windsor makes it difficult to not be at least somewhat into municipal politics.

To each their own, I suppose. Electoral Law is probably one of the fastest growing areas of law in Canada, yet is often overlooked. Really, nobody pays much attention to electoral law/financing but the political parties and academics. If you went through the laws on party financing and actually gave it a chance, I assure you that you would find some eye-opening things. For example, even one of the most basic newer laws on party financing - the fact that since 2003 every political party has received $1.75 (and adjusted for inflation) per vote per year so, generally, $7 per vote per electoral cycle of taxpayer money - is relatively unknown among members of the general public. This is multiplied by 13-15 million voters, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money going to political parties to fund campaigns. Public financing has its pros and cons, it's just unfortunate that nobody really knows that it exists.

In any case, every area of law is "boring" to 99.99% of people once they get past the fact that the study/practice of law doesn't solely involve a man in a suit pounding on a table yelling "OBJECTION!".

/end geek

I don't think $1.75 in 2003 dollars adjusted to inflation is $7, lol, but I share your interest in this area.

What do you think of public funding? I agree that there are definitely pros and cons, but I think the pros outweigh the cons. I think it's a great thing that there are obstacles to monied interests buying Canadian elections. The lack of money makes for more boring elections but I think it's worth it.

Do you know a lot about this stuff? My understanding doesn't go a whole lot deeper than learning about Bill C-24 and the Federal Accountability Act in a few POLS classes.

The reason I mention it is that there are a lot of municipal elections and that means a lot of clients who need advice about electoral laws.

$1.75 per year, which translates to about $7 per electoral cycle (if you assume there is an election every 4 years - 1.75x4).

My mistake, I always thought it was $1.75 per vote, I didn't realize it was per year. You're definitely right, my mistake. I'm still interested in your thoughts on the law if you wanna answer that part.

Most of it does involve the Federal Accountability Act and Bill-C24, while the more academic side involves countless studies/papers on the matter.

I have a hard time deciding whether or not I agree with public funding. The pro-representative democracy side of me wants to believe that public funding and the removal of corporate funding is a positive step towards helping small parties compete, but, at the same time, remember that the major parties receive more public funds than the small parties, thereby widening the gap. The Conservatives are great at this - eliminating the Liberal funding base (corporate funds) while benefiting from public funds due to their high total vote share. But it's good for small parties to receive something to get them going.

Ideologically, I would have to say I'm opposed to it. I'm about as free-market of a thinker as you can get, and if I had my way, the system itself wouldn't exist as we know it. So ideologically I'm against it, but within our current system and its restraints, I would have to say that I'm undecided.

And there is a lot more to it once you open yourself up to academic debate around the subject, especially if you go into the wider electoral system debate. As far as financing goes, there is enough there to justify a law school class on the subject. But why limit ourselves to financing, when the electoral system itself is governed by the Elections Act, and, in a greater legal sense, section 3 of the Charter? I think there could be, at the very least, a viable two-part class on election mechanics and on political financing.

To be fair, I think it was Chretien who gave his own party the middle finger on his way out with respect to changing the laws around corporate contributions.

Moreover, the Tories proposed eliminating the public subsidy that Zero says they are so reliant upon. That's what led to the prorogation kerfuffle.

In the 2009 fiscal period, the Conservatives raised 29% more money in individual contributions than the Bloc, NDP and Liberals combined, from 50% more individual donors. They're not the ones relying on public funding to stay competitive.

Oops! You're right, Chretien brought in those changes. My bad, I was thinking about the proposed changes to the Federal Accountabilities Act from the Conservatives.

But to be fair, with the above comment, I never said the Conservatives were reliant upon the public subsidies. Not at all actually. I said that the public subsidies end up benefiting the Conservatives more than any other party, at least since they came into effect, because of their high popular vote. I realize the Conservatives do better with individual donations - as I pointed out the elimination of corporate donations has hurt the Liberals. But not once did I say or even imply that the Conservatives are reliant upon public subsidies.

That's true. I read too much into it. Sorry about that.

No worries.
I will say that I've supported the Conservatives more than any other party in the past (though I think that they've moved a little too far away from their core economic ideology for my liking lately, even if it was necessary for public support), however, let's not mistake what they did with the public subsidies more recently for altruism. It was an attempt to gain public support by eliminating something that would be seen as unpopular - public subsidies for political parties. Even though they benefit monetarily more from the subsidies than any other party, they also know that they have other sources of income - as you pointed out, high individual contributions, and aren't as reliant on the public subsidies as their cash-strapped opposition, the Liberals. While the Conservatives would have lost more money with the elimination of public subsidies than any other party, they recognized that it would have choked all of the opposition parties, and what better time to propose it than during an economic downturn. Politics can be fun!