Even worse than expected

The corporate media has finally picked up on the Cons' laughable decision to put the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in charge of consultations on electoral reform. And the process has managed to go haywire even before the actual consultations have started:

The Canadian Press has learned that at least some of the recruitment of participants was compromised even before the Frontier Centre begins leading what the government calls "deliberative consultations."

Compas Public Opinion and Customer Research confirmed Thursday that an unauthorized sub-sub-contractor had been recruiting participants for forums this Friday and Saturday in Winnipeg and in Oakville, Ont.

Sources say Brooks and Done, a Calgary firm, was seeking up to 80 participants and accepting unsolicited applications after putting out a last-minute, word-of-mouth call this week.

Compas, which along with the Frontier Centre is jointly contracted to conduct the consultation, said Brooks and Done has been dropped and all applicants will be vetted by the polling firm. Compas president Conrad Winn said Thursday that only five per cent of the participants for the two forums were recruited by the firm.

If there's anything that could make the process even more brutally flawed than it already was, it's for the contractors involved to use "word of mouth" and a private application process to skew the sample of citizens involved in favour of another group of ideologically-friendly participants.

But then, it's clear that there's nothing the Cons would like less than for the process to produce any meaningful results. Which means that they're all too likely to overlook what appears to already be both a glaring violation of the original contract (if the subcontract was "unauthorized") and strong evidence of just how useless the process is, and claim that the foregone conclusion actually means something.

And that's undoubtedly a shamem as this among other Con abuses of power only highlights how much Canada stands to gain from an electoral process that wouldn't give Harper so much power with just over a third of Canada's popular vote.

Update: Peter Van Loan now says that the recruiting problems were "clearly unacceptable", but that we should now accept them and stop questioning the process.