Media organizations seek suspension of election gag law
Last Updated: Wednesday, January 4, 2006 | 10:23 PM ET
CBC News
The election gag law, in effect for the Jan. 23 vote, bans the transmission of election results to areas of the country where polls remain open. The media wants it lifted so results can be published online and broadcast nationwide as soon as they become available.
In a motion filed in the Supreme Court of Canada Wednesday, various media outlets wrote that any impact on other voters would be minimal and should "not justify infringing the expression rights of literally several millions of Canadians.
"[The ban] should strike any reasonable person as being extremely harmful to the public good and interest."
B.C. resident Paul Bryan deliberately broke the election gag law during the 2000 federal election.
He posted results from Atlantic Canada on his website before polls closed in B.C. He was convicted in provincial court and fined $1,000.
The conviction was overturned in 2003 by the B.C. Supreme Court, which struck down the gag law section of the Canada Elections Act.
That allowed media companies in the 2004 election to tell voters in Western Canada what the results were elsewhere while polling stations in B.C. were still collecting ballots.
In May of this year, the B.C. Court of Appeal reversed the lower court's decision and upheld the ban, saying it promotes fairness and ensures all voters receive equal treatment on election day.
But the media's motion says the ban is meaningless because it doesn't cover those who can telephone or text message.
As for a perceived information imbalance, it argues that all voters are subjected to different levels of information throughout the campaign.
The motion also argues that there are staggered voting hours, meaning there are less than 30 minutes between the closing of the polls in the Central-Prairie region and B.C. and would have little impact on voting patterns.
For example, when the polls closed in B.C. in 2004, only 8.4 per cent of the votes cast across the rest of the country had been reported .
In an affidavit, CBC News Editor in Chief Tony Burman wrote that news organizations "will have to deny Canadians what they know and give them news for up to three hours on the basis of news judgments that are...constrained by the Canadian Elections Act."
He said the ban will have a "huge and quite detrimental effect on societal communication at a key moment in the life of a democracy."
