No, Pat, There Hasn't Been Enough Scrutiny of Ruth-Ellen Brosseau

Unanswered questions loom over Vegas MP

Speaking of the attention that has been directed toward the NDP's MP for Las Vegas, Ruth-Ellen Brosseau, Winnipeg Centre MP Pat Martin has just one thing to say:

LEAVE RUTH-ELLEN ALONE!

“A single working mom, she’d probably have some interesting views, whether it’s national child care programs, all kinds of things that she could legitimately comment on that deserve to be heard,” Martin declared.

Of course, there's one other thing that deserves to be heard: an explanation of why Brosseau is going to be seated in Parliament at all.

It has little to do with Brosseau never so much as appearing in her riding during the election. (When it comes to making uninformed decisions, it seems very few have it over Quebeckers.) It has little to do with the falsification of credentials Brosseau does not have.

What it does have to do with is the fabrication of signatures on Brosseau's nomination papers.

It's difficult to believe that many Canadians could still be uninitiated regarding this issue. Mere days after the 2011 election, it was revealed that Brosseau's nomination papers featured signatures that had been gathered under the pretences of "a petition", and others that had been forged.

The NDP has yet to offer a proper response to this. In fact, an NDP spokesperson insisted that all the signatures were gathered properly, even after it had been shown they were not.

Brosseau did not forge any of these signatures herself. She herself never lied to anyone about what the signatures being gathered were for. Nor did she herself ever lie about her education.

It was someone within the NDP campaign who did all of this dirty work. Concerned Canadians still wait for the NDP to flush that individual -- or individuals -- out.

But the bigger question is what's going on at Elections Canada, where they seem to have not taken any action on this matter at all.

Explained most simply, if the Brosseau campaign didn't gather the 100 signatures necessary to certify her candidacy, she was inelligible to appear on the ballot. If any of the signatures are false, that's flat-out electoral fraud.

Elections Canada hasn't stepped in to de-certify the election result based on an inelligible candidate winning and call a by-election. Apparently, they're going to let this matter slide, and carry Brosseau into Parliament with it.

That's unacceptable, and just more evidecne that some bureaucrats at Elections Canada are elligible to find themselves new employment very soon.

One would expect the NDP, who produced an ad talking about Conservative Senators charged with electoral fraud would take an actual case of electoral fraud seriously. Once again, that's actual election fraud, not Elections Canada and the Conservative Party having a disagreement over whether or not specific campaign expenditures were permissable.

Apparently, the NDP has very little interest in these matters when the fraud is within their own ranks.

It's not surprising. What is surprising to see an MP such as Pat Martin, an individual who has shown himself to be of great integrity, declare scrutiny of Brosseau to be "over-blown".

There hasn't been enough scrutiny of Ruth-Ellen Brosseau. Not nearly enough.