I had the chance to attend a great talk at McGill yesterday, with the former and current Chief Electoral Officers, Jean-Pierre Kingsley and Marc Mayrand, speaking and exchanging views on the past, present, and future challenges of election law in Canada. It was great, and especially interesting in that their two perspectives, while similar, were just different enough to make the conversation into something, for lack of a better term, tri-dimensional. Mr. Kingsley was freer in his statements, more activist. He is concerned about the disappearance of public financing for political parties; Mr. Mayrand spoke more of the value of private financing. Still,, on most issues, they largely agreed.
I live-tweeted the conference ― a first for me, and more enjoyable than I expected ― so what I’m going to do, below the fold, is to collect my tweets, as they came. It’s obviously not a verbatim transcript, but rather my record (and translation!) of what struck me most in what Messrs Kingsley and Mayrand said. Here goes.
(NOTE: I accidentally published a very incomplete version of the post last night. Apologies!)
Jean-Pierre Kingsley was the first to speak:
Marc Mayrand went next:
Mr. Kingsley then had time to reply to Mr. Mayrand, but since they hadn’t been, disagreeing, he chose rather to elaborate on his earlier topics:
Mr. Mayrand also used his reply time to elaborate:
And then it was into the Q&A, with some answers worth highlighting:
Voilà.
Double Aspect 