Nicole Latour didn't waste time ruffling feathers after assuming the role of chief electoral officer of the Northwest Territories.
At the start of the 2015 election she was forced to walk back an ill-advised directive forbidding candidates from campaigning prior to the commencement of the 30-day election period. In a territory with tanking voter turnout and no political parties to help carry the message, the directive was nothing more than a roadblock on the highway of democracy.
Who cares if someone issues a tweet announcing their candidacy two months before the election? The more we know about potential MLAs wanting to run our government and the earlier we know about them, the better, we say.
More feathers were ruffled following the election when eight successful candidates, including the speaker and two cabinet ministers, were forced into NWT Supreme Court to explain why they were late with their expense reports.
Latour certainly knows how to irritate politicians and their apparatchiks but no one can she has been unproductive during her four years as chief electoral officer.
In her report on modernizing election administration, she recommends doing away with requiring candidates to provide statements from banks in their candidate financial reports – citing the lack of banking institutions in many NWT communities – as a way to ease some of the barriers that outdated elections rules are causing for candidates.
That's fair. Financial transparency is an important part of running a fair election but archaic governance shouldn't create obstacles to candidates.
Another recommendation was to extend the term for returning officers to a lifetime appointment. Currently, terms expire every four years. Latour also said the NWT has the shortest term for the chief electoral officer of all Canadian provinces and territories.
In 2016, she praised E-voting as a chance to boost turnout. The average turnout in the last election sat at 44 per cent territory-wide, a drop from 47 per cent in 2011.
At that time Latour said she was hoping to be reappointed to the office to see through the work she had started. A far cry from her most recent interview with News/North, where, although she says her office is working on “some really cool, innovative things,” she is now unsure if she will reapply for her job when her term ends in October.
One thing is certain in this territory, territorial elections are failing. People are losing their motivation to vote. MLAs reviewed Latour's recommendations and adopted some of them last fall but nothing substantial has been decided to date.
Heaving Latour's recommendations over the side and trying their luck with somebody else in the job won't change the morass for people. The status quo in the territory has gone on for too long and that needs to change if the GNWT is at all serious about democracy.