Opposition calls out CAQ for ranking citizens according to their political views

Sylvain Lévesque, CAQ MNA and Second Vice-President of the National Assembly, with Premier François Legault and Siegfried Peters, Secretary General of the National Assembly, on Oct. 18, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Jacques Boissinot)

The opposition is condemning the Coalition Avenir Québec's (CAQ) political profiling of citizens who contact MNAs' constituency offices.

The Ethics Commissioner of the National Assembly revealed in a report that constituency office employees and CAQ elected officials cross-reference electoral list data to rank citizens according to their political views for electoral purposes.

In a press scrum, Liberal leader Marc Tanguay reiterated that the constituency office is not the place for tallying and that all citizens must be served, regardless of their convictions.

He emphasised that Liberal MNAs' office staff don't rank citizens.

Similarly, Québec Solidaire's Alejandra Zaga Mendez made it clear that QS constituency offices do not classify people in their ridings.

In her opinion, the admissibility of citizens' concerns should not be filtered according to their political sensibilities.

She asked the CAQ, which issues the instructions, to use electoral data for tracking purposes.

In her report published Wednesday on the CAQ's Sylvain Lévesque, Commissioner Ariane Mignolet frowned upon the fact that staff members of CAQ elected officials and the MNAs themselves have access in their offices to data "identifying each voter's level of sympathy for the party, as well as other information of a partisan nature."

The words "supporter," "opponent," and "not marked," are in boxes in each voter's file. Staff, therefore, hold this information when a citizen addresses them.

"This situation is indicative of a blurring of the lines between partisan activities and activities related to MNAs' offices," said the Commissioner, stressing that every citizen is entitled to the assistance of their MNA, regardless of their political opinions.

This report was first published in French by The Canadian Press Nov. 7, 2024.