The only thing backing Nicolás Maduro’s claim to another six years in office as Venezuela's president is his government’s insistence to that effect.Jesus Vargas/Getty Images
In an era when authoritarian strongmen weaken the democracies in their own countries and maliciously interfere in foreign elections as a side hustle, you would hope that last month’s blatantly rigged election result in Venezuela would evoke more than a tepid response in Canadian officials.
But no. The most that Ottawa can muster is Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s rote comment about having “serious concerns” about the utterly fake re-election of Nicolás Maduro, and a call by Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly for Mr. Maduro’s government to release voting data that it can’t possibly release without confirming that it stole the election, and to seek a “negotiated” solution.
The United States, on the other hand, has officially recognized Venezuela’s opposition candidate, Edmundo González, as the election winner and is calling on Mr. Maduro to step aside to allow for a peaceful transition of power.
The Biden administration is able to be so decisive for a simple reason: Mr. González won the election. The evidence for it is overwhelming.
In fact, the only thing backing Mr. Maduro’s claim to another six years in office is his government’s insistence to that effect. There is nothing else. Nothing.
On the day of the election, as results poured into the country’s election council, the members of which are loyal to Mr. Maduro, the transmission of the results suddenly stopped for two hours, after which the election council declared their man the winner.
By Wednesday, 10 days after the vote, the government had still not released a full tally of the results or any of the data collected by electronic voting machines, insisting that Mr. Maduro got 52 per cent of the vote, compared with 43 per cent for Mr. González.
Rather than making way for a peaceful transition, Mr. Maduro is using police and soldiers to viciously attack and arrest the tens of thousands of Venezuelan demonstrators protesting the fraudulent outcome.
Meanwhile, an alliance of opposition parties have got incontrovertible proof that Mr. Maduro not only lost the election but did so by a wide margin.
That proof comes in the form of printed receipts from 80 per cent of the country’s voting machines that show Mr. González leading Mr. Maduro by an insurmountable margin of 66 per cent to 31 per cent. Those receipts have to be produced and shared publicly under Venezuelan election laws.
The Washington Post, The New York Times and other independent sources have analyzed and verified some or all of the receipts, which were collected by opposition party workers, and confirmed that Mr. Maduro lost the election by as many as four million votes.
Those findings match the results of independent exit polling, which also gave Mr. González two-thirds of the vote.
It is simply impossible to say that Mr. Maduro is the legitimate president of Venezuela, which means it is wrong for Canada to call for a negotiated resolution to this crisis. There is nothing to negotiate. Mr. Maduro must stop intimidating his own people and step down.
Canada is just one voice among many. But by failing to acknowledge forthrightly that the election was stolen, Ottawa is helping to give Mr. Maduro leeway to cling to power.
The Trudeau government needs to state clearly that the election winner was Mr. González. As a democratic country, Canada must take unequivocal stands when it sees an election so brazenly stolen by a violent authoritarian.
The government should also be more sensitive to its U.S. ally, which is still suffering through Donald Trump’s attempts to discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election – efforts Mr. Trump will no doubt redouble if he loses the election in November.
It is more critical than ever for the U.S. government to insist that election results be respected and honoured by all candidates, and to stand firm when someone, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, claims a false victory.
The Biden administration is protecting its own democracy by insisting that Mr. González is the legitimate winner of the Venezuelan election. It is also indirectly protecting Canada’s, and that of every country that chooses its leaders through fair elections.
Canada should be right there beside the U.S., but it has chosen not to be. It defies logic, and it is wrong.