RoboCon : Republican edition

The Cons' somewhat belated talking points about their use of the US voter contact firm Front Porch Strategies in the last election have been all about only using them for townhalls :

U.S. phone firm was just for town halls, say MPs 

"Jim Ross [Front Porch's Canadian liaison and Con MP Rick Dykstra's former campaign manager] said telephone town halls were about the only service the company provided in Canada. As for other calls, “Rick got all his live calling from Canada just like all the other (Tory) candidates.”   

and  "Del Mastro stressed that the U.S. company wasn’t hired to do any telemarketing or solicit votes. Front Porch Strategies was hired to host an April 7 telephone town hall on its server, he said, and was booked through its Canadian affiliate and paid in Canadian dollars." 

Yet here is Front Porch Strategies President Matthew Parker sitting in the campaign offices of Con MP Julian Fantino with a phone to his ear, a pencil in his hand, and a paper with the header "Election Day is Monday May 2nd - You Can Vote Now" in front of him.

Photo caption from FPS :
"Matt lending a hand for MP Fantino here in the greater Toronto area (GTA)"

What? 

Foreigners interfering in a Canadian election?

Ok, maybe Matt Parker and his business partner PJ Wenzel flew up from Ohio just that one time to do a little campaigning for Fantino, now the Assistant Minister of Defence, on their day off. Let's go to twitter :







So how did all this front lines taking over business get started?

Sorry - wrong one. That's one of their other causes - overturning Roe vs Wade in the US for the fetus fetishi.

Is this it?

Nope, not that one either.              
Ok, here we go :

You mean effective communications like this?

Perhaps the Cons require another presentation from their Republican friends on "effective constituent communications" because their current credibility on RoboCon communications is right in the toilet.

Why Nobody Believes the Conservative Talking Points on the RoboCon Scandal.

Meanwhile in other RoboCon news in just the last day :

Dawg : "The Speaker of the House of Commons is now ruling opposition questions about Roboscam out of order. ... And what should be front-page news barely gets a mention in the corporate media—it’s as though the Parliamentary Press Gallery is on an extended sleepover with Rob Anders."

CBC : Three former Conservative organizers want Elections Canada to look into how money was collected and spent in Fantino's campaign. They allege a second secret bank account of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Pogge does a round-up including a link to a great editorial on the above CBC story, and also notes that although the Elections Canada investigation into harassment phone calls in Eglinton (Volpe's riding) was closed last May, now that over 2700 ballots of last minute unregistered voters with no or bogus addresses have turned up in the same riding, perhaps someone could take a mo to look into that please.

Dave unravels the stuffing of ballot boxes , plus the strategic targeting of voters over 60 for phone calls telling them to go the wrong or non-existent polling station : “Every single person I’ve contacted has been (born) between 1947 and 1949,” said one unidentified Elections Canada employee."

And to cap it all off with a huge dollop of irony, Stephen Maher of Postmedia, who along with Glen McGregor of the Citizen broke the robocalls story in the first place, was reportedly thrown out of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy conference party last night. (h/t Ian by e)

Just one day in the media half-life of RoboCon.
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Arghhh Update : Or, had I known, I could have skipped doing the first part of this post and just linked to this ongoing and continuously updated version : The View From the Front Porch Looking North
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One month later : RoboCon Republican edition update
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