The Curious Case of Michael Sona

These few lines at Radio Canada and Adam Donaldson's Guelph Politico Blog are the only mentions I have found anywhere that Michael Sona, convicted of aiding and abetting unknown perp(s) in an unsolved crime of unknown proportions, lost his sentence appeal on May 18 and headed back to jail to serve out his nine month sentence.

Sona, with nothing to deal and no electronic or material evidence of his guilt produced at his trial, was such a likely fall guy.  

A couple of weeks before the 2011 election, CPC HQ had sent him out to halt voting at a special election poll at Guelph U that CPC HQ disputed the legality of and his name hit the media bigtime.

Elections Canada's investigation into the robo/live calls misdirecting voters across two thirds of the ridings in the 2011 federal election appeared dead in the water in 2012, but public interest was rekindled when reporters Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor exposed "Pierre Poutine" as the perp and the robocall company RackNine as the source of the calls into Guelph. 

Con Party robocaller Matt Meier of RackNine - you might remember him from the dubious Con Party 2013 Saskatchewan election boundaries robocalls debacle - traced the missing Poutine evidence on the RackNine hard drives and fired it off to EC investigator Al Mathews, along with a heads up to CPC HQ. Months earlier he'd sent another heads up to Andrew Prescott, Sona's Guelph campaign co-worker.

Then out of the blue on Feb 23 2012, Brian Lilley announced on Sun News that 
1) the Cons had identified Sona as a suspect, 
2) Con Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton was on the case, and 
3) Jenni Byrne had given Sun News a statement denying CPC HQ involvement. 

A shocked Sona called everyone he knew at CPC HQ to find out what was going on. According to Sona, CPC lawyer Arthur Hamilton called him back and told him not to worry about anonymous sources. 

Hamilton subsequently delivered a sixpack of Con staffers to Al Mathews and sat in on their interviews on the CPC's behalf as they told their stories of Sona asking how to pull off an anonymous robocall and later bragging of having pulled off the Pierre Poutine robocall scheme, the latter details of which were by then widely available in the media.

Elections Canada dropped their investigation into other suspects and ridings and the RCMP granted immunity from prosecution to the Crown's star witness Andrew Prescott. Prescott's "evolving" testimony at trial - Sona's post-election toast to "Pierre", burner phone packaging in Sona's waste bin, and Sona's euphoric election morning office announcement "it's working, it's working" - the Crown stressed several times, "should be approached with caution". 

The three minute difference between the end of a 4:12am Election Day Pierre Poutine log out at RackNine as Client 93 and a 4:15am Andrew Prescott log in from the same IP address in the Guelph campaign office as Client 45 was never adequately explained at trial. 
However Prescott testified that sometime before 7pm that same day, an hour before polls were to close anyway, Guelph campaign chief Ken Morgan handed him the Pierre Poutine RackNine account log in info and instructed him to put a stop to the "Counter Fake EC" robocall. 

Mr. Morgan later decamped to Kuwait without ever being interviewed by Elections Canada and Mr Prescott destroyed the Guelph campaign computers.

Sona did not testify at his trial, as is his right, after repeatedly maintaining his innocence of the charges against him and therefore his lack of knowledge as to who else might have been involved. His lawyer Norm Boxall was confident they'd won their case according to Sona, given the lack of any material or electronic evidence connecting Sona with either RackNine or Pierre Poutine or a CIMS list of non-supporters. Sona did not have access to CIMS.

On August 14 2014 however, Justice Gary Hearn found that, while apparently not acting alone, Sona authored the initiating email to Racknine and purchased one or more of the various credit cards and the burner phone in order to direct Guelph voters to the wrong polling station on May 2 2011. He believed the testimony from the Conservative staffers and campaign co-workers, or rather, as he stated in his summation, he could not believe the Conservative staffers and co-workers made it all up.

In sentencing Sona in November 2014, Hearn found that despite defence lawyer Norm Boxall's characterization of Sona's actions as possibly a "prank gone terribly wrong", nine months in prison was :

"necessary in order that the public and particularly those involved in political campaigns at any level will appreciate that the courts regard this type of activity as criminal and to be treated seriously."

So off Sona went to jail and was back out on bail pending appeal of his sentence which he has just subsequently lost.

Guelph resident Susan Watson wrote the following day in the Guelph Mercury :

"Sona certainly didn’t access non-supporter lists in Winnipeg South Centre, Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, Elmwood-Transcona, Nipissing-Temiskaming, Vancouver Island North and Yukon. In a court case involving these six ridings, Justice Richard Mosley found that “misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country, including the subject ridings.”

If he knows who it is he is doing time for "aiding and abetting", Sona isn't saying. 

Stripped of their in house authority to prosecute election offences courtesy of Harper's 2006 Federal Accountability Act, and with the no longer independent Commissioner now housed under the Attorney General's roof courtesy of the Fair Elections Act, Elections Canada has quietly rolled over and gone back to sleep. 

The website for Peter Smoczynski's documentary film Election Day in Canada : The Rise of Voter Suppression has two new interesting pieces on Sona :

Sona on his realization he had been pegged as a suspect, and

Stephen Maher's reflections on Sona as a fall guy after his conviction, in the film's trailer


Also see Michael Harris : 'I'm Tired': Michael Sona on robocalls, his suicide attempt -- and the road back
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Another reason to fight the Fair Elections Act

Duff Conacher, Founder of Democracy Watch, on the Fair Elections Act. 
Democracy Watch has a list of "10 really unfair measures in the so-called 'Fair Elections Act' " and a letter you can send to federal leaders here. C'mon, guys, surely we can do better than just 36,000 letters.  

The Cons' contention that the universally negative response to their Bill C-23 is uninformed and hysterical took a big hit today when former AG Sheila Fraser weighed in : 

Ex-watchdog Sheila Fraser slams bill as attack on democracy

'It's just astounding to me,' former auditor-general says of Tories' proposed election law overhaul

"Elections are the base of our democracy and if we do not have truly a fair electoral process and one that can be managed well by a truly independent body, it really is an attack on our democracy..."

Ok, on to my point ...

Fraser has a similar list of complaints to Conacher and also mentions another shortcoming I haven't seen much discussed - that the chief electoral officer will now have to seek prior Treasury Board approval to enter into contracts with people with specialized or technical knowledge.

In June 2011, EC investigator Alan Mathews was looking for Pierre Poutine among VOIPs and proxy servers - a field he knew nothing about. As he said in his ITO : "I relied upon [Simon] Rowland, a subject matter expert in the area of call center systems, telemessaging and telecom product development and network engineering." 

That subject matter expert was the one who provided this analysis : 

"So it's not just what was reported so far -- that the Poutine account and Prescott account were accessed by the same IP within 4 minutes of each other during the middle of this night. It's also that on three separate occasions, someone with both the Prescott and Poutine account passwords used the same browser window to log into both accounts."

I'm guessing if Elections Canada had had to go cap in hand to Tony Gazebo at the Treasury Board for permission to hire that guy and his "specialized or technical knowledge", it never would have been approved and we never would have heard anything about it.

‘Pierre Poutine’ robocalls case: Prescott has given evidence about Michael Sona, Ken Morgan 

and it ain't pretty but catch the explosive end of the McMaher piece :

A national investigation into allegations of dirty political calls has been under way for more than a year. Elections Canada had planned to wrap up that investigation by March 31. On Thursday, spokeswoman Diane Benson declined to say whether it is ongoing.

That report has been postponed until after the 2015 election because of the introduction of the Conservatives’ election bill.
The agency would not say when if ever it will report on the national robocalls investigation.

Friday 11am update : This morning the above McMaher story was changed in the two slightly different versions previously posted at NaPo and canada.com. and is only slightly less explosive.
The NaPo one, listing only Maher, now currently reads :

A national investigation into allegations of dirty political calls has been under way for more than a year. Elections Canada had planned to wrap up that investigation by March 31. On Thursday, spokeswoman Diane Benson declined to say whether it is ongoing.

The agency was expected to include information about that investigation in a “compliance and enforcement mechanisms” report to Parliament this spring.

Benson said the agency has decided not to report until after the next election.
“In light of the government’s announcement in the fall that it would introduce comprehensive legislative reform, Elections Canada decided to postpone the general enforcement report until after the next general election,” she said. “This was necessary not only to focus our attention and resources on the announced reform, but also of the difficulty of engaging stakeholders simultaneously on a parallel initiative.”

while the McMaher one on canada.com goes : 

An Elections Canada report on “compliance and enforcement mechanisms” that was scheduled for this spring has been postponed until after the 2015 election because of the introduction of the Conservatives’ election bill.

That report had been expected to include information on the national robocalls investigation. On Thursday, a spokesman for the agency would not say when any report on that investigation would be released.

 

with thanks to Salamander in comments for the updated version.

As deBeauxOs says : It's #Harper's Fraudulent Voting Reform Act, another #CON!

Friday update :From yesterday: Trapped in a Whirlpool : Parliamentary Civil Disobedience. 

To the Opposition : Go big or go home, stand up for Canadians or be judged harshly by history.

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RoboConch! We're not in Guelph anymore, Robo

In August Elections Canada updated the total number of misleading phone call complaints in the last federal election to 1,394 complaints, alleging specific instances from people in 234  of Canada’s 308 federal ridings

Now we get some concrete evidence. Elections Canada obtained phone records from Shaw and Videotron to verify complaints in 56 separate ridings across Ontario, BC, Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec. They were released to lawyers in Federal Court yesterday.

1,043 complaints are from voters who say they were directed to a wrong polling station by callers, 625 of them from live or recorded callers “claiming to emanate from Elections Canada.” 

And that's just from two phone service providers.
The new docs from outside Guelph, before and on May 2, detail a widespread vote suppression campaign : mostly robo and live callers pretending to be from EC as they direct people to wrong or non-existent polling stations, pretending to be the NDP phoning people up several times in a night between 2 and 5am, and rude canvassing from fake Liberals. 

Also in August we heard from McMaher that brand new EC Commissioner Yves Côté "declined to hand over robocalls investigation data to Federal Court", citing that it would "encroach upon the public interest".

So how come their big data release yesterday?
Well ...Council of Canadians posted last week's correspondence between EC and Steve Shrybman, lawyer for the plaintiffs in the six contested ridings. [Page 70]
Feel free to add Christopher Walken/Danny DeVito voices as you read my shorter version :

Shrybman : Yo, EC!  Those docs I asked for - the Guelph stuff with Allan Mathews' sworn statements - where are they? The ones the Con respondents say are inadmissible and all just hearsay. 

EC : It is all just hearsay. 

Shrybman : Sorry to hear you feel that way. I guess we'll just have to get Mathews on the stand to swear it isn't hearsay. Yeah, that way we can ask him a few more questions while we're at it.  

EC : Uh ... hey guess what! - we just scored these brand new docs for you today! 

Shrybman : Real nice doing business with you, EC.

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RoboCon : The Very Significant Alligator Under the Bed

Kady did such a brilliant live-blog of Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand's appearance before the Procedures Committee last Thursday that I didn't get around to watching it all myself till today.  But now that I have, I think the extraordinary lengths to which the Cons on committee were willing to go to try to shift the blame onto Elections Canada requires a fuller transcript.

As PLG points out at Pogge :

"we know the Pierre Poutine phone alone resulted in 6,700 calls to voters, but these calls only resulted in 70 complaints. So, 800 complaints clearly doesn't indicate only 800 calls.If the ratio held it'd be around 80,000. But I'd figure the ratio in other ridings would actually be higher--since publicity about the whole deal would have been especially intense in Guelph, leading more people to actually come forward. So who knows how many fraudulent calls were actually made--I'd say likely well over 100,000."

So here, given that the PROC committee does not have a transcript up yet, is a partial one for posterity and committee geeks :

Con MP Tom Lukiwski opened with a tirade against a Lib staffer who alerted voters to the fact that Con Marty Burke is reportedly anti-choice without identifying herself in the tagline as a Lib staffer.
Tom's talking point already handily debunked two weeks ago here. 
Next up :

Con MP John Williamson : "800 strikes me as potentially just a few errors per riding in the grand scheme of potential voters. What's your sense of the numbers?" 

Mayrand : "We know in the case of Pierre Poutine that there were at least 6,700 calls placed... What is troubling here is that there were definitely calls that were placed on behalf of people, falsely placed on behalf of people including Elections Canada. When you talk about 800 complaints you're talking about specific allegations with respect to calls received by electors."

Con MP Harold Albrecht of Kitchener-Conestoga amusingly tries to make the case that his party might contact a voter early on in the campaign and receive a response of overwhelming support but that by week five of the campaign that voter might changed his mind and it's possible that voter might perceive a follow up call on election day as harassment. 
Which of course has fuck all to do with pretending to be from EC and directing people to non-existent polling booths or calling people up and being rude or offensive while pretending to be from another party. 
Albrecht : 

"800 complaints in 70,000 polling stations - that's roughly one complaint per 100 polling stations"

Lukiwski :

"If we're looking at only 800 complaints, reasonably founded complaints, over roughly 200 ridings, that's maybe as little as one complaint lodged in a riding or as many as seven complaints in another riding. But based on the election return ... since there's a court challenge in seven ridings, and we're only talking about perhaps an average of four complaints, in other words perhaps as little as four examples, even if they were verified, of a voter receiving a vote suppression or misleading phone call trying to get them to another voting station, or to try and prevent them from voting in itself, what is the level that is required to overturn a result? It wouldn't seem to me that if we're talking about only four complaints, even if they were legitimate, per riding, that that would be enough to overturn an election result. What would it take to actually have you look at even considering the possibility of overturning an election result?"

Mayrand : "The responsibility to overturn an election lays with the court. The court will decide." 

Lukiwski : "But in your opinion ..." 

Mayrand : "My understanding of the legislation is that there has to be a demonstration that the result of the specific election, riding election, were affected by the irregularities claimed by the plaintiffs."

Con MP Bob Zimmer, Prince George Peace River : 

"We're hearing about deliberate acts that are attempting to dissude voters from voting or sending voters to wrong polling stations - I would suggest to moving to more of the non-deliberate acts and we mentioned earlier that there was 84% in terms of accurate calling lists or voters lists, [Note to Bob : EC does not have or give out phone numbers] but that still remains 16% in error and I guess most of us and me I was alarmed to see that number. And you had said that 700,000 were updated but that still leaves 3.1 million in error, and I guess just for Canadians' confidence, and I know that's why you're here, can you relay your confidence in the system with that high amount of error? Can you give Canadians a sense of confidence that we still have a good system? And I'll go back to your numbers of four per riding in terms of complaints, of actual calls, so we see quite a discrepancy in numbers there of significant amouts of errors - 3.1 million as opposed to four per riding in terms of net complaints. So there's quite a gap there like you had stated. How can Canadians still be confidant in the Elections Canada system?"

After pointing out that Canada's electoral system is a model around the world,  

Mayrand :"I would point out that a single elector being misdirected from his poll is a serious offence. At the end of the day, that's what investigations are about... "

Zimmer : "Deliberately or even really if its done non-deliberately - if it's an accident ..." 

Mayrand : "One thing I can assure Canadians and the committee is that calls made on behalf of Elections Canada are not errors. I'm sorry, this is not an error. That's a deliberate attempt to thwart the right of an elector."

Zimmer : " But if ridings are given incorrect data and are responding to that data and Canadians are responding to that data and going to the wrong polling stations as a result of incorrect data, that, simply put, that's ..."

And his time is up. 

Laurie Hawn : 

"This circus, and it is a circus, is undermining, notwithstanding the legitimacy of the processes that need to be followed in order to get to the bottom of it - nobody argues with that -  the circus aspect of this process has served to do nothing but unfortunately degrade the trust of Canadians in their system."

Hawn : Afghanistan, Haiti, blah, blah, blah, after which Lukiwski returns for yet another bout of whine about the Lib staffer busting out Con Marty Burke's alleged anti-choice creds.
Finally, the alligator under the bed makes its appearance :

Con MP Scott Reid : 

".. Is what we've heard an indication of some kind of alligator under the bed? Is something bigger going on or not? The assertion has been at least implied that there's widespread fraudulent either voter suppression or impersonation of Elections Canada or something of that sort. But what strikes me is if there's really an alligator under the bed, that I wonder if the alligator under the bed simply isn't a widespread problem with trying to figure out where people actually live in order to contact them in a way that uh - you can see there is a distinct problem here.  The normal voters list, the normal number of voters who are put in the wrong location, is 16%. You indicated that after you go through and issue the final voters list, it comes down to 12% error rate? Is that correct? That's still millions of Canadians and I know from experience I've picked up that final voters list myself in the last election from my riding. .. It was about 48 or 72 hours before Voting Day so you can understand it's hard to get that data, input it, and that sort of thing, any kind of actual ...In our case we do more print communication - you can't get that out with the list. As a final note - this is not something that Elections Canada has done but I'll make the point - from the last provincial election, Elections Ontario put myself and my wife - we live in the same house - in two different ridings. So things like this occur all the time. It is as a practical matter very difficult to overcome that problem. I think there is a widespread problem here that leads to many of the kinds of complaints you've heard ."

Mayrand : "The list is not perfect and I don't think it will ever be ... people move all the time, things happen. That being said, I still can't reconcile the idea that people pretending to be Elections Canada tried to misdirect people."

Scott Reid : "... but I think I'm right in saying that the number of instances you're going to find of that as a proportion of the total number of complaints people are raising will be very very small."

Just dying to get to the bottom of this, aren't they?
Final obfuscations with bonus veiled threat from Mr. Creosote ...

Dean Del Mastro : "Just to kinda tie things up here - Mr. Mayrand, thank you for your appearance. You've indicated that in the 308 election results you stand behind your determination of each and every riding - that's part of your report that you've already made to this committee and I thank you for that. You've indicated in your report that you find it troubling to hear sometimes sweeping and vague allegations of irregularities being made public many months after the election and not supported by specific facts. We find that troubling as well - we've referred to that as the unsubstantiated smear campaign. 

Uh and I'd also like to point out that we've got a couple of former very significant - well, police chief and a commissioner of the OPP - that have been involved in some very significant investigations and one of the things that they're concerned with are some of the leaks. And I really wanna say that I appreciate your commitment and your comments specifically with respect to keeping these things in the strictest confidence. I can tell you that there's been harm, there's been harm to individuals, there's been harm to companies, even though for example the member from Winnipeg Centre has apologized for a number of the outlandish things that he has said in the NDP, there has been real harm done. Can you just confirm to the committee that you're going to work to make sure that no leaks are occurring from Elections Canada because there's a number of folks in the media that have in fact came forward and indicated to me that they feel Elections Canada has been the source of some of these things, or folks within Elections Canada. Can you just confirm that you're going to echo your comments to this committee that things will be kept in the strictest confidence...."

Mayrand :  "Another case of vague allegation here.[Room erupts with laughter] I can assure you - no, seriously, seriously  - again, there's no source leaking from Elections Canada if that's the allegation. I can attest to that. I think some should be checking their sources."

Committee ends with an all-party agreement to call Al Mathews, the guy heading up the actual investigations, some time before June. 
Maybe he can locate the very very significant alligator under the bed.

Fun fact : Committee members Tom Lukiwski, Harold Albrecht, Scott Reid, and Bob Zimmer are all from ridings where alligators of electoral irregularities have been alleged.

The most significant alligator of all : The Accountability Act of 2006 rescinded the authority of Elections Canada to prosecute offences under the Elections Act and gave that authority instead  to the Director of Public Prosecutions under the  Attorney General of Canada :

"The Director is given responsibility, in place of the Commissioner of Canada Elections, for prosecutions of offences under the Canada Elections Act."

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