Political speech : Support the troops

In May 2012, David Pugliese wrote about how senior managers at Veterans Affairs Canada received almost $700,000 in bonuses and extra pay in 2011 "even as their department came under fire for failing to help former soldiers." A Con official advised him the bonuses are set by the Treasury Board and senior management at Veterans Affairs. Pugliese : 

"Next year's payouts could be even larger, since the government is tying those to the savings managers can find in their departments. An estimated 800 jobs will be lost at Veterans Affairs over the next three years."

Chronicle Herald, yesterday : Veterans Affairs: Managers reaped rewards after cuts

"Veterans Affairs Canada managers made hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses for cutting costs as the department shed hundreds of jobs.

In 2011-12, the department paid $343,000 to 60 managers under what appears to be a new program for “Savings/Spending Targets.

Bonuses ranged from $2,376 up to $14,728, and averaged about $5,700 per person. The following year, $243,000 was paid out to 55 managers, an average of $4,400 each."

Chronicle Herald, Dec 4 : Harper dismisses massive job cuts at Veterans Affairs amid calls for Fantino’s removal 

"According to departmental performance reports filed with the Treasury Board, Veterans Affairs had the equivalent of 4,039 full-time employees in 2008-09. That number fell to 3,050 by 2013-14.

More than half of those cuts came from a program called Health Care and Re-Establishment Benefits and Services.

The program is in charge of helping with the physical, mental and social well-being of veterans and to “provide access to employment support, health benefits, home care and long-term care.”

Last year, there were 1,536 employees in that division, down 619, or almost 30 per cent, from 2009."

Vancouver Sun, May 2014 : Tories spending $4M more on veterans ads to counter 'misinformation': Fantino

"Veterans Affairs is spending an additional $4 million on advertising this year — including television spots throughout the NHL playoffs ... The TV ads emphasize efforts to move soldiers smoothly from military to civilian life...."

David Pugliese : Wounded vets asked to sign form saying they won’t criticize the military on social media

"The Canadian Forces is requiring physically and mentally wounded soldiers to sign a form acknowledging they won’t criticize senior officers or discourage others in uniform with their comments on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The form, given to military personnel who are transferred to the Joint Personnel Support Unit, was sent to the Citizen by military members upset with what they see as a threat to their right to speak out about the failure of the Department of National Defence and Canadian Forces to take care of the wounded."

CBC, March 2014 : Veterans don't have social contract, Ottawa says in lawsuit response

This month - December - the government is again attempting to have the vets' case in the British Columbia Court Of Appeal dismissed on the grounds that they have no particular social contract or covenant with returning troops because the promise made by Tory PM Robert Borden in 1917 was just "political speech":

"The defendant pleads that the statements made by Sir Robert Borden and the coalition government in 1917 were political speeches that reflected the policy positions of the government at the time and were never imended to create a contract or covenant."

Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino's office released a statement Wednesday saying the government doesn't comment on issues that are before the court.

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From Ferguson and Gaza to the Toronto G-20

Combined Tactical Systems, Inc. (CSI), according to its website, manufactures and markets tactical munitions and crowd control devices to armed forces, law enforcement, corrections and homeland security agencies around the world.

This photo of its Jamestown, Pennsylvania headquarters raised a few eyebrows this week because :

1) as you can see in the photo, CSI was flying an Israeli flag alongside the US one up until January 2012 and, according to a former CSI plant employee in the first comment here, it is flown whenever the Israeli owner/founder is in town, and 

2) CTS tear gas shell cartridges manufactured there were found a week apart in Gaza and Ferguson, Missouri - where protests and excessive police reaction fuelled by the half a billion dollars in military weapons given to local police forces erupted in response to the August 9 shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a local police officer. 

Comparisons of the highly militarized assault on their respective populations, supportive tweets from citizens in Gaza to citizens in Ferguson about dealing with the effects of teargas, and a look at the fact Ferguson and St. Louis County police forces were trained in Israel in recent years followed.

Along with 9,500 other law enforcement officials who have attended Israeli-led LEEP training sessions in the US and Israel. 

The Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP) - created :

"in cooperation with the Israel National Police, the Israel Ministry of Internal Security, and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) to support and strengthen American law enforcement counter terrorism practices"

 - was the brainchild of former FBI Assistant Director and Chief of Counter-Terrorism Steve Pomerantz, in his capacity as Director for Counter-Terrorism Programs for The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). 

JINSA was founded to "advocate on behalf of a strong U.S. military, a robust national security policy, and a strong U.S. security relationship with Israel" to "provide leadership and affect policy on crucial issues of national security and foreign policy." 

Yeah, they pretty much have that part nailed down.

Former JINSA advisory board members include perennial neocon warmongers Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, James Woolsey, and Michael Ledeen.

Meanwhile, according to the U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation : Joint Police & Law Enforcement Training page at the Jewish Virtual Library detailing their joint history :

"In early September 2012, the New Police Department (NYPD) opened an Israeli branch at the Sharon District Police Headquarters" in Israel because "the Israeli police is one of the major police forces with which it must maintain close work relations and daily contact."

Really? The NYPD requires daily contact with Israeli police from a location inside Israel?

Naturally, there have also been Canadian security junkets to Israel. In 2005, on his first day as Ontario emergency management commissioner, Julian Fantino, Toronto Police Staff Supt. Bill Blair, and 30 more Ontario police officials left for Israel to "study security and anti-terrorism measures", courtesy of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, airline El Al and the Israeli government.

But back to Combined Tactical Systems (CSI). In addition to making the teargas cannisters used against populations in Gaza, Ferguson, Tahrir Square in Egypt, Bahrain, Occupy Wall Street, and Toronto's G-20 in 2010, they also run their own training sessions "combining product tools with knowledge and techniques."

In February 2010 - four months before the Toronto G20 - this highly respected and decorated officer was a Training Sergeant with the Toronto Police Public Order Unit working on :

• Development & delivery of crowd management training to Toronto Police Service and police agencies across Canada.
• ORT (Obstacle Removal Team) trained - Responsible for training Toronto Police members in extrication and removal of protestors from fixed objectives using various tools and equipment.

when he took the four-day CSI course on chemical munitions (hand-held and fired), distraction devices (flash bangs), and fired munitions, bean bags, wood batons, rubber batons, sting calls :

CHEMICAL MUNITIONS/ LESS LETHAL WEAPONS - INSTRUCTOR  

Combined Tactical Systems, San Bernadino, CA / February 2010

Then read this account of Why there wasn't accountability for the police in Ferguson and see if it doesn't remind you of the same police set up used to defy accountability at G-20, involving the aforementioned Fantino and Blair.

Final note from Jewish Virtual Library :

In January 2011, Canada and Israel signed an umbrella pact for defense and military cooperation and bolstered that agreement in November 2011 amid the turmoil that had been set upon the Middle East and around the Arab World during the Arab Spring. Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak settled a number of memoranda of understanding to facilitate information and intelligence sharing as well as cooperative arrangements for the development and sale of military technologies.

From Ferguson and the occupation of Gaza to the Toronto G-20, war is a racket that always comes home .

Edited for clarity and typos.
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Rock the Hill 2014

Rock the Hill News Release

Ottawa, May 28, 2014 –Veterans, families and fellow Canadians will come together on Parliament Hill beginning June 4, 2014. This peaceful gathering is set to be the largest demonstration in support of veterans since the First World War, which began 100 years ago.

Unlike the politically scripted photo ops of military members and veterans which have inundated Canada’s media these past eight years, “Rock the Hill” is a truly grassroots apolitical initiative bringing Canadians together with veterans and their families.        

From their website : 

"Canada's Veterans are planning on going to Ottawa on June 4th to protest the total breach of trust that this government has shown towards us and the disregard of the sacred oath that has been in place since World War I. 

We also plan to enlighten the public on the amount of misinformation that this government is putting out with documented proof. 

By doing so we will be showing this government that we are no longer going to just stand by and take the continued mistreatment of our rights.
You don't have to be a Vet, or have anything to do with the military, to show your support. Actually, the more civilians the better. 

This will not be just a one-day event, as we plan on staying as long as it takes."

So naturally today there was a Con counterattack ...

Tories spending $4M more on veterans ads to counter 'misinformation': Fantino

Veterans Affairs is spending an additional $4 million on advertising this year — including television spots throughout the NHL playoffs ... The TV ads emphasize efforts to move soldiers smoothly from military to civilian life....

Liberal critic Frank Valeriote pointed out that this year's federal budget increased transition services for veterans by only $11,000.
"I'm wondering how you can justify for us your department spending more on advertising — a $4-million increase in advertising — and less on the actual programs themselves," Valeriote said. 

Fantino defended the increase, saying the ads are an attempt by the government to communicate directly with veterans and dispel what he called "misinformation" surrounding the treatment of ex-soldiers.
"We are faced with the bantering that goes back and forth about what is or isn't (covered); what facts and non-facts are; and also the fear mongering."  

Jenifer Migneault, whose husband Claude Rainville was diagnosed with PTSD eight years ago, has tried to raise awareness, but she said she can't get Conservative MPs — including Fantino's parliamentary secretary, Parm Gill — to return her calls.

"Please just use that money to talk to us," she said. 

Last year Veterans Affairs spent $88,194 to promote tweets for Remembrance Day and $15,500 on advertising services to veterans.

You can watch Fantino running away from Migneault today here.
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Social contracts - they're so-o-o last century

According to lawyers for the Attorney General fighting the class-action suit filed by six Afghanistan veterans, the social contract Prime Minister Robert Borden promised to Canadian Armed Forces and their families just before Canadian soldiers went off to Vimy Ridge in 1917 was just a politician talking so they are under no particular obligation to honour it.

Good to know.

Federal government response, BC Supreme Court, Page 17  :

"The defendant further pleads that at no time in Canada's history has any alleged "social contract" or "social covenant" having the attributes pleaded by the plaintiffs been given effect in any statute, regulation, or as a constitutional principle, written or unwritten.   

The terms "social covenant" and "social contract" have been used at various points in time by a number of different groups and in a number of different ways to describe the relationship between members of the CAF and the government and people of Canada. No set of principles exist that can be stated with certainty, understood with clarity, or accepted with unanimity among the people of Canada to define a "social contract" or "social covenant" as alleged."

Really? I could give you a really simple one that everyone in Canada except you agrees on even without Borden. When you send soldiers off to risk life and limb in some foreign Great Game adventure, you better have a really good fucking plan in place for them when they get home.

"The defendant pleads that the statements made by Sir Robert Borden and the coalition government in 1917 were political speeches that reflected the policy positions of the government at the time and were never imended to create a contract or covenant."

Bastards.

This is their third argument against the vets. 

The first one sought to dismiss the case on the grounds the vets had no hope of winning it. The second one argued that court was not the appropriate venue for members of the Canadian Armed Forces to express their concerns - which pretty much exudes the very definition of a special social covenant in itself.

Next time Steve is in the mood for a military adventure, perhaps he should consider hiring mercs or contractors from a Canadian firm like GardaWorld instead. In Canada we think of Garda as a Brinks security trucks competitor that also does airport screening but you may recall the first daylight abduction and eventual assassination of four British ex-servicemen at gunpoint in Baghdad in 2007 were employees of GardaWorld, "one of the world’s largest privately owned security companies."

GardaWorld's website boasts security operations on every continent : Afghanistan, Basra, Colombia, Haiti, Kurdistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Baghdad, Argentina - pretty much anywhere guns are required to protect corporate interests.

Derek Burney is Chairman of GardaWorld's International Advisory Board. 
Brian Mulroney's chief of staff, head of the Steve's government 'transition team' in 2006 and a member of the Afghan panel which advised extending the Afghan mission, Burney worries about Canadian "aversion to war-fighting". 

Advisory Board members assist GardaWorld in developing key relationships among corporate executives, industry associations and appropriate government agencies.

Another GardaWorld luminary is Daniel Menard, former Canadian head of the NATO-led Task Force Kandahar in 2009, during which time he had 2800 Canadian troops under his command before he was court-marshalled in 2010 for canoodling. He returned to Afghanistan the following year as head of Afghan operations for GardaWorld after the Department of National Defence paid $40,000 to relocate Menard to his new job headquarters. There was also that bit of unpleasantness about him being jailed in Afghanistan for alleged gun smuggling on behalf of GardaWorld earlier this year but that's all straightened out now. 

A Freedom of Information request to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the amounts the FCO spent hiring "Private Military and Security Companies from Nov. 2010 to March 2012" reveals they paid GardaWorld £56,000,000 for security services in Iraq from Dec. 09 to Jan. 13 and £1,740,000 from Feb. 11 to July 11 for the same in Libya.

Now that's a contract the Cons can respect.

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Cons pay manufacturers to move to China

From Blacklocks, via The Jurist, a tale of taxpayer-funded government-facilitated corporate welfare off-shoring :

"Cabinet paid millions of dollars in grants to Canadian manufacturers to move production and jobs overseas in the name of foreign aid. 

Newly-released accounts show the program paid cash grants totalling $3,852,927 to manufacturers to move production out of Canada, including $450,000 paid to one applicant that told Fantino’s department it had to “establish ourselves in Mexico so we can offer lower costs.” "

But most went to factories in China - automotive parts, rugs, fencing, furniture, plastics recycling .... over a two year period in 2006-7.

Because clearly China, the world's 2nd largest economy by GDP and we're #11, btw , is sorely in need of our "foreign aid" and "manufacturing jobs".

"International Cooperation Minister Julian Fantino ... had not heard of the grant scheme called the Industrial Cooperation Program."

Ah well, that's because you guys rebranded it in 2010 as the Investment Cooperation Program  or CIDA-INC.  According to the DFAIT website : 

• Managed by DFAIT, the Investment Cooperation Program, formerly the Industrial Cooperation Program, supports developmentally beneficial direct investments by Canadian firms in developing countries.

But only Canadian firms with at least $2M in annual revenues were eligible for 50- 75% taxpayer coverage of up to $1M of their costs in assessing and moving a project abroad.

Happily touted as a Canadian success story as late as March 2012 by the previous International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda, CIDA-INC was the object of damning internal audits until it was finally shut down on May 18 2012 by Trade Minister Ed Fast in a statement citing "irregularities" and "taking immediate action to recover taxpayer funds that had supported these particular INC projects" and promising a "fundamental review of the program, expected later in 2012-13".

Terrific. 

What about those intervening six years of sending Canadian manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere - you know, the period from 2006-7 covered by Blacklocks and up to when you shut it down last year?

And does your newly branded "foreign aid" model of "doubling down on partnership with the business sector" and "vigorously promoting and defending Canadian interests and values abroad” benefit anyone here in Canada? Outside of those in the business sector looking for new avenues of taxpayer money to send Canadian manufacturing jobs overseas of course.

5 pm Update : I see SNC Lavalin had a multi-year contract with the Investment Cooperation Program, dated 2011-11-04.

"The purpose of this Investment Cooperation Program (INC) contribution agreement is to support responsible, developmentally beneficial, private sector engagement in developing countries leading to sustained economic growth and poverty reduction."

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RoboCon Republican edition update

Been just over a month now since I posted this picture of Front Porch Strategies President Matthew Parker sitting in the Vaughn 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 during the last federal election.
The FPS caption reads : "Matt lending a hand for MP Fantino here in the greater Toronto area (GTA)"

I also mentioned a FPS tweet about their door knocking for Con MP Rick Dykstra plus some of FPS's other Republican pet causes.

Dave over at the Beav was bothered by this. Exactly how, he asked, did the Ohio boys' adventures in the Canadian election square with the Canada Elections Act prohibition on Non-interference by Foreigners?  

331. No person who does not reside in Canada shall, during an election period, in any way induce electors to vote or refrain from voting or vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate unless the person is(a) a Canadian citizen; or(b) a permanent resident within the meaning of subsection 2(1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Good question. I fired off a letter to Elections Canada but did not receive a reply. Well, they have been pretty busy.

Two weeks later, student journos at Brock Press were wondering the same thing and Sun journalist Stephen Lautens had a go at unpacking the EC's language on violating the Elections Act. 

Four days ago : Vancouver Observer, April 9 :
Tories may have broken 2011 election rules with US Republican campaigners in Ontario
including this response from Front Porch Strategies' "Canadian liaison": 

“They were in Ontario for a day and a half (in April), for the purpose of acquiring new clients,” political consultant Jim Ross told the Vancouver Observer. “They knocked on doors for roughly an hour with Rick [Dykstra], traditional canvassing to identify support. While waiting for a delayed meeting they made roughly 30 minutes worth of phone calls for Minister Fantino, again to identify support.
“Other than teleforums, brief incidental volunteerism as described above over the course of a day and a half that was mostly spent trying to acquire new clients. There was no other involvement.”

Good for VO for getting a response from FPS 'Canadian liaison Jim Ross' but I think they might have mentioned that he was also Con MP Rick Dykstra's campaign manager in the last election before he made the jump to FPS. in November 2011. FPS is not alleged to have committed any improper use of live calls or robocalls.

Today Kady is on it. After also failing to get an answer from EC, she slogged through "through every election-related bill introduced in Parliament since 1997...in hopes of coming across even a parenthetical reference to S331 that would shed light on its original purpose" and comes up thwarted as to what the MPs who drafted and amended it actually intended. 

In other cross-border telemarketing news, FPS was awarded a 'Pollie' -  the US political PR industry's Oscar - in Texas this month for their telemarketing success in getting the National Holocaust Monument bill through Canadian parliament.
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RoboConduct unbecoming

Shorter CBC : They call you up and ask what party you support; if not a Con supporter, you get a frowny face entered next to your name on the Cons voter identification system CIMS, and a callback later advising you your polling station has been moved to wherever - a mall, a real estate office. 
CBC's Terry Milewski tracked this in 31 ridings clear across the country.

Former Tory MP Inky Mark, maverick that he is, confirmed how the smileyface/frownyface CIMS system works, adding that he opted out of it because :

"the party had control over the entire, nationwide database. An MP and his staff were at the mercy of headquarters, Mark says, because they had the power to allocate and revoke database passwords." 

Unfuckablewith discovers CISM is "designed explicitly" to be integrated with "a feature to perform robocalls on a nationwide level". He has a working draft up on security flaws in the CIMS and LiberaList, with the most interesting bits so far redacted while he thinks them through : 

"A shocking amount of personal information is stored on these servers and can be recalled for use in individual campaign offices and on Parliament Hill via a secure VPN connection to the main Conservative Party servers.  While this leaves the system vulnerable to [redacted], the greater issue is that in the process of establishing this VPN connection, the data [redacted], and thus, outside of the control of Canadian authorities." 

"the data ___ and thus outside the control of Canadian authorities" ???
The data is what?  Stored in the fridge? Stored on servers at some US voter- ID/townhall company? 

Which reminds me : Con MP Julian Fantino, Associate Minister of F-35s, is outraged, outraged, that three former board members of his Guelph electoral district association have alleged a second undeclared campaign bank account of $300,000+, which Elections Canada does not allow :

Fantino : 

“I am grateful to the people of Vaughan for their support of our honorable and ethical election campaigns. The disgraceful accusations from these individuals is false.”

Fantino’s fundraising co-chair Sam Ciccolini immediately replaced former board member Richard Lorello as a Director after Lorello quit over the alleged secret account. Ciccolini is Director and Chair of the Audit Committee at Italian Canadian Savings & Credit Union, home of the same alleged secret account :

"There was no wrongdoing, there was no impropriety, and there were zero allegations of wrongdoing during the elections. They talk about a second account; there was no second account," said Ciccolini on Tuesday."

*cough* Michael Harris, iPolitics :

"Then there is this evidence of a second account from Sam Ciccolini himself. In an e-mail dated April 29, 2011 to former Director Richard Lorello and Frank Domenichiello, who was president of the Vaughan Conservative EDA, Mr. Ciccolini stated that, “The reason we still have the second account still open is that Mirella [Chiapetta][secretary to Julian Fantino] felt that it would be best to have the TD bank account as they have been good to us and there were some transactions – checks that have yet to clear and at some point we would close it. I do not remember any vote taken on it, could be wrong….”  These comments were made on April 29 during the General Election, and according to Mr. Ciccolini, there still seem to be two bank accounts."

404 Systems Error published the docs a couple of weeks ago.

As noted in the CBC clip above, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand announced today that he now has "over 700 Canadians from across the country" who allege "specific circumstances" of fraudulent or improper calls and he would be pleased to appear before committee (that would be PROC) to discuss it. 

Ha! PROC going in camera in 3  ... 2 ... 1

One a lighter note, among all the 'RoboCon is no-biggie' editorials flourishing in our media comes this amusing one from a former Con candidate: The great robocall scandal is a fraud.

Spending more than a minute talking to a voter is a Liberal plot, she says, all this fuss about fraud is just Pierre Poutine, and even if it wasn't :

"Out of a list of say, 1,000 phone numbers of supposed opposition supporters that you would get off a voters’ list, probably half are wrong."  

So again - no biggie. Apart from the fact voters' lists don't have phone numbers.
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h/t to Anon in comments for Vaughan Weekly link

Update - really rolling now :  Dave, RossK, and Dawg dig deeper : 
Dave : Toto I don't think we're in Guelph anymore and More pretty dots More evidence
RossK : Real/Not Robocall ... The number on Lori Bruce's phone
Dr. Dawg : Roboscam : Abuse of constituents.
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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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RoboConfetti : WWMD?

Right now the Cons are "reviewing tapes of every call made by the Responsive Marketing Group call centre in Thunder Bay in the last election before Elections Canada investigators arrive next week," reports CBC, before adding the Cons deny it.

Presumably Steve would be in search of exactly where to place his own 18 minutes of tape hiss or RoboConfetti.

So after four decades of simply adding the suffix -gate onto the scandal du jour - from cleavagegate to gazebogate - Canada finally gets to watch Steve watergate the question : What Would Milhous Do?

On Tuesday Steve pledged to get to the bottom of the lone, single, solitary, isolated, rogue robocalling incident, but by yesterday - with thousands of voters reporting electoral fraud clear across the country - their new story is that it's all just a case of "Liberal and NDP sleaze", a giant RoboConspiracy!

AssMin of National Defence Julian Fantino, who is aghast his name cropped up in the Guelph burner phone logs search warrants at Item #39, is going with the "smear campaign" story, while in-and-out scandal alumnus and the Cons' campaign chair emeritus during the last election, Senator Doug Finley, nails the argument for Con Party innocence : 

“This is the whole point : the central campaign does not know because they had absolutely no idea it was happening.”

Thank you, Senator Finley, for that moment of lucid RoboContemplation.

Speaking of in-and-out shenanigans, here's the new robocalling edition. Quebec Con candidate Bertin-Denis told Le Devoir and two radio stations yesterday that $15,000.01 was funneled into his riding and right back out again in the last election, ostensibly for local RMG poll research that he never saw.
Really? A Con candidate said that?
Oh wait, he has since mysteriously recanted that accusation - a RoboConcaving.

More RoboContenders. Last Friday, after being fingered by Sun TV for complicity in the Guelph robocall shenanigans, Con parliamentary staffer Michael Sona quit his job. Two days later DefMin Airshow MacKay announced "the party doesn't need to investigate any further" because : 

"I think they've identified the individual that was involved in this," he said.

But I guess the God of the Rescue Helicopter Taxi Service wasn't listening because by Tuesday Mr. Sona was publicly protesting his innocence and expressing his hope the real guilty party would be caught. 

In QP yesterday the Cons sent out Mr Creosote to accuse the Libs of sabotaging their own ridings by using a North Dakota automated calling firm :

“These calls were made on behalf of the Liberal party,” Del Mastro said.
“I see that they used this company quite a bit. It seems that they were robodialing quite a number of people on behalf of the Liberal party.”

Unfortunately for Mr Creosote, it was immediately pointed out he had confused the name of a US firm with the completely unrelated but identically named Canadian one used by the Libs, but no matter : Corporate Television Vehicle ran with it anyway.  RoboComplicity.

Still, you can see why the Cons instinctively turned to their the-Libs-do-it-too defence. 
However clownish, it was a pre-emptive strike to protect their robodialing ReformAlliance/Mike Harris/Republican buddies at RMG, which worked on 97 individual Conservative candidate campaigns in the last election after a 2010 merger with Xentel under IMarketing Solutions Group :

Conservative call centre company has checkered legal history in U.S. 

The company that handles the Conservative Party’s computerized voter-identification system and powerful fundraising machine has a checkered legal history in the United States, where it operates call centres that have repeatedly been the subject of lawsuits and complaints over its telemarketing practices.

Longtime key Conservative organizer Stewart Braddick is listed on RMG’s web site as director of the company’s Focused Direct Response program. Braddick is also listed as director, Focused Direct Response, for the American company Target Outreach Inc., which works for Republican campaigns.

The Cons think they are playing us for suckers. They think we're all rubes, that we won't get it, that we'll put up with their imported Rovian Republican tactics. So - are we rubes? Are we going to let them get away with it this time?

Last word on this goes to Nixon Watergate dirty trickster Donald Segretti, yesterday.
His assessment? : "Worse than Watergate."

“We never tried to do something that would, at the end of the day, take away the right of somebody to vote,” he said. “That goes beyond a prank. It’s just wrong, on many levels.” 

Their dirty tricks campaign, Mr. Segretti claimed, was designed to disrupt the Democrats, not hoodwink voters."

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