RoboCon : Skippy vs Lenny

"What happens," asked the Ottawa Citizen, "when a “Pierre Poutine”-style robo-caller, like the automated system that sent Guelph voters to the wrong polls in 2011, meets a robo-responder like Lenny?"

"Every minute Pierre Poilievre's telemarketer spent with our recording was time she wasn't bothering someone at dinner."

And we thank you for that, Alberta software developer Mango 

The telemarketer calling here on behalf of the re-election campaign of Pierre Poilievre, champion of the Fair Elections Act, told "Lenny" she was from "Campaign Support". 

Guelph-based "Campaign Support" made calls into Liberal MP Irwin Cotler's Mont-Royal riding in the fall of 2011 suggesting that Cotler may be resigning so how's about you support our Steve in a non-existent upcoming by-election? 

From Campaign Research principal and Conservative strategist Nick Kouvalis' affidavit : 

“The calls were conducted under the business name of Campaign Support, which is a business name registered by Campaign Research for the specific purpose of conducting telemarketing activities.”

Cotler was not of course considering resigning at the time and kicked up a stink about the dirty tricks telephone campaign in the HoC. 
House Speaker and $8198.79 Campaign Research client Andrew Scheer dismissed the campaign as "reprehensible" but not actionable, thereby preserving Campaign Research's other founding principal - Richard Ciano, president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario - from being dragged into any committee investigation of his firm's actions.  

Kouvalis, also former campaign chair and chief of staff to Mayor Rob Ford, promptly went on CTV to explain that his job is "ending Liberal politicians' careers". 

Campaign Support was soon spun off Campaign Research as a separate legal entity headed up by Kouvalis and Greg Dunlop. Dunlop left Kouvalis's firm two months ago after four years - if LinkedIn can be believed - and now heads up his own telemarketing firm iFusion Research.
iFusion also used to be a shell company for Campaign Research 

Here's Steve in 2011 campaigning in Irwin Cotler's Mont-Royal riding on behalf of Con hopeful Saulie Zajdel, presumed beneficiary of the later Campaign Research phone campaign. 
Zajdel lost to Cotler and was put on the payroll in Heritage Minister James Moore's office as a shadow MP doing ethnic outreach while awaiting a new shot at the riding.

Zajdel pled guilty this year to charges of corruption and breach of trust in two real estate deals involving tens of thousands of dollars in bribes.

Conservative Party spokesey Fred DeLorey expressed surprise at Zajdel's arrest in June 2013, saying none of this had come out in their screening of Zajdel. 
A few months earlier, DeLorey was also surprised when McMaher busted the Conservative Party and RackNine shell company Chase Research for being behind the Republican-style push-poll robocalls about changes to Saskatchewan's electoral riding boundaries. 

And so the story has turned inevitably back to Con robo/live calls ... which is where I think we came in... 
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Elections Canada throws in the towel

It would be unseemly for a sitting government under the cloud of elections fraud and voter suppression in 200 ridings across the country to ram through the Fair Elections Act mainly benefitting themselves, so today Elections Canada Commissioner Yves Côté obligingly threw in the towel on any further investigation into what Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley called :

"an orchestrated effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election campaign by a person or persons with access to the CIMS database" 

Commissioner Côté :

"... it is not sufficient to find evidence of misdirection of an elector. There must be evidence of intention to prevent the elector from voting, or by some pretence or contrivance, to induce the elector to vote or not vote for a particular candidate.

"No such evidence was found."

Skippy was pleased though : 

"Pierre Poilievre, the minister for democratic reform, said the report proves the Conservative party ran "an honest and ethical campaign" in 2011.

"We followed all of the rules and we won fair and square," Poilievre said Thursday before delivering a speech on controversial new electoral reforms proposed for the 2015 vote.

"That is what we've been saying all along and those who've been making baseless smears ever since have been once again proven wrong in the process."

Not that the Office of the Commissioner has shown much previous inclination to pursue evidence of election fraud in the last election, but his report shows he was hampered by "investigative challenges", due to "outright refusal to cooperate" on the part of witnesses. 
Supreme Court Justice Louise Charron : "Some telemarketers retained by political parties simply refused to co-operate."
Unsurprisingly, the new Fair Elections Act declines to give him the power to compel witnesses.

So here is an example of what is presumably now legal in our new 'buyer beware' elections - a "misdirection of an elector" from Election Day in 2011, left on the phone of a librarian :



I'll save you the bother of looking up that phone number - it's Pierre Poutine.

Saskboy did an excellent rundown on the issues this morning and -updated- RossK reminds this is all just a redo of EC declining to pursue election fraud in SGI in 2008.
Back with more in a bit.

Update : So what exactly happened between an EC spokesey giving a completely bullshit reason 3 weeks ago for why their report would not be released until after the next election and its release today? 
Is it a different report altogether? 

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.”

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Hey, Skippy, this is how it's done.

A picture of voters lining up for 6 hours to vote in the 2012 election in Democrat-heavy Miami-Dade Florida is accompanied by the caption :
"New rule prohibits voters in Miami-Dade from using the restroom, no matter how long the line."      h/t Kev

Apparently the decision to close all restrooms was a direct response to a request from a disability rights lawyer regarding the accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities. 

So now people with disabilities are not being especially singled out for discrimination and everyone is free to choose between voting and peeing. 

Well it's just crazy old Florida, right?  Couldn't happen here.

The thing I found interesting was - when did people stop being outraged about lining up for six hours to vote?
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P.S. Dear Google : Having typed the terms "Miami-Dade" and "restroom" into your search box, I have now received all the advertising I will ever require for PortaPotty and Depends. Thanks.
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RoboCon Poilievre

"Thank you for your co-operation. Goodnight."

Harper's Perps with Perks #10

Welcome Dimitri Soudas, Steve's one time comm. director, campaign tactician, faithful dog since their Reform days, and as of yesterday, Steve's former executive director of the Con Party of Canada after only four months on the job for using his exec position and the Cons CIMS database to try to shoehorn his fiancée Con MP Eve Adams onto an unwilling riding association. Then when the 10-year Con regional director Wally Butts objected to Eve-meddling, Soudas fired him.

Ironically, Soudas had to be shoehorned into the Con Party exec job himself by Steve, "over the protests of cabinet ministers and national council members." 

Seems like only yesterday that Soudas was hiding out for days from HoC bailiffs looking to serve him with a summons to appear before the Ethics Committee regarding allegations of "systematic political interference". Sadly, his eventual appearance before that committee in 2010 was aborted by a fire alarm going off just as he was scheduled to appear.

This time there was no fire alarm. It all happened so quickly on Sunday there wasn't even time for Pierre Poilievre to go on national tv to explain to us that Soudas was actually a hero for saving taxpayer money by personally running Eve's campaign out of the CPC exec director's office ... or something ... like he did after Nigel Wright's firing/departure.

Now it's true that unlike other Perps, Soudas hasn't been accused or convicted of bribing anyone or defrauding the government of millions of dollars or covering up election fraud or fiddling Senate audits or campaign expenses, but we can't have party honchos foisting girlfriends on unwilling local riding associations and firing people who object. 

On Saturday Soudas' twitter feed featured a picture :  "A Soviet spy laughs at his executioner in Finland, 1942."    Hmm ...  He'll be back inside the ever diminishing cadre of Steve's personal firewall soon enough I'll bet. 


So this tenth Parade of Perps with Perks marks the one year anniversary since I started collecting them. 
You can too - Special anniversary boxed set.  OK, that didn't work so here's the regular bargain bin boxed set.
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"F-bomb shows lack of judgement"

says the PMO : "This is yet another example of Justin Trudeau's lack of judgement."

         Well alrighty then.

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Elections Canada youth vote vids vs ... puffin poop?

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Noon Update : Hill Times : "Elections Canada says a video ad the Conservative government cited as the type of advertising campaign it wants to prohibit the elections agency from using under the proposed new election law was never actually aired." 
The ad was uploaded to their own Youtube account in 2008 by FluoHill, the art collective that produced it.
Mayrand cancelled it before it aired in 2007. Back to original post :

This Elections Canada video promoting the youth vote is exactly what the Cons intend their Fair Elections Act to put a stop to, an anonymous gov official told The Hill Times, providing them with a link to the video. 

As you can see, it shows Xs representing ballot votes moving from a rock concert to a recycling symbol and industry emitters and ends in a quiet forest : "Vote. Shape your world."
Interesting that the Cons would cop to admitting that a vid loosely advocating that youth exercise their vote for a cleaner environment in a better world is not in the Cons' own best interests.

" ... the official reiterated the government’s position that political parties and candidates, not Elections Canada, would be responsible for increasing voter turnout under Bill C-23."

Right. So just for comparison, here is an example of the kind of "political parties and candidates" outreach the anon gov official is presumably referring to : the Con Party puffin poop election ad that came out at the same time as the EC vid [that never aired]:

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Galvanizing stuff really, except that six year olds don't have the vote. 

A spokesperson for Minister of State for Democratic Reform Pierre Poilievre (Nepean Carleton, Ont.) said the government is addressing the content of Elections Canada voting promotion campaigns.

I'll bet. Can't be offending the industry dudes who wrote the Environmental Assessment Act 2012 for them. 

And I'm way past fed up with this Con tripe about shutting down EC's ads promoting the youth vote - on the grounds they are not successful because the youth vote hasn't increased -in favour of having individual political parties do it instead. Party ads targeting youth have run concurrently with the EC ads so using the Cons' correlation error logic, they've already proven they don't work either.

You know what does keep the youth vote from dropping off the electoral map entirely? Vouching. The next election will presumably fall in October 2015. How many students who just moved to a new campus the previous month are going to have voter ID with a current address for that riding one month after they arrive in it?

Remember that scene in Annie Hall when some pompous pontificating blowhard in a theatre line-up is grandly interpreting Marshall McLuhan and McLuhan shows up and says he's full of shit? If only life was like that, says Woody Allen.
Well that happened to the Cons this week when Harry Neufeld, the expert they've been heavily citing in support of their bid to kill off vouching and voter info cards due to widespread voter fraud, showed up and said they were full of shit. 
Neufeld's argument in favour of actually widening the use of vouching and on the dangers of the Cons' new voter suppression bill here.

Poilievre of course just shrugged it off. He likes his own pompous pontificating blowhard interpretation of Neufeld's report better than he likes Neufeld's.

The Cons don't even care any more that the Fair Elections Act has been revealed to be a ploy to suppress the vote. They're just counting on Team Con showing up to vote and as many other voters as possible becoming too disgusted to bother.
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The Fair Elections Action Plan

What problems are the Conservatives really trying to solve with bizarre Fair Elections Act?wrote Andrew Coyne in an excellent column two days ago.
I'd like to pillage that model and expand on it a bit.

Problem : Investigation into election fraud in 2011 Election 33 months ago being rushed along at dangerous breakneck speeds.

Fair Elections Act Solutions : 
1) Deny Elections Commissioner authority to compel documents and witness testimony (with individual authorizations from the courts)  - a power nonetheless already enjoyed by elections chiefs in most provinces : Yukon, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. 
Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand on CBC's The House yesterday :

"Many people refused to talk to the commissioner even if they were not suspects. I'm afraid to say this is happening more and more in files investigated by the commissioner."

2) The Del Mastro clause. Require Elections Canada to inform subjects they are being investigated while preventing EC from telling the public about it.


Problem : Public trust in fair elections in Canada at all time high.

Fair Elections Act solutions : 
1) Governing party rewrites election law while being investigating by Elections Canada for election fraud.
2) Don't consult with Chief Electoral Officer before tabling major overhaul of Elections Act.
3) Deny Elections Canada commissioner access to parties' and riding associations' financial documentation to support claims made on their financial returns. 
4) Forbid Elections Canada from communicating with public. Mayrand :

"Most reports and research will no longer be public - not only not available but probably won't be done at all. 

I can no longer speak about democracy in this country except where and when to vote. I am not aware of any other electoral bodies around the world who cannot talk about democracy."   

then cut off debate about the bill in the HoC, sending it to PROC with its 6 out of 10 Con committee members.

Problem :  Serially violate election law successfully but then lose court battles to election watchdog.

Solution : Neutralize watchdog by moving entire elections enforcement apparatus from current independent office answerable to Parliament to inside Peter MacKay's ministry.

Problem : Too many people vote - 61% in the last federal election - especially aboriginals, young people, old people, and poor people.

Solutions : 
1) Forbid Elections Canada from encouraging voting, including terminating the mock elections model currently being taught to 300,000 Canadian students.
2) Voter suppression. Kill off vouching *** - the provision allowing an elector to prove their residence in a riding by having someone they know in the riding who is registered to vote sign a legal document.  Marc Mayrand on CBC's The House again :

"Every Canadian has the right to vote. That's a universal franchise. Vouching is meant to assist people facing challenges. We estimate that in the last election a little over 100,000 electors required vouching before they could cast a ballot. What will happen to those electors in the next election?"

Neufeld Compliance Review, commissioned by Elections Canada :

"The audit estimated that “irregularities” occurred for 1.3 percent of all cases of Election Day voting during the 2011 federal election."

and of those irregularities, "0.4 percent of ballots had irregularities due to vouching - of which the vast majority were cases of misfiled paperwork, not misidentified voters."

Problem : Parties not spending enough time and money on elections 

Solutions : 

1) Bump allowable individual contribution limit up by 25% with yearly increases to follow.

2) Bump party spending limits directed at new members up by 5% ($22-million).

3) Permit parties to exclude from declaring as a campaign expenditure any communication with electors as long as it's done with an elector that has contributed before in the previous five years and that it includes a call for additional money.

Mayrand : "20 to 25% of total expenditure goes to GOTV"

Problem : Incumbents don't have enough advantage over new candidates.

Solution :  See Solution #3 above.

Problem : Not enough Pierre Poutine robocalls are being made during elections.

Solution : Ditto

Problem : Not allowed to campaign on Election Day 

Solution : Ditto

***On a personal note, I have often relied on vouching in order to vote in my riding, despite having voted in every election I have been in the country for since I came of age to do so. I have a voter ID card, a Canadian passport, a Canadian citizenship card, a BC health care card, and a deed to the house in my riding which has been my only residence for decades. None of these have my address on them, including, according to Elections Canada, the deed to my house because it lists a rural RR# address they no longer recognize. I pay all my bills online or through my credit union. 

Just get a driver's licence says the harried DRO every time. 

Why? says I. Driving a car is not a requirement of citizenship.

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Council of Canadians Phone Your MP Against Unfair Elections Act campaign is today!

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h/t Beijing York for Mayrand interview - highly recommended. 

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It's a small small small Con world

Top Conservative party operative says she didn’t know of plan to cover Duffy expense tab, reads the headline. 

Nor did she speak to Nigel Wright or Senator Gerstein about it apparently.

That top party op is Pierre Poilievre's ex, Jenni Byrne - Conservative Party director of political operations, national Con campaign director during the 2011 election, and Steve's once and perhaps future director of issues management in the PMO.

But then when you read the article, it turns out to be the Con Party spokesy Fred DeLorey answering all the reporter's questions on Byrne's behalf by email. Nothing directly from Byrne and no follow-up questions.

Mr. DeLorey, you may recall, also initially denied that the Cons were behind the January robocall pushpoll in Saskatchewan regarding electoral riding redistricting, while Poilievre, who once founded a robocall company of his own, said they were done by Chase Research. Eventually Chase Research was outed for having done the calls on behalf of the Cons as an affiliate of RackNine, the company used by Pierre Poutine to make the election fraud robocalls in Guelph.

For her part, Jenni Byrne denied the Cons had anything to do with the Guelph robocall election fraud, issuing an email to say that the Cons ran "a clean and ethical campaign", notwithstanding they had to fire Patrick Muttart from their election war room after he sent Jenni Byrne's close friend SunNews CEO Kory Teneycke that bogus Iggy war photo.

But back to the article. 
Commenters below it point out the obvious - the unlikelihood of the Con Party director of political operations knowing nothing about a PMO/Con Party plan to bribe a sitting senator causing them headaches for his silence. 
Three comments are the angry rebuttals of one commenter, William Donaldson.  
While he has every right to his defence of Ms Byrne, is this the same Bill Donaldson who was Pierre Poilievre's first campaign manager and Nepean-Carleton EDA president back in 2006 under Manager of Political Operations for Ontario, Jenni Byrne? [fourth link down marked DOC]

It's a small small small Con world. 
Pull on any Duffy/Senate/election fraud thread and the same names come up over and over again.
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Pierre Poilievre, Minister for Democratic Reform

Who really thinks Skippy's appointment to Democratic Reform is about democratic reform? Ha!

Poilievre's appointment is about a coming battle over election reform and robocalls. It's been sixteen months since the Cons promised to bring in a bill addressing Mayrand's proposed reforms to prevent a repeat of last election's robocon fiasco.  The Cons have yet to consult Mayrand on it and he's been making public noises about their obstruction of his election fraud investigation as well.
Meanwhile the 2014 spring deadline past which reforms can't be implemented in time for the next election approaches...

Skippy's new job will be to attack Mayrand.
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Thursday July8th Update :
 Glen McGregor : Poilievre brings robocalls expertise to new job

2014 Update : You have to admit I called it.
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The root causes of not committing sociology

"This is not a time to commit sociology," said Stephen Harper, asked when is the right time to study the root causes of acts of terrorism like those by the alleged Trainspotter Two.

"The root causes of terrorism is terrorists", said Pierre Poilievre three times on CBC Power and Politics yesterday.

Politics and its Discontents has clips up of both Steve and Poilieve's statements.

Neither statement has anything to do with terrorism at all of course; they were just manufacturing an attack on Justin Trudeau's "root causes" response to a terrorism question in his interview with Peter Mansbridge.

In 2004 journalist and author Ron Suskind related the following conversation with a senior Goerge W Bush advisor :

"The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' 

I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' 

So, how are y'all enjoying the 'other new realities' Steve has created in his 39% empire ?

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Penashue's political dodgeball

I thought Con MP Pierre Poilievre held the dodgeball record for giving the same identical non-answer seven times to seven different questions put to him by a single reporter in November 2012, but three months earlier now-former Labrador Con MP and cabinet minister Peter Penashue had already swallowed the ballgag whole at eight identical non-answers to eight different questions from a reporter about his election spending violations. Eight "working closely with Elections Canada"s in just over 2 minutes.

If this government were any more transparent, they'd be completely invisible but for the scandals.

h/t Diamondwalker at Pogge's for Penashue vid.

Monday Update : Kady reports Penashue has already hit the campaign trail for his election do-over even though the byelection hasn't been called yet. Well that's handy - until it is officially called, Penashue's pre-writ electioneering won't count as a campaign expense. Also noted by Kady, Penashue's re-election website went up 4 days before he resigned.

This could be the start of a whole new election strategy for the Cons - spend whatever you like in an election, accept corporate donations and change the paperwork later, whatever. Then when you get caught, resign and begin again outside the spending limits time period, secure in the knowledge the Con Party will repay your illegal debts.
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Poilievre : "No one takes Ethics Committee summons seriously"

"At the end of the day, [Ethics Committee Chair]Paul Szabo and this kangaroo court have no credibility and no one takes their summons seriously."

So said Con MP Pierre Poilievre in August two years ago when he was only an associate member of the Ethics Committee.
Since becoming fully-fledged, and also Parliamentary Secretary to Steve, his job there is apparently to pipe up "Point of order" every few minutes like some demented Energizer bunny until the Chair finally cuts his mike.

Lib Wayne Easter's spirited response to John Baird's surprise appearance before the Ethics Committee on Tuesday in place of Dimitri Soudas as scheduled has already been well covered.

Chair Paul Szabo first let Baird speak, setting off an hour of angry motions to dismiss the usurper - interspersed with Poilievre's points! of! order! - versus the Con committee members dutifully bent over their brand new talking points on "ministerial responsibility for their staffers", carefully read aloud heads bowed down, when it was their turn to speak.
Eventually Szabo broke a tie vote over whether or not to let Baird stay and booted him out.

Well sure. After all, as Minister of Transport, Baird is not Soudas' boss and would not be able to answer any of the questions the committee was intending to ask Soudas, despite Baird's sinister hand waving about something he called "collective responsibility".
And as Bloc Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac pointed out, the last time a minister appeared before the committee on behalf of one of their staffers - that would be Christian Paradis, Minister of Asbestos - his idea of "ministerial responsibility" was to just blame the staffer.

Bloc Carole Freeman brought up committees' right to subpoena witnesses, reminding that Soudas

"is an ordinary citizen and should be treated as such. A house leader does not have the power to change existing rules simply by standing up in the House and making a statement."

But then there was another tie vote following that I haven't seen discussed.

What to do about the many named bureaucrats already scheduled to appear in the few weeks remaining before the committee last meets on June 22? And what to do if their ministers wanted to show up in their staffers' place?

Chair Szabo asked for a motion to give him authority to summon the witnesses already scheduled to appear ... if necessary ... even if it meant allowing those witnesses' ministers to come as substitutes in their stead.

A pretty weak motion but as he explained, they were waiting on an expected future ruling by the Speaker on such witness substitutions. And he was only asking for either the scheduled witness or his/her minister to appear if that's what was offered.

OK so it was an astoundingly weak motion to exercise parliamentary committees' right to summon witnesses, but you know what? That vote was tied up 5 to 5 - the Cons vs everyone else - and only passed because the Chair broke it by voting in favour.

Pierre Poilievre suggested what he called "a friendly amendment" to solve the impasse over the next scheduled witness :

"just replace the name of the political staffer in question with the name of the Minister."

Your moment of hideous irony : The work currently before the committee is looking into "allegations of systematic political interference by ministers' offices to block, delay, or obstruct the release of information to the public regarding the operation of government departments".
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And they're back!

With pledges of renewed civility in the House.

"I agree that decorum has gone down somewhat,"admitted previous Speaker of the House Peter Millikin, in what must be described as an underunderstatement.

"We want to be very serious," pledged Jay Hill, the new Conservative House leader who took over the position from Peter Van Loan, famous, along with his compatriot Pierre Poilievre, for his fondness for using sign language in the House.

Gone will be the parliamentary practise of responding to the opposing party's arguments by making an L on one's forehead with thumb and forefinger. Never again will Con MP Royal Galipeau, himself a contender for Speaker of the House up till an hour ago, storm the Liberal backbenches to grapple with Lib MP David McGuinty.

Personally I think this proposed civility thing is a big mistake. Arm the buggers, I say! Break out the parliamentary catapaults! Build a moat in the aisle and fill it with green jello. I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! Fetchez la vache!

Picture ripped off from Ottawonk