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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Duffy, Sona, Finley, and Lunn

Three live accounts from CBC, CTV, and the Ottawa Citizen covering Mike Duffy's allegations under oath at his trial that :
1) Con campaign chair Doug Finley's "black ops" team perpetrated the Saanich-Gulf Islands robocalls in the 2008 federal election (Dec. 10 testimony) and 
2) Doug Finley said Sona could not have perped the Guelph robocalls in the 2011 election because he hadn't taken their black ops course. (Dec. 16 testimony)

John Paul Tasker, live blog at CBC  Dec 10 2015 10:01am :

"[Gary] Lunn met with Duffy and a lobbyist for Molson (big sponsor of the Olympics) at Hy's steakhouse in Ottawa. He wanted to discuss his 'election problems.' Duffy says Lunn was concerned, he had only squeaked by in the last election. 'He wouldn't have won without the intervention of Doug Finley's black ops at headquarters ... They used robocalls to misdirect NDP voters headed to the polls,' Duffy says, the Conservatives knew who all the NDP supporters were (because of their voter database), they made targeted calls to NDP urging them to vote for the NDP candidate. Problem is, the NDP candidate had dropped out after the deadline to withdraw, would still be on the ballot. Lunn told Duffy he had no idea he just a call after from HQ 'saying you're welcome Gary.' " 

"Lunn wanted Duffy to come out for 'third party validation,' to help him win over non-Conservative voters, because it had been so close last time and he had only won because of Finley's dirty tricks."  

John Paul Tasker, liveblog at CBC, Dec 16 2015  1:08 pm today :

"Turning now to June 18, 2009. 'Duty entertainment' with Gary Lunn at Hy's. ... This is the meeting where you described election fraud, Holmes said. Duffy said I didn't say it's election fraud, I said they mobilized robo calls to confuse NDP voters, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not sure if it's fraud, they thought it was clever. Did you think it was clever? I didn't think about it too much. That's why Lunn told me 'I was hanging on by my fingernails,' please come out and help me on labour day to win by riding. Duffy says the motivation to invite me out was for me to help him with campaigning. Would Harper have known about Doug Finley and his black ops? I have no idea. Duffy says I have no knowledge if Harper knew about those robocalls."

"Duffy says robo calls or misdirecting goes on in every party especially during leadership races; Duffy says parliament hill is rife with stories of manipulation. Holmes says did you keep Lunn's story to yourself. Yes. You didn't see it fit to go to Elections Canada to report this? No. Lunn only knew that he got a phone call when someone says 'you're welcome.' 

Duffy says when Michael Sona took the fall for the robo calls in Guelph [in 2011], Doug Finley flew off the handle. 'He hasn't taken our courses,' on black ops, 'he wouldn't know enough to do this,' Duffy says Finley said."

Katie Simpson, live blog at CTV  Dec 16 2015 today :

"Duffy says members of Conservative political "black ops" teams went to international conferences to learn tactics.

When Michael Sona robocall story broke, he was with Doug Finely. Duffy says Finley said "this kid doesn't know enough"

Duffy says Finley said that Sona hadn't been on this course."

Kady O'Malley, live blog for The Citizen on Dec 10, re Saanich-Gulf Islands in 2008 :

"The only way Lunn hung on to that seat, according to Duffy, was through the "black ops" robo-calls campaign to misdirect NDP voters, which was, he recalled, perpetrated by then-Conservative campaign chair Doug Finley."

Today in her Ottawa Citizen blog however, after she quotes Duffy : 

"Doug Finley "raced out" saying that Sona "couldn't be guilty" as he hadn't been on their course."

she writes :

But Duffy *now* concedes that at no point was Finley mentioned during the meeting at Hy's -- Lunn just told him about the subsequent phone call saying "you're welcome."

So just to clarify, Duffy is now backing away from his headline-ready anecdote last week about Doug Finley's black ops teams in Saanich, which now seems to be a conflation of separate stories, but which he acknowledges he didn't share with anyone else, including Elections Canada. (Nor does he seem to have been particularly surprised or appalled by the revelation.)"

Back in February 2012 before he went under the Con bus, Duffy was busy attempting to deflect blame away from the Conservatives about the 2011 election robo/live calls : 

“I don’t believe it was the Conservative Party. But if something is going on, don’t forget, we have all these other groups,” Mr. Duffy said. 

“People have to remember that it’s not just political parties that are operating during a federal election campaign,” he added. “Under the law, we have all kinds of interested third parties that are operating in election campaigns, and I think that’s where we have to be careful. People are throwing stones but there have been third parties that have been attacking Conservatives as well as Liberals and New Democrats.”

Nice try but third party operations are not necessarily independent of the parties they support.
Also notable that Duffy mounted this handy 2012 deflection for the Cons nearly three years after his 2009 meeting with Lunn and his presumed knowledge of Con campaign chair Finley's alleged "black ops" operations in Saanich-Gulf Islands that he never mentioned to Elections Canada.

An excerpt on the 2008 Saanich-Gulf Islands robocalls pilot project from the documentary Election Day in Canada : The Rise of Voter Suppression is online here. 

With Harper now out of office, the media is bored with the whole business of election fraud because it's never going to happen ever again, right?  After Elections Canada determined there had been a widespread campaign of electoral fraud targetting non-Conservatives in at least 247 ridings, they closed their puny investigation and declined to put it before the courts.

Democracy Watch is taking the Conservatives to court because government lawyers won’t. 

If you have a few bucks to spare, kick them over a donation towards their court costs at the link.

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Sunday update : Duffy testimony sparks call for investigation of Saanich robocalls
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A closer look at the CRTC Voter Contact Registry

The Fair Elections Act mandated the first ever Voter Contact Registry. 

Phone-bank companies, candidates, political parties and third party groups hiring an outside company to make live and robo calls had 48 hours from the start of their use in a campaign to register with the CRTC. Parties and candidates making their own in house calls were not required to register. The DoNotCall list does not apply to political calls.

This same Fair Elections Act prevented release of the list til a month after the election. This meant voters were unable to check it to see if the calls they were receiving were legitimately registered with the CRTC - not that it would have mattered in the case of Pierre Poutine in the last election as he hid his use anyway.

The CRTC list was published a week ago: 

"A total of 1460 registrations have been filed to the CRTC for the 42nd General Election, including 554 from calling service providers and 906 from other persons or groups."

At first glance, the list appears to be one long list of Con MP/candidate names and phone service providers so I added them up :

118 Con candidates used Responsive Marketing Group (RMG), for live calls

92 Cons used ElectRight for live/robo calls or both, Bergen, Clement, Raitt, Nicholson, and Scheer among them.

38 Cons used Nik Kouvalis' Campaign Research/Campaign Support for live/robocalls or both, including Harper, Poilievre, Oliver, Alexander, Rempel, Leitch, O'Toole, Lukiwski  

But First Contact, which told CBC that in the 2011 election it "provided services to more than 80 Liberal candidates", is listed on CRTC's 2015 Voter Contact Registry simply as 

where "Both" refers to both live and robocalls. No names or numbers so we don't know how many Liberals signed up with them for how many calling contracts this time.

Likewise NGP VAN, a Washington DC company used by Obama in 2012 on which Liberalist is based, is just listed as : 

Perhaps NGP VAN is considered "in house" but I wonder on what grounds the CRTC allowed First Contact off the hook about their specific use in a list that is supposed to be about public disclosure. 
Glen McGregor writes : Compared to their rivals, Tories used a whack more telephone contact firms during the election
but I don't think we can know that if data for large firms are missing.

Onwards ...

127 Liberals used Prime Contact Inc

Only 4 Cons used RackNine this time round, Jason Kenney being most notable.

5 NDP candidates used Strategic Communications. This appears to comprise the entire extent of reported NDP phone campaigning for individual candidates. There were another 4 Strategic Comm listings for the NDP Party at large.The bulk of Strategic Comm users were third party groups like unions, Greenpeace, and Council of Canadians. The NDP as a party also used Direct Leap Technologies.

And lastly, a brief look at Blue Direct, new to me and used by Stephen Harper, Jason Kenney, and 10 other Cons for both live and robo calls according to the CRTC list. 
In his 2014 book, Winning Power: Canadian Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century, Tom Flanagan writes Blue Direct is owned by a former student of his, Matt Gelinas, formerly of RMG and the Manning Centre. 
Gelinas' partner at Blue Direct is Richard Dur, a Morton Blackwell Leadership Institute alumnus, seen here being honoured as Leadership Institute graduate of the week in 2011 :

“LI graduate and Canadian Member of Parliament Rob Anders said it well when he described LI training as ‘taking a drink from a fire hose,’” Richard said.

Ok then.

Edited for clarity.
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Joyce Bateman - Strike Two

Incumbent Winnipeg South Centre Con MP Joyce Bateman got pilloried this week for reading out a list of Liberals she deemed insufficiently pro-Israel at an all-candidates meeting hosted by B'nai Brith. Her booed list included Omar Alghabra, Borys Wrzesnewskyj, and retired Canadian Forces lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie.

Winnipeg Free Press columnist and event moderator Don Lett described what he called her "enemies of Israel list" as "creepy".

But really why wouldn't she play the anti-Semitism card again?
This is her second campaign running with it :

"Three years ago, the Conservatives sent flyers to Jewish homes in Mount Royal, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler's riding. The flyers claimed the Liberals had participated in a UN conference known as Durban I that descended into anti-Semitism. They also said a Liberal MP had shown support for Hezbollah, a designated terror group.

A letter with similar allegations was used in Winnipeg South Centre against incumbent Liberal Anita Neville, distributed by Conservative Joyce Bateman's campaign. 

Bateman's Elections Canada file shows she sent out a letter from a prominent lawyer and businessman. The letter included examples identical to the ones used in the Mount Royal flyers."

The year before, former Conservative Party president, Vic Toews campaign manager, and now Senator Don Plett, sent out taxpayer-funded flyers into Neville's riding. This time the charge was that she was insufficiently tough on crime and Plett wanted a revealed list of dangerous young offenders. Because this is what we pay senators to do.

Senator Runciman, "who distributed almost identical material" explained it was the “Conservative campaign folks” that put him up to it.

"It's hockey, not figure-skating," explained a source in the Con war room.

Fun fact : Bateman was a Liberal herself up until 31 days before the 2011 federal election when she decided to run as a Conservative against Neville. 

Bateman beat Neville by some 700 votes in the riding receiving the second highest number of bogus robocalls in Canada. Elections Canada declined to investigate despite voters having been misdirected to take a 20 minute drive out of the riding to a non-existent polling station. 

And so it goes ...
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Diane Watts, Jihadi Fighter

The election flyer landing on doorsteps in South Surrey-White Rock BC shows the three main party leaders - Justin Trudeau, Tom Mulcair, and an apparent new entry to the race :"YOU WILL NOT FEEL SECURE IN YOUR BEDROOMS". 

They are featured above a brave pledge by CPC candidate Diane Watts to "fight Jihadist Terrorists at home and abroad." 

You go, girl. 

In response to catching flack for "the worst example of politics of fear that I’ve ever seen" as one of her constituents put it, Watts issued a statement :

"ISIS has clearly declared Canada as a target for terrorism. We have seen such acts on Canadian soil with the death of our Canadian soldier in Ottawa — in Quebec and a foiled attempt at the B.C. Legislature."

Someone in her office purportedly explained the flyers were not really Diane's fault : 

"That came directly from Ottawa."

Which interestingly enough is the same response local CPC campaigns gave to Elections Canada the day before the last federal election about CPC live and robo-calls purveying incorrect poll location information. Elections Canada  :

"When contacted by returning officers, local Conservative Party campaigns advised that the calls were from the national campaign of the party, and that the campaigns could not stop them.”

Meanwhile two ridings away, households in West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country received CPC incumbent John Weston's 6"x10" glossy flyer. Half of it features Trudeau and the other half the actress from the Cons' "Just Not Ready" video. 

Notice what's missing in these flyers? 

They might come from "directly from Ottawa" but there's nary a mention in them anywhere of Steve.
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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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Saanich-Gulf Islands - perhaps not quite Ground Zero after all

Saanich Gulf Islands in 2008 is widely perceived by many to be "ground zero for election fraud in Canada", as Elizabeth May puts it. Not only did the perps successfully pull it off but Elections Canada's botched investigation demonstrated it could be done in future elections with impunity.

The scam comes in two parts. (Wet coasters may want to skip this bit.)
1)Robocalls
Environmentalist and SGI Lib candidate Briony Penn lost in the 2008 election when robocalls from the US spoofed the NDP campaign number and encouraged SGI voters to vote for the NDP candidate who had very publicly dropped out 3 weeks earlier but too late to have his name removed from the ballot. Some 3700 voted for him and Con MP/TarSands Minister Gary Lunn bested Penn by a 2,625 vote margin. 

The alternative theory is that pissed off NDP voters voted for their candidate anyway to spite the Liberals who outed him for inappropriate skinny dipping and body painting behavior 12 years earlier in 1996, causing him to drop out of the race. 

“The Liberal Party did that,” the director of communications for the Liberals B.C. campaign Brad Zubyk said, though he denied deserving credit himself. “It's all public domain. Quite frankly, we don't apologize for it. None of this is particularly hard to find.”

Either way, Elections Canada closed their investigation after failing to determine whether anyone "had actually been influenced in their vote because of the purported telephone call", and because "evidence of the actual source of the calls and the person or persons who made them would be required."   
Same reasons EC gave for concluding their election fraud investigation in 2011. 

2) Third party advertisers. 
Your previously unheard-of go-to people when a campaign has maxed out their allowable EC spending limit and there's a need for a last minute proxy ad buy in local papers and radio before Election Day, after which they vanish in a puff of smoke til next election.
Of the 50 odd third-party groups registered with Elections Canada in 308 ridings across Canada in 2008, five were registered in Saanich-Gulf Islands. The first four on the list below all shared the same financial agent and registered under the law firm address and phone number of Bruce Hallsor - former Canadian Alliance Party candidate, Gary Lunn supporter, and Conservative riding association VP . 

• Economic Advisory Council of Saanich  - Patricia Trottier, sole financial contributor, c/o Bruce Hallsor’s law office at 800-1070 Douglas St., Victoria
• Dean Park Advocacy Association  - Ralph Bodine, contributors Ralph and Linda Bodine c/o Hallsor law office
• Saanich Peninsula Citizens Council  - Dana Dickinson c/o Hallsor law office
• Citizens Against Higher Taxes  - Lynda Farmer c/o Hallsor law office
• Common Sense Advocacy of Victoria  - Donna Evans

Before Andrew MacLeod at The Tyee added Citizens Against Higher Taxes to his list, there were only four on it. At that time Hallsor told him that while Dickinson of Saanich Peninsula Citizens Council :

"did some advertising in 2006 - the other three were new for this election."

Not that new.

In 2006 in Victoria - the riding right next to SGI - crown prosecutor and Con MP-hopeful Robin Baird got some election advertising help from Common Sense Advocacy of Victoria. On their January 2006 Elections Canada Third Party Advertising Report, Common Sense Advocacy lists Donna Evans as financial agent and the address is once again ... wait for it ...   Bruce Hallsor's law office.  

Donna Evans is married to Robert Evans, Gary Lunn's fundraising chair for Saanich-Gulf Islands electoral district association. Lunn's VP was Bruce Hallsor and his riding president was then-Environment Minister Jim Prentice's sister.   
MacLeod :

"Robert Evans is the vice-president of Community Marine Concepts, which is seeking a license from the province to occupy 2.63 hectares of Victoria Harbour with a marina for 80-foot to 120-foot yachts.  The company is working on the proposal with Alberta-based WAM Development Group. Getting the license requires approvals from various provincial and federal agencies ... Hallsor has registered to lobby on behalf of WAM."

and is still the registered lobbyist for WAM in 2015 : 

• Application of transport regulations related to use of the Victoria Harbour

G&M : "... when a minister gets lobbied by his own campaign manager, who is acting for his fundraiser, it certainly looks bad. "

Likewise, when local opponents to the mega-marina ask the riding president's brother, the Environment Minister, for an environmental assessment and are refused - also not good.

In 2006 Bruce Hallsor formed the BC Conservative Club ; by 2009 he was also the BC Liberal constituency association president for Victoria – Beacon Hill. In a treatise I can no longer find online, Hallser argued that federal conservatives should vote for BC Liberals.  

It's a small, small, small LibCon world out here in BC. A lot of it is about money. I reckon the 'ground zero' elections shenanigans event horizon goes back further than most of us can remember.

Thursday Update : Deep Climate : Conservative Democracy Deficit on Vancouver Island
A very thorough and detailed look that I had read four years ago and forgotten about.
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Election Day in Canada : The Rise of Voter Suppression

The Script&Film Company's EDayFilm "Election Day In Canada: The Rise Of Voter Suppression" is travelling across Canada visiting communities where live and robocalls were made to record the stories of the electors Elections Canada has abandoned. 

It kicks off at 6:30pm tomorrow Wednesday May 20 at the main branch of Public Library in Guelph with a presentation and a fundraiser. Free admission. More deets here for an event on the 21st in Waterloo and then back again to Guelph on the 23rd - Guelph where an estimated 7,760 robocall attempts were made.

Because isn't it time we had some answers about what happened with the robo and live calls in 237 ridings right across Canada in the 41st federal election before we deal with more of the same again in the upcoming 42nd election this fall? 

In November of 2012, nine months after the robocall story really broke open nation-wide, Elections Canada commissioned and published a survey which reported that 85% of electors polled said the 41st election "was fairly run". Subsequent missives from EC show they never wavered far from this comforting conclusion, despite the commissioner's own final report on the termination of any further investigation stating that 27% of the complainants they investigated received fraudulent calls. 

So it's up to us now.  

Support the film any way you can - with a donation, promoting it online, or organizing presentations in your community like the ones in Guelph.   

It really is up to us now.  

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Harper's Perps with Perks #13

Michael Sona, fall guy robocall perp sentenced to nine months in jail for his role in the 2011 election robocall scandal, has served 12 days of that sentence and would like to go home now while he waits for the appeal of both his conviction and sentence. 
OK, said Judge Harry Laforme today, releasing Sona til May 29, 2015.

As Sona's trial progressed from his being an unlikely criminal mastermind whose friend and fellow Guelph campaign co-worker received immunity to give evidence against him that turned out to be so self-serving that even the prosecution said it should "be approached with caution", to the testimony of the Hill staffers delivered to Elections Canada's investigation by the Con Party lawyer who sat in on and coached their initial EC interviews even as EC lacked the power to compel any witnesses themselves, and on to his lawyer's decision not to put Sona on the stand because he thought they'd won their case, Michael Sona mostly serves now as the symbolic closed door to any further investigation or interest by Elections Canada into the 1,394 legitimate complaints about misleading phone calls across 234 ridings in the 2011 election. 

Ironically, perhaps the most damning account of this farce to date comes from the guy who rolled over on Sona - the same guy who testified he logged out of his own RackNine account on election day only to log back in again a few minutes later onto the Pierre Jones/Poutine account on the instructions of Guelph election campaign chair Ken Morgan who decamped to Kuwait after refusing to be interviewed by Elections Canada.

Sona still insists he is innocent of the charges brought against him and doesn't know who the real perp(s) were in Guelph.


Elizabeth May has again called for a public inquiry.

Peter Smoczynski is still making his election fraud documentary, with renewed fundraisers coming in the spring.

Perps with Perks Boxed Set!
Order yours in time for Xmas today!

Dec 15 Update : The Crown served notice today it wants to lock up Sona for an even longer sentence than the nine months he is already appealing.

Sona has called for a public inquiry into the 2011 elections robocalls case. 
EC Commissioner Yves Côté has closed his investigation.

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E-Day in Canada: When Voter Suppression Comes Calling

Ten minute promotional video on an investigative documentary in production which previews preliminary interviews. from The Script & Film Co. on Vimeo.

Tomorrow, lone RoboCon fall-guy Michael Sona may find out whether he goes to jail for his part in the 6,000 illegal robocalls pretending to come from Elections Canada and wrongly telling voters their polling station had been moved. [Update : Sentencing now to be handed down on Nov. 19]

Yesterday, the Alberta Party candidate in the Calgary-Elbow byelection reported being targeted in a fraudulent robocall campaign that used a fake caller ID purporting to come from the Alberta Party :

“We started getting complaints from people receiving multiple phone calls throughout the day and some suggesting we had called them at 3 a.m. "

Sound familiar? It's not like this is going to get better on its own.

As Mulcair notes in the doc clip above, the Fair Elections Act (sic) is about "the Conservatives trying to put into law some of the cheating they'd been doing before."

Did you watch the clip? Wouldn't you like to hear Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor's reflections since their epic McMaher election fraud investigation?

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Peter Smoczynski : 

Election Day In Canada: When Voter Suppression Comes Calling is an investigative documentary film which examines the sudden rise of voter suppression in Canada since the 2006 Federal Election to the Federal Election of 2011, its aftermath, Elections Canada investigations, court trials, its affect on Canadians and more recently the Fair Elections Act.

He has thousands of hours of footage and is looking for funding to do further research into the communities of highest voter suppression and finish editing it. 
So far his site has only received 1700 Canadian visits and 43 funders but as he says : "if every visitor gave $20, within five days this film is back in production"
His first donation was $5 from a 13 year old girl.

Come on, people - and I'm looking at you, you glittering twitterati and facebookies - spread the word and DONATE whatever you can. Let's get this doc out there to the public well before the shenanigans begin in the 2015 election.

h/t Saskboy

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