Happy RoboCon Election Fraud Budget Day

Lucky scheduling break for the Cons, eh? - getting Election Canada's Marc Mayrand to testify on 2011 election fraud on the same day they released the 2012 budget.

"We are free to choose our future," Flaherty said in his budget speech. "We have made our choice."


Election Fraud : Calling it "absolutely outrageous" and " totally unacceptable in a modern democracy", Elections Canada Marc Mayrand told the PROCommittee EC is investigating 800 specific complaints of electoral phone fraud in 200 ridings across ten provinces and one territory. 250 files open right now including 70 out of the 7,000 complaints in Guelph.

2012 Budget : Elections Canada budget to be cut by $7.5 million a year.


Election Fraud  : CBC's Terry Milewski : Misleading robocalls went to voters ID'd as non-Tories
2012 Budget : CBC budget cut by 10%


Well I guess that'll learn 'em.


The budget features "streamlining" environmental review processes, plus gives $8 million to the Canadian Revenue Agency to target registered charities that are "too overtly political", translation : "opposition from environmental groups to the massive Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline."
New RevCan money will investigate "the extent to which these are funded by foreign sources." 

But foreign tarsands-to-tanker funding from China is still a-ok, even at the cost of Canadian jobs ... 


PetroChina bids to help build $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline


"Chinese investment in Canada’s energy sector could move to a new level if PetroChina wins a bid to build the controversial Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline.
The largest of China’s three state-controlled oil companies has expressed an interest in building the $5.5-billion project across the northern Canadian Rockies and is considering purchasing an equity stake, said Pat Daniel, president and CEO of proponent Enbridge Inc.
[W]ith a workforce of almost two million and cheaper labour costs than its North American counterparts, the Chinese company stands a good chance of presenting a competitive bid."


Well so much for Pipeline Steve's Canadian 'jobs, jobs, jobs' angle in that case. Also :


WSJ : Canada To Allow Wealth Funds To Invest In Its Financial Institutions

"The Canadian government said Thursday it plans to introduce legislation to allow foreign and domestic sovereign-wealth funds to invest in Canadian financial institutions."

So. After somehow being the apparent beneficiary of massive election fraud in which they gained a majority government, The Harper Economy™, as Pogge says, "is primarily based on ripping anything that might be of value out of the ground and shipping it out of the country as quickly as possible."
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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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RoboCon : Cross-border election shopping

A Republican operative convicted of perpetrating election phone fraud for the Republican National Committee told interviewer Stephen Maher that "fraudulent calls in the last Canadian election are likely an American import" and a "fairly sophisticated operation".


Allen Raymond wrote a book about his stint as a GOP dirty trickster called How to Rig an Election in which he explains the use of tactics like phone jamming political opponents - hey, did Elections Canada ever investigate the over 10,000 phone jamming calls used to disrupt the NDP's online leadership vote this year ? - as well as harassment live calls intended to discourage opponents from voting at all. 


Raymond says he was approached for the illegal phone work by an RNC field director he knew called Jim Tobin, a regional chairman of George Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
The RNC spent years and millions of dollars defending Tobin through umpteen court cases and appeals to choke off the flow of election fraud charges at just Raymond. When Raymond realized he was going under the bus alone, he talked.


Today the Ottawa Citizen and the G&M both report Elections Canada has confirmed 'Pierre Poutine' launched his fraudulent robocalls from the Guelph Con campaign election office.
Stephen Maher explains on CTV here.

RoboCon Pop Quiz : Spot the Difference!

Thwap asks a very good question :

What exactly is the difference between 

1. Elections Canada and federal prosecutors granting immunity to Con deputy campaign manager Andrew Prescott this month in the 2011 Guelph robocall election fraud case, and

2. Elections Canada refusing to grant immunity to a group of donors willing to testify about giving $1,000 each to Dean Del Mastro’s campaign, allegedly in return for receiving $1050 back from Del Mastro's cousin.

July 2012 : Elections Canada refuses immunity request for donors to Dean Del Mastro

"Elections Canada has rebuffed an offer of information about an alleged reimbursement scheme involving Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro’s 2008 election campaign, saying it doesn’t have the authority to give witnesses immunity from prosecution.

Elections Canada spokesman John Enright said Tuesday that the commissioner is not able to grant immunity... it can only investigate allegations of electoral misconduct and that the power to offer immunity rests with federal prosecutors."

although Toronto elections lawyer Jack Siegel says : 

"the commissioner can negotiate compliance agreements with people who have violated the act, which allows the office to effectively offer immunity from prosecution."

Robocalls immunity deal struck with ex-Tory worker Andrew Prescott

"A key player in the 2011 Guelph robocalls scandal is getting immunity from prosecution in the Elections Canada investigation into misleading calls in the last federal election, CBC News has learned.Prescott has a written guarantee "the Crown has no intention" of charging him in connection with the misleading phone calls."

So what's the difference? 

Aside of course from the fact Del Mastro was Steve's parliamentary secretary, election fraud pointman, and key spokesy in the House at the time, while Prescott's Con candidate Marty Burke didn't win his seat anyway and the Guelph case appears to be hermetically sealed off from the election fraud that occurred in over 200 other ridings. 

Admittedly Del Mastro is now being charged by Elections Canada in a separate investigation for overspending his 2008 campaign limit and trying to cover it up, and they are continuing their investigation into the 22 people who were issued cheques for $1,050 from Deltro, owned by Dean's cousin.

But Thwap's question remains : What exactly is Election Canada's criteria for involving Crown prosecutors in securing immunity for witnesses? Especially given it seems highly unlikely Prescott was granted immunity just to roll over on Sona in the case against him provided by Con Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton. 

If Sona goes down, the Cons will draw a line through it and say it's done : One rogue lone gun on the grassy Guelph knoll that didn't change the election results in a single riding in the 2011 election anyway.

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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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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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Ethical election fraud

Dr. Dawg does Harper: I'm not a crook

and overnight the Cons "Ooopsie, another single solitary lone independently-operating rogue bad apple" story started to leak very badly.

Election Day deputy returns officer at Kitchener Centre speaks out on voting poll misdirection done under his watch.


And now RMG* call centre staffers in Thunder Bay are leaking too 
Conservative scripts misdirected voters in 2011 election

Callers on behalf of the federal Conservative Party were instructed in the days before last year’s election to read scripts telling voters that Elections Canada had changed their voting locations, say telephone operators who worked for a Thunder Bay-based call centre

“We’re sending people to the wrong place,” Desgagné recalled telling her supervisor and RCMP.

She says RCMP said there was "nothing they can do".

And although staffers calls to the public were monitored by a supervisor ...

"... workers shortened their script — although they weren’t supposed to — and said “... I’m calling from Elections Canada ...”

Earlier in the call centre campaign "if a person identified himself as Liberal or NDP, the agent punched a button to indicate he was not a Conservative supporter."

So. If only those Lib or NDP people were then singled out for call back on Election Day and misdirected to wrong or non-existent polling stations, that's flat out effing election fraud. 

*Responsive Marketing Group : “We work exclusively with right-of-centre campaigns to develop fundraising and voter contact strategies that target your message to the right audience, maximize your vote-getting, and win.”

Notable that Harper's former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart was on loan to Steve's election war room at the time from his new position with a stateside Republican PR company. You can check out Muttart's new boss' record on election dirty tricks in the US here.  

Superlative research job from The Sixth Estate : Hoax Phone Calls Reported in 42 Ridings During 2011 Election. Really excellent work.

And a reminder : Steve's majority holds by just 14 12 seats.
(Thanks, Dr. Dawg! for the correction : 12 seats, not 14.)
So far, six of those ridings are reporting dirty tricks on Election Day as of this morning.

Vancouver Sun : Judicial inquiry needed into election scandal
Yup.

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A few more links, because so far none of us has covered everything in one place :
Dave : Things to energize your outrage
Boris : What made you do it?
Dammit Janet! : Bad times, good times
Montreal Simon : The Bright Side of the Robo Con Scandal - with great toon
Also LeDaro's clever vid : Robocalls
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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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RoboContractors

If the Public Prosecution Service of Canada is so concerned that Michael Sona's nine month sentence for election fraud is "demonstrably unfit and fails to reflect the gravity of the offence” - so concerned in fact that they are appealing to have his sentence increased - why don't they direct that same concern towards investigating the Pierre Poutine perps behind him? 
Especially given both the judge and prosecutor in the case stated that Sona didn't act alone.

So reasons the Council of Canadians in their new formal complaint to the PPSC.

“PPSC is not an investigative agency,” responded PPSC spokesey Dan Brien. “It’s not in our mandate to initiate, conduct or direct investigations.”

Meh, said a spokesey for Elections Canada Commissioner Yves Côté, who now falls under the purview of the PPSC thanks to the Fair Elections Act, noting that the case is now closed as far as they are concerned unless someone submits a formal complaint or new information comes to light. 

“We conducted an investigation. All of the evidence that we found was presented to the Crown,” Michelle Laliberte told Global News.

"Asked if the office has received more information, Laliberte said, “Not at this point.”

Really?  
Andrew Prescott's immunity-protected testimony that 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 - that isn't "new" or "more" information? Isn't a new lead? Isn't worthy of further investigation, if not a few subpoenas?

You know, it's really too bad Canada lacks a national police force who could look into this kind of crime on our behalf when they aren't busy dragging a 61 year old woman off her walker and throwing her to the ground and handcuffing her for being unclear what was being asked of her, or protecting foreign oil corporations from local protesters or First Nations, or protecting themselves from the possibility of staples, or shooting a vet with PTSD twice in the back and killing him on his own property because they didn't have a warrant to follow him into his house or .... where the hell was I? Oh yeah ...

In the absence of any interest from the horsemen, and for an idea of how much help Council of Canadians can expect from the Elections Canada Commissioner this time round in their bid to have the Poutine case in Guelph re-opened, lets have a look at the commissioner's response to their request for help in their March 2012 election fraud court case, launched on behalf of six plaintiffs from six ridings :

In early August. Commissioner Yves Cote refused to give a federal court more details on its ongoing investigation into the robocalls scandal.

To avoid sharing the information, Cote filed for a special exemption, saying releasing it would “encroach upon the public interest,” and that “public disclosure of information from a partially completed investigation carries the serious risk of compromising the investigation by, among other things, influencing the testimony of witnesses, impairing the ability to verify information already obtained and affecting the willingness of witnesses to speak.”

And then, as far as anyone knows, some time after that they just stopped.

Jan 1 2015 Update : Elections Canada confirms total lack of interest in pursuing election fraud.

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RoboConjob Disclaimer : No voters were harmed in the making of this election fraud

McMaher and CBC's Terry Milewski report on this week's  release of internal emails between an alarmed Elections Canada and a stonewalling Con Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton.
Turns out EC officials' were reporting on a robocall "scam" in a "dozen ridings" across "at least 6 provinces", starting three days before the last election.
Four months later Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand was still publicly referring to them as "crank calls".

Milewski :

"Ever since the scandal broke, the Conservative line has been it was just a rogue operation in one riding, in Guelph of course, and that otherwise they ran a clean and ethical campaign. So no systematic campaign by the central party as a whole - that's the point of their position."

However ...

"Elections Canada kept track of the complainants' caller ID of the people who phoned in saying : hey I'm getting these crazy calls - what's going on?
Check your caller ID - what's the number? Where did these calls come from?

And they called those numbers -the whole list of them all over the country, different area codes, all over - and guess what? The same voice was on the voicemail of all of them which said : " Thank you for calling the Conservative Party."

So all of that suggests that this was not one rogue operation in Guelph but it was a wider scheme to suppress votes."

Uh oh. Time for a new Con defence position :

No evidence anyone failed to vote due to misleading calls, say the 6 Con MPs facing a separate legal challenge to their respective election victories

The Cons have apparently given up claiming innocence in election fraud and are now just going with  "no harm, no foul"- an illegal move ignored by the ref because in his opinion it didn't change the outcome of the play.

Now here's "no harm no foul" again - this time from the Commissioner of Elections Canada when he dismissed the complaint that US rightwing Front Porch Strategies violated the Non-interference by Foreigners clause of the Canada Elections Act when they went door-knocking and manned phonebanks in a Canadian campaign office.

After stating that it's just too darn difficult to investigate voter interference by foreigners because they're foreigners, the Commissioner concluded :

"No complaint to this office provided a basis to believe that any elector was actually induced or affected in their voting behavior due to the activity complained of. It is the Commissioner's view that ... it is not in the public interest to pursue this further."

No harm, no foul ever, apparently, in the case of foreign interference.

RoboCon Pilot Project Flashback : Environmentalist Briony Penn lost the 2008 election when taped robocalls advised Saanich Gulf Islanders on the eve of the election to vote for a candidate who had very publicly dropped out 3 weeks earlier. Seems 3700 voters did just that, likely throwing the election to Con MP Gary Lunn who consequently won by a 2,625 vote margin.

Ok, some harm there for sure, huh? Definitely a foul.
Wait for it ...

Elections Canada stated it had "…found no one who had actually been influenced in their vote because of the purported telephone call, nor was he [the Elections Canada representative] able to identify the source or the person or persons who actually made the calls."

Penn :

Our riding association and the citizens’ groups continued to push Elections Canada for over a year. My last personal email inquiry elicited this response in March of 2010: "In this case, this Office examined thoroughly the complaints received and advised the complainants that there is no evidence that the Canada Elections Act has been contravened."

No harm, no foul, another big dollup of we-couldn't-figure-it-out-so-screw-it, and hence no mention of it in the Elections Canada 2008 report.

Democracy Watch would like to know what happened in 3,000 other rulings EC has made over the last 15 years and they have a letter and petition calling for "a law to stop false election robocalls and strengthen election law enforcement".
As Pogge says : only 56000 signatures? That's the best we can do?

Go.
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Robo-calling an election fraud

In writing about the Cons' dirty tricks robocall election fraud, John Ibbitson muses whether the Cons might just bear some "measure of responsibility" for creating a political climate in which their "rogue" campaign managers impersonate Election Canada officials on Election Day in order to send voters off to the wrong or non-existing polling stations to vote.

OK, let's look at just one such riding where things went rogue.

During the last election, Kitchener-Waterloo voters reported being phoned on Election Day and told their polling station had been changed to another location. Complete bs, of course, and the calls were traced to a Conservative Party phone number.

K-W is represented by Con MP Peter Braid. In 2008 he won the riding by just 17 votes.
His campaign manager Aaron Wudrick also works for Campaign Research Inc - this Campaign Research Inc. Braid paid the company "$19,210 to do automated dialing and voter identification" (h/t cultureguru) and hired one of their CEOs to be his Election Day Chair.  

Two years prior to this, Braid, Wudrick, another Campaign Research founder named Richard Ciano ***(previously VP of the federal Conservatives and now running for presidency president of the Ontario Con Party), and the 9th VP of the Ontario Con Party, Ryan O'Connor, were all off at a workshop hosted by the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association and the Preston Manning's Manning Centre for Building Democracy ...  ** Correction

And this is where things got just a tad ... roguey

Transcript via WikiLeaks audio. Yes I'm pillaging a previous post here :

37:10) Aaron Lee-Wudrick : I say we, because, even though [Ryan O'Connor] was the forced neutral [as Student President] and me as the Tory president, it was all orchestrated obviously behind closed doors, and it actually worked out well because it looked like different groups of stakeholders, like I'm the outsider coming in, and you guys were just the responsible student government and we had other members of council, a guy he appointed to council, he got speaking rights but he wasn't an elected member, but just as another voice at the table, it made it look like there were all kinds of different corners where in fact we were all on the same team. 

(42:14) Aaron Lee-Wudrick : Campus Radicals for Action on Zimbabwe Yes, or something like that, they were a great shell group. Feel free to use Campus Coalition for Liberty, that's ours so we have a logo and everything. 

(50:05) Ryan O'Connor : When Aaron was doing the petition campaign, which "I knew nothing about;" I was printing them in my frickin office in student government, of course I knew about it, of course we were behind it, I couldn't take a public position on that issue because although I wasn't running for reelection, this was three months before the end of my mandate ... if we had made them an issue, no Tory would ever get elected to student government again.  

Ryan O'Connor : Sometimes you can't attach the party's name to something. You just can't. If it's a really controversial issue on campus or something that might show up in the newspaper, you want to be careful. You just have your shell organization and have the Campus Coalition for Liberty and two other Tory front groups which are front organizations, all of those groups might actually qualify for funding too. 

Aaron Lee-Wudrick : Don't think that the Party doesn't like that, because they do. They're things that will help the Party, but it looks like it's an organically-grown organization and it just stimulated from the grassroots spontaneously. They love that stuff. And they don't have to bear the burden of having any of it attached to their name."

Ok, that lays out the "measure of responsibility" relationship pretty clearly, and here's Steve yesterday to verify it :

"In this case, our party has no knowledge of these calls. It’s not part of our campaign.”

Number of  ridings in the last election allegedly hit by fraudulent robocall campaigns so far : 27
Number of ridings giving Steve his majority : 14  12
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Friday Night Update : Elections Canada has dropped their investigation into Waterloo.
"Inaccuracies can occur," said Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews.
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But Glen Mcgregor and Stephen Maher are still on it :
More than a dozen ridings blitzed by harassing fake Liberal phone calls in 2011 election.
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*** Link defunct. Richard Ciano appears to have been expunged from the Campaign Research website.
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