2nd Electoral Reform Committee meeting

was held in camera yesterday. 

The entire three hour meeting from 10am til 1pm - with presentations from five in-house analysts and tech experts and questions from MPs - was held in camera.

What happened to last week's decision to televise them? 

Meanwhile ...

Former Ontario Progressive Conservative Party president Richard Ciano and Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research - pollsters and managers of the Rob Ford and John Tory campaigns, harriers of Liberals - 

have teamed up with Liberal Toronto Councillor Justin Di Ciano to found a "grass roots advocacy group" Keep Voting Simple . 
Their aim is to fight electoral reform and advocate for a national referendum. 
Funny how those two ideas keep cropping up together.


Canadians wishing to appear before the ERRE committee or submit a brief have until Oct 07 to do so. 
Questions to be submitted a la Cullen's motion for public participation in questioning witnesses can be left at #ERRE#Q. 
A notice with the deets will be put up on the committee site.

Minutes from yesterday's meeting

My notes on first ERRE meeting
.
Update : 

.

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.
.

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... 
.

Stephen Harper and Saulie Zajdel in happier times ...

Stephen Harper seen here campaigning for Saulie Zajdel back in 2011. 

Saulie didn't win but he did go on to become a political aide to then Canadian Heritage Minister James Wilfred Moore - where he used his six-digit taxpayer-funded job in Moore’s office to undermine Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, the candidate who had defeated him in the election.

Campaign Research helped out with that.

Here Harper and Zajdel share a moment over brown paper bags. 

Not many Conservative politicians have the chutzpah to be photo-opped with a prop like brown paper bags ever since former PM Muldoon successfully sued Canada for $2.1 M for even mentioning them.


CBC, yesterday : Saulie Zajdel pleads guilty to corruption charges for real estate deal

"He had faced charges of bribery, breach of trust, fraud and corruption.  Zajdel's lawyer, Jeffrey Boro, told CBC News pleading guilty was a difficult decision for his client. 

"Mr. Zajdel has decided to turn the page, close that part of his life and move on," he said. He received a suspended sentence and was ordered to perform 240 hours of community service and donate $10,000 to a charity."

It was a difficult decision but Mr. Zajdel has decided to turn the page, close that part of his life and move on...  
Yeah, quite a lot of that going around ...
                                                                     

.

Brown bag photo h/t : Robert Jensen2 via Holly Stick in old comments.
.

Decline Your Vote Elect Some Cons!

                                                                Post updated below

The option to formally Decline Your Vote in the Ontario provincial election tomorrow has been getting  some  press, with the OttawaCitizen even giving detailed instructions on how to do it. 

It's a brilliant strategy when you think about it - getting people in a province with under 50% voter turnout in the last provincial election to think they will be making a difference this time by refusing to vote.  Activism! Stand up for your right not to vote!
And who benefits from lower voter turnout when the contest is between the Harper/Hudak/Ford TeaCon Trifecta entry vs the other guys that progressives are generally pissed at and feeling "none of the above" about?

The man behind the Decline Your Vote campaign is former Campaign Research employee Paul Synnott. 
Quick refresher on Campaign Research from principal Kouvalis :



Synnott left Campaign Research in April 2010 to launch his own company, Polisource, from May 2010 to Dec. 2011, and rolled out his first Decline Your Vote campaign in Sept 2011:

"Polisource.ca is a New Media Solutions company focusing on conservative Canadian Politics at the Municipal, Provincial and Federal levels.

Political campaigns in Canada are subject to strict spending limits. Polisource.ca will help you deliver your message through the Internet utilizing the latest tools in a efficient, cost-effective manner."

Getting people to suppress their own votes would definitely qualify as cost-effective.

And despite his particular dislike of Hudakery, Synnott's conservative creds are not in doubt. He has worked on conservative election campaigns in Ontario and here's his upload of Kory Teneycke's Oily the Splot attack ad attacking Dion's carbon tax back in 2008.

But here's something I don't get.
From Synnott's Decline Your Vote website :

Join us in spreading the word about the option of "Declining Your Vote"  [Us?]

We are looking for individuals in all ridings to spread the word locally. There will be simple flyers you can download and distribute in your neighbourhood or across your city or town. We will have lawn signs available to print as well as a utility to make phone calls to educate people.

Social media will be a large part of our initiative, so if you can help us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram - sign up below!
The following ridings are our "Top 10" to target : [Wed night update : additional riding info in red and orange was added by me and is not in original Decline post]                                                    

Brant                                       LIB        by 1106 votes
Etobicoke Centre                  LIB        by 7960 votes
Kitchener-Waterloo               NDP     by 3748 votes
London-West                         NDP     by 3278 votes
Mississauga-Erindale           LIB        by 4258 votes
Oakridges-Markham             LIB        by 4928 votes
Ottawa South                          LIB        by 1279 votes
St. Catherines                        LIB        by 1705 votes
Windsor-West                        LIB        by 3583 votes
Thunder Bay-Atikokan           LIB        by  438 votes 

Why them? I don't know enough about local Ontario politics to know why those "Top 10" ridings in particular were chosen to elect Conservatives merit your considered and principled lack of voting. Perhaps someone out there in Ontarioland could fill me in on that.

h/t Reddit via Stephen Lautens
.
Wed night Update : An answer as to why those particular ridings were targeted was provided by Brian Busby and Beijing York in comments. Seems they're currently held by Lib or NDP candidates in the 2011 provincial election and 2013 by-elections, while 8 out of 10 of those ridings voted Con federally.  
I've now added this info to Paul Synnott's original Decline Your Vote list above, as per Elections Ontario. 
.
Thurs am update : More dumbass media promotion of Decline :
Windsor Star : Decline your vote ?
NaPo : Ontario Election 2014: How to vote for 'none of the above'
and a good one from Alheli Picazo : 'Decline your vote' makes no difference - with Brian Busby and Synnott in comments!
.

Christy Clark and the Manning Centre for Building Conservatives

In March 2012, Christy Clark gave the opening remarks to the Ottawa Manning Centre Networking Conference, the yearly "conservative family reunion".

She was introduced by her then chief of staff, former senior Harper advisor, Enbridge lobbyist, and Alberta 'firewall manifesto' signatory Ken Boessenkool, who was her very first campaign manager back in 2010. 

"We have a duty to Canada" to easy the flow of products to Asia, she told her audience at the Manning Centre [a year ago]. "We support pipelines in British Columbia."

BC Conservative leader John Cummins was not invited.

Manning has in the past said he doesn’t support the political ambitions of Cummins, who was elected as a Reformer with Manning in the 1993 election, because vote-splitting on the centre-right always makes it easier for the NDP to assume power.

One-time Harper government cabinet minister, Jay Hill, also said Friday he’s backing Clark’s leadership. “I’ll do whatever I can to support her and support the B.C. Liberals."

Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party and President of the Manning Centre, is also a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.

Jay Hill was in charge of the Cons 200 page dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt and stonewall parliamentary committees back in 2007.

Also helping Christy's campaign was Chuck Strahl, former BC Reform and Con MP, now chair of the Manning Centre and chair of CSIS watchdog the Security Intelligence Review Committee since last June, at which time he had to give up working for Christy.

The only pollster to accurately predict Tuesday's election result was Christy's principal secretary and ADM in charge of "Intergovernmental Relations" till a year ago and now on contract to Christy, former Reform and Republican policy advisor Dimitri Pantazopoulos.

Premier’s Office targeted crucial election ridings for the B.C. Liberals — all on government time and your dime

"Premier Christy Clark’s former principal secretary, Dimitri Pantazopolous, and former deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstad were among those involved in a comprehensive strategy that used government staff and resources to try to win swing ridings for the BC Liberals ...  serious misconduct by government employees and misuse of government funds.   

“Dimitri was the driving force behind the swing teams, from its inception through to the operational phase."

Pantazoploulos also runs the Manning Centre Municipal Governance Project and is mentioned by Calgary developer Cal Wenzel in the now infamous cel vid about buying the campaigns of developer-friendly municipal candidates in order to defeat Calgary Mayor Nenshi.

On Ken Boessenkool's twitter account at Kool, Topp, & Guy Public Affairs - the political consultancy firm formed in February - Christy's former chief of staff Ken Boessenkool and Christy's election advisor Don Guy are busy congratulating Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research on Christy Clark's federal ConservaLiberal campaign win.  
The third partner in the firm is BC NDP campaign director Brian Topp.

and a quick tweet from Rob Ford's chief of staff Mark Towhey:

You do remember Nick Kouvalis from Campaign Research,  don't you ? 

In addition to being Rob Ford's election architect, Kouvalis is a regular speaker at ... wait for it ... the Manning Centre yearly bunfest.

Fun fact :  Founding directors of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy :

• Nigel Wright, Harper's chief of staff, currently in the news for cutting Con senator Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to cover money the Duffster owed to the Senate for inappropriately claimed living expenses for the past four years while Duffy was being investigated for it,  and 
• Gwyn Morgan, Chairman of the Board of SNC Lavalin til May 2 this year, the company being investigated for fraud in four countries on three continents, was Steve's choice for heading up his brand new Accountability commission in 2006.

Manning Centre : "Congratulations to Christy Clark on a spectacular victory. The election of a non-socialist government in BC is in the best interests of BC and Canada."
.

Manning Centre for Building Conservatism 2012

The Manning Centre For Building Democracy 2012, billed as a "Conservative Family Reunion", kicks off its 3-day getting Conservatives elected convention today. 

At left is the first graduating class of the Manning Centre's Executive Program in Political Management at the Future Leaders Series dinner in 2007.

At their 2008 convention, a campaign activism session for young organizers was jointly held by RMG  Responsive Marketing Group CEO Michael Davis; Richard Ciano, eventual co-founder of Campaign Research Inc with Nick Kouvalis, and now President of the Con Party of Ontario; and Mark Spiro of Crestview Public Affairs and the Cons' 2007-2011 election Target Seat Management Unit.

RMG CEO, future Campaign Research founder, and Steve's election target seat guy.
Small world, huh?

*Update from Beijing York in comments : Then the following year they gave RMG CEO Michael Davis their Pyramid Award for his GOTV and voter ID work*

"Preston Manning presented RMG with the Manning Centre Pyramid Award for Political Technology, recognizing RMG's role in helping to build the conservative movement in Canada. Since its inception, RMG has raised more than $75 million for right of centre causes in Canada, and helped to elect hundreds of 'right of centre' politicians at municipal, provincial and national levels."

Kouvalis and Ciano are back at the Manning Conference again this year - full three day schedule and roster of speakers here - despite being under industry investigation for their alleged misleading phone campaign against Lib MP Irwin Cotler. BC Premier Christy Clark will give the opening remarks tomorrow morning.

Three days ago, John Fryer, a member of the Order of Canada and an adjunct professor at UVic, wrote a letter to the G&M criticizing a local Manning Centre campaign manager training session he attended in 2010, organized by Campaign Research founder Ciano. 

Fryer : "Instructors made it clear that robo-calling and voter suppression were an acceptable and normal part of winning political campaigns."

Vancouver Observer has more background on the session from Fryer, plus a reaction from Campaign Research.

And here's a post I wrote in 2008 about the founding members of the Preston Manning Institute for Building Democracy.

.
Friday night update : Preston Manning condemns robocalls
Mr. Manning condemned the idea of campaigns using robo-calls to harass voters or divert them to the wrong polls.

“I've spent my life trying to get people to participate more in the political system and trying to vote more,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a conservative conference sponsored by his Manning Centre for Building Democracy.
“And the fact that there would be people out trying to work in the opposite direction is deplorable.”

and then they threw Stephen Maher, the reporter who broke the robocalls story along with Glen McGregor, out of the Manning Centre conference party.

Killer post from RossK.  Killer. Also Dave.
Go Beijing York! whose comments are usually better than my posts.
.

It was Mr. Creosote on the Front Porch with a chequebook

Poor old Mr Creosote.
Steve sent his parliamentary secretary out into the House two days in a row last week to claim the Libs spent "millions of dollars" in the last election hiring a foreign voter telemarketing company with offices in North Dakota - which turned out not to be the case.

Then he put in a bizarre appearance on CBC to insist the Con Party only ever uses Canadian firms but deflected questions about their use by individual Con MPs.

Now of course it turns out to be Mr Creosote and 13 other Cons who hired an anti-choice US Republican voter contact firm, Front Porch Strategies, which made thousands of calls from Ohio in the last election and prints gushy editorials on their website about Steve : “the most powerful conservative leader in the Americas.”
Here Front Porch boasts of their success in the last Canadian election  :

“In May’s federal elections, Front Porch Strategies won all 14 of their races.”

with the help of Con MP Rick Dykstra's campaign manager Jim Ross, who also works for Front Porch as the Canadian liaison.

Today in the House the Mr Creosote got the job of demanding that the Libs release all records of calls made on their behalf during the last election, but stated the Cons have no intention of doing likewise. His reasoning?  

 “No, because obviously our party is not behind the calls. We know that." 

Meanwhile, Guy Giorno, Con campaign boss and former Steve chief of staff, condemns the recent voter suppression techniques as a “despicable, reprehensible practice,” and says he really hopes Elections Canada can get to the bottom of this problem in Guelph. 
Um, so we're back to just Guelph again, Guy? 
We hope EC can get to the bottom of it too, even though they will have to manage it without the additional investigative powers Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand requested to do the job but was denied in a secret vote by the majority of Cons on the PROC parliamentary committee a week ago.

NaPo quotes Giorno yesterday :

Tory staff couldn’t make ‘despicable’ robocalls without party knowing: campaign boss

Sigh. The plausible deniability defence again.
Once more with feeling ...

Aaron Lee Wudrick, now a Campaign Research Inc employee and campaign manager to Con MP Peter Braid (K-W), speaking about the effectiveness of dirty tricks in Con campus orgs in 2009  :

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."

Update : Briony Penn : I was the first robocalls victim
Yeah, we remember that one around here.
.
.

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
.
Friday Night Update : Elections Canada has dropped their investigation into Waterloo.
"Inaccuracies can occur," said Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews.
.
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.
.
*** Link defunct. Richard Ciano appears to have been expunged from the Campaign Research website.
.