See, first-past-the-post is working again now

In June 2015 the Liberal Party released a position paper :

“We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.”

and Justin Trudeau took that campaign promise on the road.

At the time the Liberals were 3rd in the polls :

NDP - 32.6%    CPC - 28.6%   LPC - 26.3%

The Liberal majority now rests on 43 MPs whose margin of victory is less than 5%.

Before the election Fair Vote Canada asked all MPs to pledge that campaign promise. NDP did because it is part of party policy; CPC did not because it is not.

The following list of Liberal MPs, some of whom campaigned aggressively on that issue, answered ‘Yes’ when asked before the election if they feel :

"the number of MPs elected to Parliament from each party should be roughly proportional to the number of votes cast for that party’s candidates.":

Cabinet ministers in bold: 

Candidate                            Riding                                         % Margin of victory 

BC

John Aldag                        Cloverdale-Langley City, B.C.          10.7

Terry Beech                       Burnaby North-Seymour, B.C.          6.5

Ken Hardie                         Fleetwood-Port Kells, B.C.              17.6

Joyce Murray                     Vancouver-Quadra, B.C.                  32.9

Carla Qualtrough              Delta, B.C.                                       16.3

Harjit Sajjan                      Vancouver-South, B.C.                    14.9

Jonathan Wilkinson            North Vancouver, B.C.                     29.8 

Jody Wilson-Raybould     Vancouver-Granville, B.C.               17.0

Ontario

Omar Alghabra                    Mississauga, Ont.                           21.1

Leon Alleslev                       Aurora-Richmond Hill, Ont.              2.1

Shaun Chen                         Scarborough North, Ont.                20.8

Neil Ellis                               Bay of Quinte, Ont.                         16.4

Nathaniel Erskine Smith      Beaches-East York, Ont.                 18.6

Karina Gould                      Burlington, Ont.                                3.5

Patty Hajdu                         Thunder Bay-Sup North, Ont.         21.8

Andrew Leslie                      Orléans, Ont.                                   28.8

Lloyd Longfield                    Guelph, Ont.                                    22.8

Karen McCrimmon              Kanata-Carleton, Ont.                     12.1

David McGuinty                   Ottawa South, Ont.                         48.5

John McKay                         Scarborough-Guildwood, Ont.       33.5

Catherine McKenna           Ottawa-Centre, Ont.                         4.2

Maryam Monsef                 Peterborough-Kawartha, Ont.          8.7

Jennifer O’Connell               Pickering-Uxbridge, Ont.                12.1

Rob Oliphant                        Don Valley West, Ont.                     16.2

John Oliver                           Oakville, Ont.                                    6.9

Anthony Rota                       Nippissing-Timiskaming, Ont.         22.6

Kim Rudd                             Peterborough South, Ont.                 2.9

Raj Saini                               Kitchener Centre, Ont.                    18.4

Sonia Sidhu                         Brampton South, Ont.                     17.1

Marwan Tabbara                  Kitchener South-Hespeler, Ont.        5.6

Anita Vandenbeld                Ottawa West-Nepean, Ont.             25.9

Arif Virani                             Parkdale-High Park, Ont.                  1.8

Quebec

David Lametti                      LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, Que.          14.9

Alexandra Mendès              Brossard-Saint-Lambert, Que.        25.7

Greg Fergus                        Hull-Aylmer, Que.                            19.9

PEI

Wayne Easter                      Malpeque, P.E.I.                               44.5

Lawrence MacAulay          Cardigan, P.E.I.                                48.8

Bobby Morrissey                 Egmont, P.E.I.                                  20.3

Amarjeet Sohi                     Edmonton Mill Woods, Alta.             0.1

Robert-Falcon Ouellette      Winnipeg Centre, Man.                    26.5

Jim Carr                              Winnipeg South Centre, Man.         31.5

Matt DeCourcey                  Fredericton, N.B.                              20.9

Darrell Samson                    Sackville-Chezzetcook, N.S.           13.6

Ironically, it is first-past-the-post that allows these MPs to now ignore that campaign promise.

h/t Anita Nickerson and Kelly Carmichael at FairVote for poster and stats respectively.

Hill Times : Liberal MPs concerned about PMO’s handling of electoral reform and cash-for-access issues, say Grit sources

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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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Barnstorming the strategic vote

CBC : Liberal voters in Victoria confused after candidate drops out

"Jean Oliver lives in Victoria and is a long time Green Party supporter. But in advanced polls, she decided to vote strategically, and cast a ballot for the Liberals by ticking Thomas's name.Oliver is worried that less informed voters will be casting ballots Monday based on misinformation."

I worry about that too. Three things to note here :
The "long time Green Party supporter" in the Victoria riding decides to "vote strategically" for the Liberals even though :

1.  the Liberal candidate Cheryl Thomas had withdrawn from the race three weeks before
2.  the Liberals had come in third or fourth place in that riding in the past three elections
3. the voter's first choice, the Green Party, had come second in the byelection one year before and strategic vote proponents projected a similar ranking for this election. 

In the end, 8,489 votes were strategically cast for a Liberal candidate who had dropped out, more than the party received in the previous two elections, one of them a byelection, and more than the margin of difference between the first and second place NDP and Green candidates. 

Graphic from Wikipedia










Manipulating the strategic vote ...

A month ago, "10 ridings where strategic voting might decide the election" at Global News explained how Conservatives in this same Victoria riding would benefit from voting strategically for the Green Party in order to oust the NDP incumbent : 

"Conservative voters could vote strategically, if so inclined, in Victoria, where NDP MP Murray Rankin won a close byelection over the Green Party three years ago.

A Green Party win in Victoria wouldn’t directly help the Conservatives. But it would take away one seat from the NDP—and in an election this close, one riding could make a big difference.

Two months prior, former BC Premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff penned a column entreating people to eschew strategic voting and vote Green Party.
In the last provincial election, the BC Liberals bought a full page ad in the Victoria Times Colonist promoting the BC Green Party leader as a principled alternative to Christy Clark in a blatant attempt to split the vote between Greens and the NDP, then leading in the polls.

All voting is tactical. Strategic voting is the moniker commonly used to mean supporting a candidate other than your sincere preference in order to block a candidate or party you dislike.

Its popularity is helped by a media happily promoting a poll-driven "who's the most popular leader/" horse-race approach which results in voters imagining they vote in their local ridings for some distant party leader.  

In December in the HoC last year, Justin Trudeau voted against an NDP motion to bring in some form of mixed member proportional representation as recommended by the federal Law Commission, stating his personal preference for a ranked ballot system that would - he did not say - mostly benefit the Liberals. He then campaigned on ending the First-Past-the-Post system that just gave his party a majority government by the same percentage the Cons got theirs last time round. 

We'll see. Electoral reform explained through Lego

Update : Kai Nagata : Strategic voting didn't defeat Harper. Voter turnout did.
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Canada Votes 2015 - FPtP vs PropRep

2011 vs 2015

In 2011, Conservatives won 53.9% of the seats with 39.6% of the popular vote.

In 2015, Liberals won 54.4% of the seats with 39.5% of the popular vote.

In 2011, voter turnout was 61%.   In 2015, voter turnout was 68.5%.

900,000 voters unrepresented :

93.88 % of Green Party voters couldn’t elect anyone
76.78%  of Bloc voters couldn’t elect anyone
74.5% of NDP voters couldn’t elect anyone
50.98 % of Conservative voters couldn’t elect anyone
33.49% of Liberal voters couldn’t elect anyone



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Open letter to Stephen Harper

Dear Mr. Harper,

I live in BC with my husband and two little girls. I grew up in Calgary and have many friends and family members there. I’m white and in my early 40s. One of us is a stay at home parent, so we benefit 100% from the direct deposits in lieu of a National Childcare Program. We also benefit 100% from income splitting. And we can afford to take advantage of the increased allowance in our TFSAs.

In other words, we’re the picture of the family who benefits the most from your economic policies.

But we’re not voting Conservative on October 19th.

You see, you’ve misjudged us. We enjoy our standard of living, we work hard for it but it’s not the only thing that matters to us.

You assume we don’t care about our First Nations neighbours, or Canadians trying to bring their family members here from war torn countries. That we don’t care about less fortunate Canadians, our veterans, or scientists. You think we don’t mind that to save a few bucks and balance the books we axed the census, dumped decades of research from our libraries, cut funding to CBC, under-spent our budgets in important departments and closed coast guard stations. You figure we no longer want our lakes and rivers protected and that we don’t understand that climate change is a far greater risk to our way of life than Barbaric Cultural Practices.

You’ve underestimated us.

On October 19, we’re not voting for our bank balance. We’re voting for change because we want the caring Canada of our youth back. The Canada that supported our single mothers that gave us the opportunity to succeed in the first place.

Mary Cleaver

Vancouver

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How strategic is strategic voting?

Jamie Biggar of Leadnow.ca and David Bush of RankandFile.ca debate whether such a strategy is useful or effective. 
Good respectful discussion of the issues involved. 
You'll have to restart it from the beginning.

Transcript at The Real News Network
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G&M Endorses Harper's Perps with Perks Without Harper

Hilarious G&M editorial election endorsement today: "His party deserves to be re-elected. But after Oct. 19, he should quickly resign." 

In other words, as Antonia Zerbisias put it : "The flying monkeys but not the wicked witch"

Editor-in-Chief David Walmsley then went on Faceplant to perform the 'little man behind the curtain' sketch. He bombed.  #MoreGlobeEndorsements followed.

Munchkinland flashback! Here's the G&M's 2011 Harper election endorsement :

"Only Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have shown the leadership, the bullheadedness (let's call it what it is) and the discipline this country needs.

.... during his five years in office has demonstrated strength of character, resolve and a desire to reform ... 

Those who disdain the Harper approach should consider his overall record, which is good. The Prime Minister and the Conservative Party have demonstrated principled judgment ..."

With few exceptions, the rest of the media Munchkins also follow the yellow brick road of Harper endorsements with a yellow front page Con attack ad buy today ...as they have for the entire nine year Harper regime.

Saturday update : I'm updating the media graphic above as new editorial endorsements are published today.  Original graphic found at Reddit  

Also : Not only the Ottawa Citizen but the PostMedia chain is apparently running the same attack ad on their front page today, using Elections Canada's trademark yellow. Note : not merely an endorsement for the Cons, but an attack ad that mimics an Elections Canada notice.

Who are you getting your news from lately?
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Sunday update : 
National Observer : YELLOW STAIN : the bystander bigotry of newspaper endorsements
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Reversing the script on Harper

This is brilliant. Witty simple campaign ad from the guy running against Harper in Calgary-Heritage, formerly Calgary Southwest. 
Go on, play it.

Matt Masters Burgener was also the candidate behind Send Harper A Message, raising money for his campaign by getting people to sponsor space on his lawn signs for $50 with their own personal messages to Harper.

 Flipping the script with wit. Nicely done, Matt.     h/t Dave Cournoyer
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This is Canada ...

Pass this on. Get out and vote.

According to Elections Canada, 850,000 people voted at advance polls on Friday and 780,000 people voted on Saturday, a 34% increase over 2011. A good start.
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Not even remotely effing safe for work

continued ....
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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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THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF RMG

Prior to the 2011 federal election fraud/robocalls scandal, few Canadians had ever heard of CIMS, the Conservative Party of Canada’s national permanent voter-tracking database, or its close relationship to Responsive Marketing Group or RMG, the Conservatives' main GOTV phone bank and fundraising company used in that election by the CPC national campaign and 97 individual Conservative candidates.

Canadians did not know that the Conservative Party paid RMG $1.4million and provided them with a CIMS voters list and a script for its call centre employees to read to voters. That script, according to Canada Elections investigators, read in part : 

“Elections Canada has changed some voting locations at the last moment. To be sure, could you tell me the address of where you’re voting.”

This last in direct contravention of Elections Canada's request that "users of the dataset of all polling sites respect the following restrictions: that the dataset be used for internal purposes only; that it not be used to inform voters of their voting location."

As it happens, the percentage of voting stations across Canada that changed location in the final week of the election was just 0.003.

In their section on RMG in the 2014 Summary Investigation Report on Robocalls, Elections Canada reported that investigators who listened to the recorded live calls noted that “RMG provided wrong poll location information in 27% of the cases involving complainants.”

“In some cases the difference was a few kilometres; in several cases the difference was more than 100 kilometres. The furthest location, provided to an elector called twice by RMG, was 740 kilometres from the correct location.”

“From April 29 to May 1, 2011, returning officers in 11 electoral districts reported elector complaints of incorrect poll location information coming from Conservative Party callers. 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.”

“Investigators were told by the Conservative Party national campaign chair that Elections Canada had no authority to limit a party's use of the poll location data.”

The Conservative Party’s partnership with RMG dates back to 2003 when RMG founder and president Michael Davis pitched the idea of a fundraising machine attached to a national permanent CIMS database to Stephen Harper's mentor Tom Flanagan.

Mike Harris strategist Stewart Braddick came on board to head up Target Outreach, an affilliate firm providing "fundraising and direct voter contact solutions to U.S. Right of Centre Political Organizations". 
Greg Kaufman signed up with RMG in 2007. From his bio at RMG parent group iMarketing Solutions, where he became Chief Knowledge Officer in 2010 :

"Greg has extensive experience in IT management. For six years, he worked for the Ontario PC Party as part of the IT / Direct Voter Contact Team. There, he helped develop CIMS, a revolutionary political database tool that is in wide use today.

Following his time with the Ontario PC Party, Greg spent three years working for Elections Ontario as a manager in the register division, where he compiled and managed the Provincial Voters List."

Flanagan : “CIMS provided a receptacle for the hundreds of thousands of records generated by RMG’s large-scale calling programs.”

In 2009 Preston Manning at the Manning Centre for Building Democracy presented RMG founder Michael Davis 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."

In March 2010 RMG parent company iMarketing Solutions merged with Xentel, a company with an alarming history of lawsuits on both sides of the Canada/US border over its fundraising practices. That year they spent $1,839,000 on equipment to update their dialing platform and another $1,453,000 in 2011.

In the first quarter after the 2011 election, iMarketing Solutions posted $24M in revenue, but according to their Canadian Stock Exchange statement : "For the year ended December 31, 2011, the Company had a loss of $5,253,000."

A 2012 legal challenge supported by the Council of Canadians was based in part on the affidavit of Annette Desgagne, a RMG call centre worker who reported that three days before the 41st federal election she and her co-workers were given scripts to mislead voters on election day into going to the wrong location to vote.

From the Desgagne 2012 affidavit :

“The new scripts we were to read did not identify that we were calling on behalf of the Conservative Party nor did we mention the local Conservative candidate. The new script, as far as I can recall, was as follows: “Hello. My name is Annette Desgagne. I am calling from the Voter Outreach Centre. Elections Canada has made some last minute changes to the polling stations.”

Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton served motions to have the case thrown out of court before the supporting evidence had been filed. 
RMG CEO Andrew Langhorne, a former election campaign worker for Stephen Harper and seven years a Director of Voter Contact and Information Management for Premier Mike Harris and the Ontario PC Party, filed an affidavit in August calling Desgagne's affidavit "categorically false". 
The plaintiffs' suit to overturn election results in six ridings was unsuccessful and the court ascribed no blame to RMG.


Four months later on April 8 2013, RMG announced it was closing its call centres and laying off call centre employees, and four days after that iMarketing Solutions and all its 18 Canadian and American subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy protection in Canada and the US.
At the time they owed the Canadian federal government $1 million in unpaid taxes.

CEO Andrew Langhorne was sanguine :

“The nature of our business often necessitates ramping work up and down based on business requirements.”

And sure enough the 42nd federal election has brought them out above ground once again, now known as IMKT Direct Solutions in Canada and iMarketing Acquisitions in New Mexico. They are currently posting ads to hire call centre workers across Canada and Andrew Langhorne is once again launching those phone banks for Voter Outreach Centre, the name registered in February 2011 and used by RMG in the previous election as well. 

Households across Canada from Ottawa to BC reported receiving their calls beginning in December.
Port Alberni municipal councillor Chris Alemany got a call on August 4 :

“Hi, this is the Voter Outreach Centre for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. We would like to know if we can count on your support for Stephen Harper in the upcoming election”

His wife picked up another call 11 days later :

"Hi, this is _name of person_ with the Voter Outreach Centre. We would like to know if we can count on your vote for Stephen Harper in the upcoming election."

Councillor Alemany : "Note the difference from my call? They didn’t specifically identify the Voter Outreach Centre as being a part of the Stephen Harper campaign."

A new script or a bit of free lancing on the part of the call centre employee?
Either way, they did mention Steve in there so it's all still legal.

Operators are standing by...

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