RoboCon : Michael Sona and Sun News Network

Former Guelph Con Party communications director Michael Sona relates how he was sitting in his Hill office on Feb. 23 2012 when he was shocked to hear Sun News reporter Brian Lilley fingering him on air for the Guelph robocalls election fraud. Sona  : 

 "I contacted a few people at [Con] headquarters and I just said I wanna know what's going on. Like why am I being thrown out here because Sun News is you know kind of an alternate method of getting press releases and other stories out from the party, right? I mean everyone knows that, right? It's just a standard comm's tactic. And I knew if this is on Sun News, this isn't just some you know hack journalist picking up some story that he's fabricated in his head. This is someone. Someone is feeding him this."

Sona eventually hears back from Con Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton who tells him not to worry about anonymous sources.

Excerpted from that 2012 Sun News broadcast with Brian Lilley :

"The Conservatives have someone identified already on who they think this could be. ... We've been talking to sources here for the Ottawa bureau for Sun News Network and they're pointing towards on individual in particular. His name is Michael Sona. ... We're waiting on an official statement on this but sources are saying at this point it appears it is this one individual, a Michael Sona, who has associations with the campaign, may have worked on a local campaign, but he's not, was not with the national Conservative campaign. So then it becomes a question of was this a directive from the top, was this someone acting on their own locally to try and help their candidate win? ... "

Lilley says Con lawyer Arthur Hamilton is already on it - praises him as a "no-nonsense guy"

"But it does look at this point that it was Michael Sona who was behind this ...."

A statement is then read out from Steve's political director Jenni Byrne denying Con Party headquarters involvement. Back to Lilley :

"Sources say that it does look like it was Michael Sona who was behind this but no confirmation for sure, no charges laid at this point and we'll wait and see what Mr. Sona himself has to say. We'll be reaching out to him today of course as well."

After the broadcast and a phone call from Jenni Byrne, Con MP Eve Adams asked Sona to hand in his resignation.

DefMin Peter MacKay answering a question on the Guelph robocalls three days later :

"I think they've identified the individual that was involved in this ... and that individual is no longer in the employment of the party."

Eye-bleach graffic above inspired by the cover of Brian Lilley's popular runaway! runaway! bestcellar book CBC Exposed  which accuses the CBC of being the state broadcaster : 

"This book takes on the holy grail of the Canadian media landscape and lays bare the truth about CBC. Reckless reporting at the state broadcaster has ruined lives ...

"Ruined lives" indeed. Michael Sona, forced to resign his job on the Hill the day of that Sun News broadcast, is still waiting for resolution a year later.

Big City Lib blogged on Thursday that Harpercrat Action Plan ads appear to account "for well over half of the adverts on the Sun TV website."  

"Does this amount to a government subsidy...the Harper Gov. throwing money to a message friendly news service?  And if so, does that make Sun TV Canada's REAL state broadcaster?"

Certainly the Conservative Party seems to think so. 
Just before the last federal election, Patrick Muttart, Harper's former deputy chief of staff and chief marketing strategist for the Conservative Party of Canada, forwarded what appeared to be a photo of Michael Ignatieff in Kuwait in US battle fatigues on to former Harper spokesy now founder and VP of Sun News Kory Teneycke - presumably for election news publication. Teneycke caught it in time.
Muttart, who had moved to the Canada/ US practice of a US marketing firm, told reporters that at the time, he was both an unpaid advisor to Sun News to launch their TV network and "on the Con payroll as a consultant to the party's election war room."

CBC is the national public broadcaster. Sun News Network, as Michael Sona puts it, is an alternate method of getting stories out from the party.

Michael Sona's video interview with McMaher on Friday , btw, well worth a full listen.
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A word from our new Ambassador of Religious Freedom

"Religion, artificially divorced from the public sphere, makes for an impoverished politics at best, and a benighted political class at worst."

Our new Ambassador of Religious Freedom, Andrew P. W. Bennett, 2 years a dean of Augustine College,  is passionate about returning religious discourse to public life.
Our "official secular religion", he argues two years ago here, "violates freedom of religious expression." 

Huh.

In April 2011, ImmMin Jason Kenney announced that Canada's religious freedom office "would be modeled after the Office of International Religious Freedom within the US Department of State," whose head is styled as an ambassador. 

Two days ago, in announcing our ambassador for the new Office of Religious Freedom within Foreign Affairs, Harper "denied the office would be modeled after its U.S. counterpart, which has been accused of being biased towards Christians". 

Really?
A closed-door ORF Stakeholders Conference in 2011 chaired by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and the following four out of six Christian panelists advised the government 

• Thomas Farr, the State Department's first director of the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom. Catholic
• Father Raymond De Souza, Roman Catholic priest, NattyPost columnist, and on the Board of Directors at The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs
• Anne Brandner, former policy analyst with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada., which "promotes Biblical principles on matters of public policy"
• Don Hutchinson, vice-president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, who yesterday suggested : "A key part of the ambassador’s job should be to help formulate immigration policy."
• Frank Dimant, CEO of B'nai Brith Canada and Chair of the Department of Modern Israel Studies at Charles McVety's Evangelical Canada Christian College .
• Susanne Tamas of the Baha'i Community of Canada.

Our Ambassador of Religious Freedom has a Ph.D in political science and has been a policy research & analysis manager at Natural Resources Canada and senior political risk analyst at Export Development Canada. He is currently working part-time towards a theology degree in Ottawa.

Which of the above credentials do you think will be most useful to him in defending "freedom of religious expression" against our "official secular religion" ?

Update -- DJ : 'Acids of Modernity' at a Christian Finishing School Ha!
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RoboCon : RMG and the US Right to Life Committee

--- updated below ---

In August 2004, three telemarketing companies - RMG (Responsive Marketing Group), Xentel DM, and Univision Marketing Group - jointly petitioned the Governor General to have not-for-profit organizations and their fundraisers exempted from certain CRTC regulations they felt were unfair to the success of their trade. Citing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, "freedom of expression", and the "moral rights of authors" over their copyrighted telephone scripts, they objected to :

"the requirement that tele-canvassing service providers identify themselves, their organization, and their organization’s client right at the beginning of the call"

because, among othe reasons :

"if a recipient other than the intended recipient hears the name of a not- for-profit or a cause that he or she is not supportive of, there is a high likelihood that that not-for-profit is vetted before reaching the intended recipient. The not-for-profits most affected by this are those which represent views that society deems controversial or not mainstream, for example: gun control, women's rights, abortion, environmental issues, politics or religious issues."

Women's rights are controversial?

So given that RMG described itself in the brief as "providing direct marketing services to non-profit and political organizations across Canada and a relatively small number of North American corporations" and on its website as working "exclusively with right-of-centre campaigns", I googled up RMG and abortion.

NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE COMMITTEE, INC. of WASHINGTON, DC will be conducting a telephone solicitation campaign beginning November 23, 2009 and ending July 26, 2010. NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE COMMITTEE, INC. has hired RMG USA, INC. of TORONTO, ON, to conduct the campaign.  According to the fundraising contract filed with the State, NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE COMMITTEE, INC. will receive a minimum of 1 per cent of the gross funds raised from this solicitation. RMG USA, INC. will be required to file a financial report on the results of this solicitation campaign within 90 days after the end of the campaign.

Financial reports were duly filed in Washington, Colorado, Connecticut, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Washington, New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Ohio, California ... ok, all the states apparently.

Here's Colorado's in 2011 : 

That 1% to Charity is a bit of a misnomer as the contract signed by NRL Exec Director David N O'Steen and RMG's Andrew Langhorne states : "The main Agreement between RMG and Charity is not a percentage-based agreement ... and the language is provided only for the purposes of complying with the contract disclosure requirements of the states ..."  
Instead RMG USA was paid a fixed hourly fee to contact NRLC's house file of donors to recruit them as volunteers in a phone/mail/online pledge drive to enlarge the NRLC donor membership.

And that "USA" after RMG's name? RMG founder Michael M Davis incorporated RMG USA, Inc. in Ontario in March 2008 under RMG's then 1235 Bay Street address. 

Coincidentally, there is another unrelated telemarketing/data-mining company based in Richmond Virginia called Response Marketing Group (rmg-usa.com) who once had an office in Toronto many years ago called Interactive Marketing Group .

Update : It's a small small small telemarketing world.
Steven Hubley, founder of Univision Marketing mentioned at the top of the post, later became RMG's VP of Business Development. From his bio at left bank international where he is a partner :

"Founded in 1988, RMG has been a leader in high quality, high response telefundraising. RMG merged with Xentel in 2010 and their fundraising division, [is] now known as Engage Interactive " 

RMG's parent organization iMarketing Solutions Group lists Engage Interactive as a subsidiary.
Engage Interactive President Marianne Mulders is RMG's President of Non-Profit and Relationship Management, and was formerly listed as President of RMG USA.
Len Wolstenholme, spokesperson  for Xentel for over 20 years and now Chief Compliance Officer of iMmarketing Solutions Group, is listed on Engage Interactive's Meet the Management page.

In August 2012, Xentel advised the West Virginia Sec. of State's office that its new head office address was at 700 W. Virginia Street, Suite 700, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is the same address as the US office for both Engage Interactive and another iMarketing Solutions Group subsidiary - Target Outreach : 

"For the past 15 years the principals of Target Outreach have helped Republicans win."  

Xentel's Sept. 2012 Renewal of Charity Registration at the US Sec. of State lists David Winograd of Mequon Wisconsin as President of Xentel. Winograd is also President of iMarketing Solutions.
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Ratz abandoning ship

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Sixth Estate celebrates Pope Benedict XVI’s tenure.
I hadn't realized Bennie had annointed two Canadians to sainthood for performing miracles - one of which involved a cure consisting of prayer and antibiotics. Heh. Go. 

DAMMIT JANET! does the Best of Bennie.
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RoboCon : Do you have a cat?

30 seconds of Red Dwarf nicely illustrates the Cons' 'evolving' versions of their no-we-didn't-ok-then-yes-alright-we-did shenanigans this week after they were cornered with evidence they were behind the RackNine push-poll robocalls to Saskatchewans to foment opposition to proposed new riding boundaries. 

Seems despite what Steve says about 75% public support for his version of "Saskatchewan values", submissions to the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission up to that point "almost unanimously voiced opposition to the continued use of hybrid urban-rural districts in Saskatchewan" and would support five new urban ridings.
Urban ridings - you know, the kind that don't reliably vote Con.

Regina Con MP Tom Lukiwski immediately threw Steve's chief political operative Jenni Byrne under the bus for the robocalls -which was a bit of a surprise until you remember that in addition to being the Regina MP and deputy house leader, Lukiwski is also a member of PROC, the parliamentary committee ( 7 Cons, 4 NDP, and 1 Lib) which will take a run at the proposed redistricting report sometime next year.
Hence his attempt to distance himself and his committee from any accusations of complicity in the Con robocall shenanigans while simultaneously diverting Con Party heat away from himself for not being on top of the commission's preliminary report in the first place.

Alice Funke explains :

"To local Conservative Party activists in Saskatchewan it meant that party headquarters had dropped the ball on the pre-submission phase, and that from that point forward they would be fighting a rear-guard action. Fingers were pointed during a behind-closed-doors meeting for over an hour, with Ottawa bearing the brunt of the blame and resentment.
Party Operations Director Jenni Byrne is said to have demanded in return that she wanted to see 8,000 submissions in the public hearing phase against the ending of the rurban seat boundaries."

800 identical postcards attacking the urban seat boundaries were subsequently received by the committee.

Because despite our crappy first-past-the-post system, new urban ridings might not support a near-Con sweep in Saskatchewan like the one in the last federal election :
Cons :   256,004 votes     (13 seats)
NDP :   147,084 votes     (0 seats)
Liberals :   38,981 votes   (1 seat)

Alice has a theory about those covert robocalls :

"It might have been part one of a two-stage process, where you run a push-poll to plant the information, and then follow it up with a legitimate poll to “capture public opinion” on the basis of the information just planted. Anyways, if that was the plan it likely wouldn’t work now.`

Meanwhile, RackNine, hapless home of Pierre Poutine and the latest batch of robocalls in Saskatchewan, is continuing to help Elections Canada in their 650-day-and-counting investigation into election fraud and voter suppression, and when the independent Electoral Boundaries Commission finishes its report, it will be sent on to Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand for review and implementation.

Alice's very excellent post at Pundits' Guide is well worth a full read, Sixth Estate is also on it, and Saskboy got one of those recent RackNine robocalls.

So, Jenni Byrne ... do you have a cat?
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( Friday : Edited twice for clarity)
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Sun News Exposed

" Sun News has been a strong voice supporting pro-life, pro-family and limited government ideals. This is what my show, Byline, has been about from the beginning," wrote Sun News host Brian Lilley to select supporters. "We are asking friends to help us out by signing our petition which will tell the CRTC that Sun News is a valued service that all Canadians should have access to."

Or rather : Canadians will be forced to pay for if they successfully petition the government to force 'free market' companies into doing business with Sun News.

So who answered the call?

Well, as already noted first by Alberta Diary : LifeSite: Sun News asks pro-lifers to support 'do or die' application.

The anti-choice Campaign Life Coalition : Sign the petition to keep Sun News Network on the Air

Canadian Shooting Sports Assoc. : Attention firearms enthusiasts -- please vote NOW to keep Sun News Network on the air

Catholic Canada : Help Sun News get a fair shake

Senator Patrick Brazeau : Dude, how many more ways can I say this: I. Support. Sun. News. Getting. Mandatory. Carriage. (With associated fees.)"

While over at Counterjihad!, if you scroll down a bit under
Breaking News! – FOIA response confirms Obama using stolen Social Security number, 
you'll find Canadians! Sun News needs your help!  

"Our rivals are doing everything in their power to stop us from getting a new broadcast licence. We’re used to their tactics, but we can’t let them get away with this. We need your support. We need you to take action.
Right now we’re getting the short end of the stick. Many local cable providers are refusing to offer Sun News! In fact, we’re only allowed in 4 out of 10 households in Canada and that’s not fair."

Along with alerts in Sun Media Corp's 43 daily newspapers and over 250 community weekly papers across the country, the largest press group in Canada, and CanoeTV, Canoe.ca., plus the daily harangues from Spun News itself.
Quite the little support group they have going there.

About that constant Sun News refrain: "only available in 4 out of 10 Canadian households."

Fagstein : Fact-checking the debate over Sun News

According to the latest CRTC Communications Monitoring Report, the major providers (Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, Cogeco and Bell) combine for 10.2 million subscribers out of 11.8 million total. According to the same report, 80% of subscribers have digital service, so that means at least 8 million of the 12 million (two thirds) could add Sun News to their service if they wanted to.

So I guess they don't want to, huh? Probably don't want to be forced to either.

Michael Geist  : CRTC should put consumers first and drop ‘must carry’ requirements

"CRTC - stop treating Canadians as ATMs for the broadcasters by dropping mandatory distribution altogether, while requiring broadcast distributors to offer all licensed channels to their subscribers in a pick-and-pay format so that at long last consumers get to decide what they want to watch and pay for."

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Paging Snuffleupagus to the SunNews white courtesy petition

The last time Sun News needed help with an online petition, Snuffleupagus and Homer Simpson were there to help, mysteriously adding their names  to 80,000 others on a "Stop Fox News North" Avaaz petition in 2010, along with a number of real people like Kady and Stephen Maher who didn't sign it.

Sun News mastermind, Kornkob ethanol lobbyist, and Steve's former director of communications Kory Teneycke 'discovered' the fraudulent names and wrote it up in his Sun News column on Sept 3 2010 in a bid to discredit the petition ....  only to get busted by Kady who pointed out the names on the petition were not published so how did he know about them then, huh?

Kory, who had wanted a Fox News for Canada as far back as 2003 and in March 2009 went with boss  Harper to meet with Fox News magnates Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in New York, resigned unexpectedly from Sun News four days after his Homer/Snuffy column, but returned as Sun News VP three and a half months later.

The very same day Homer and Snuffy were helping out Sun News with their bogus petition entries, Kory went on CBC's Power and Politics :

"We are not nor have we ever asked for mandatory carriage of this station where Canadians would have to be obliged to pay. We are saying that we would like to have it offered but theoretically it could be carried by no one ... these are all private sector negotiations." 

Or, as he put it in his Homer/Snuffy column :

"Sun TV News is not, nor has it ever, asked for “mandatory carriage” by cable or satellite companies. As the critics correctly point out, this would be tantamount to a tax on everyone with cable or satellite service"

Well that was then; this is now. 
Now they are asking the CRTC for exactly that - mandatory carriage to be included in every basic cable package in Canada plus guaranteed placement on the lower end of the dial. Because it turns out the 'free market' they go on about so relentlessly turns out to be just another of the many many obstacles they have to overcome on their path to Spun News greatness, like Ezra wearing that orange wig above to mock Jack Layton's funeral.

Sun News Network is arguing its signal must be broadcast into every Canadian home if it is ever going to recover from losses that have already reached $17-million a year.

This would generate about $18-million a year for the network ...

... sparking a whole slew of "then cancel my cable" comments under the G&M article.

Sun News argues that many Canadians have expressed enthusiasm for its conservative commentary-intensive programming, and would watch the channel regularly, but they don’t know it even exists. The digital cable or satellite connections currently required to see it haven’t been adopted by enough viewers in the senior citizen demographic that Quebecor concedes it is largely appealing to.

So Sun News has put up its own petition to the CRTC, presumably appealing to the angry racist misogynist xenophobic pro-gun pro-christian anti-choice anti-environment anti-union anti-gay anti-pot anti-Quebec anti-government anti-Roma anti-FN anti-Islam anti-arts tough-on-crime "senior citizen demographic" who "don't know it even exists" to lend their support. 

Well ok then. Maybe Homer and Snuffy could help out here.

Update : Arghh. Alberta Diary : SUN NEWS PLEADS WITH ANTI-CHOICE GROUP TO BACK ITS QUEST FOR 'RIGHT TO LIFE' SUBSIDY

Brian Lilley : "Sun News is the strongest voice for the pro-life cause on television in Canada. Bar none."

Sun VP Teneycke : " we need to demonstrate a groundswell of support for Sun News, and the readers of LifeSiteNews can help."

You can submit your opinion on SunNews' application directly to the CRTC here.
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Christy Clark's Big Fat Tarsands Fundraisers

Our national media seems pretty exercised about Alberta tarsands bigwigs and political insiders throwing a fundraiser in Calgary for our unelected Premier Christy Clark's Liberals to slag off on the NDP :

CBC : Albertans hold fundraiser for BC Liberals
G&M : Clark defends out-of-province fundraising for B.C. Liberal candidate
FPost : Alberta powerbrokers throw lifeline to B.C. premier as threat of tougher pipeline fight from NDP looms
Sun : B.C. Liberals tap Calgary crowd for election funds
Edmonton Journal : Alberta Tories helping to raise cash for beleaguered B.C. Liberals

They do know that last October, Chrusty went straight from her "frosty" meeting with Alberta's Alison Redford in which she loudly promised to protect BC's environment from Alberta pipelines, directly to a fundraiser at the Calgary Petroleum Club, also hosted by the same Murray Edwards, chairman of Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and exactly these same Alberta dudes, don't they? And that the year before on October 20, 2011, a $500-a-plate fundraiser was held for her, again at the Calgary Petroleum Club. 

They do realize that Chrusty's 2011 October Alberta fundraiser was set up by her then chief of staff Ken Boessenkool, formerly Tarsands Harper's chief of staff, right?

They have noticed that it was Encana's Gwyn Morgan who smoothed over the transition from the unre-electable Gordo to the unelected Premier Chrusty - the same Encana who have donated over a half a million dollars to Chrusty's Liberals in the last 3 years. Right?

Oh well, if Calgary could hold a $1000-a-plate fundraiser to elect John McCain for president in 2008, I guess Chrusty might be worth $125-a-plate to them in 2013.

h/t MoS and BCLib

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Update : RossK brings the "foreign special interests and their deep pocket puppets" angle to Encana's financial support for Christy. But come on, Ross, PetroChina buying 49.9% of an Encana project with an additional $1B to come over the next four years falls a whole .1% within Steve's new foreign ownership guidelines. So we're good here and no review required says Industry Canada.
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RoboConstructions: Del Mastro and the GeoVote

Update June 13 : The above vid has been taken down from Youtube so here's CTV's Youtube version of it :



Back to original January post .... Dean Del Mastro and his $21,000 personal cheque to Frank Hall at Holinshed Research Group for voter ID/GOTV services are back in the news tonight as McMaher reports the RCMP are investigating Steve's hapless parliamentary secretary/RoboCon pointman for his various 2008 election campaign financing irregularities and their apparent ham-fisted cover-up.

The  details   were   extensively   covered   back   in   June, including Holinshed's lapsed Feb 2 2010 lawsuit against Del Mastro for non-payment of use of their CIMS-like interactive voter-tracking system called GeoVote, and the six figure Canada Economic Action Plan cheque Holinshed received to develop GeoVote in 2009/10 ... before Holinshed dropped off the map themselves in 2011.


I haven't seen the vid up top of Frank Hall explaining the GeoVote system in 2008 posted anywhere else before so here ya go. In this demonstration, Mr Hall pinpoints locations of how people voted in the Don Valley West riding :

"What we've done is put a face on it and a geographic location on it and a contact that becomes personal or personable all of a sudden because you can take that data and use it - it puts a name and a face and a geographic location on something and that's powerful."

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RoboCon: RMG/Xentel/iMarketing Solutions revisited

Earlier this year the Cons' principal voter contact company Responsive Marketing Group came under heavy media scrutiny for

•  its role as a partner in the Cons' CIMS data collection on Canadian voters used by 97 Con candidate campaigns in the last election,
• allegations made by at least one former RMG call centre employee that their scripts were directing voters to the wrong polling stations, 
• aggressive fundraising tactics for the Cons with pensioners, and
• its merger with Xentel.

In March RMG put out a press release protesting the unfairness of being smeared by its association with Xentel, a company with a dodgy  robo/live call   history in both Canada and the US, that RMG had "acquired" two years earlier.
McMaher :

The company now operates under the umbrella of iMarketing Solutions Group. During the election campaign in the spring of 2011, the merged company was run by co-CEOs Michael Davis, formerly of RMG, and Michael Platz, formerly of Xentel 

As I wrote at the time, what was less clear was which company had acquired the other, with most news reports, like Bloomberg's Business Week for example, describing RMG as "a subsidiary of Xentel" and iMarketing Solutions as an "alternate name of Xentel".

Three weeks ago, iMarketing Solutions Group published its Canadian Stock Exchange Listing.
In the following excerpts, iMS is "The Company".

"On October 28, 2010, the shareholders of the Company approved a name change of the Company to iMarketing Solutions Group Inc. from Xentel DM Incorporated (“Xentel”) as an initial step in rebranding and reorganizing the operations. 

The Company merged with RMG on March 3, 2010. 

On behalf of political clients, the Company conducts direct tele-service contact with potential voters to assist in the assessment and evaluation of political and consumer attitudes.
The Company continues the practice of subcontracting some of its work.  This is done on a strategically selective basis where the subcontractor has superior data in a specific area and/or can execute the work on a more economical basis.    

Marketing List Rentals : The Company rents selected proprietary databases to not-for-profit organizations where they do not compete with our normal business activities. These databases are developed through our normal course of business. 

Re the CRTC's Do Not Call Lists, operated by Bell Canada :

A number of exemptions were made in the DNCL due to efforts of the Company and a group of diverse stakeholders. The following types of calls are exempt from using the DNCL:

(a) calls made by or for registered political campaigns, associations, candidates or persons seeking a political nomination,
(b) calls made to parties with whom the caller has an existing business relationship,
(c) calls made by or on behalf of a registered charity
(d) calls made for market research purposes

Throughout the report are numerous allusions to financial hardship with "substantial doubt that the Company will be able to continue as a going concern" without "access to additional financing".
Equipment purchases of $1,839,000 and $1,453,000 in 2010 and 2011 were "related mostly to the ongoing update of the Company’s dialing platform and information technologies".
The principals are making out ok though, with compensation packages of well over $½ million each  for Chairman Platz and President Winograd for 2010, not including their directors' fees.

David A. Winograd in Wisconsin was President of US operations of Xentel DM since 2003 - now President of iMarketing Solutions.
Michael Platz, Chairman, CEO, and "founder of the predecessor company Xentel", served as Co-Chief Executive Officer of iMS til Sept 2011 and Chairman til Jan. 2012. Now just a iMS director.
Andrew Langhorne, Mike Harris Voter Contact Director for 7 years and COO of RMG since Nov. 2006, now COO for iMS. 
Michael M. Davis, founder of RMG, is "Managing Director, Political"
Listed among iMS's 20 subsidiary companies like RMG and Xentel Inc - half of them Canadian and half US - is Stewart Braddick's Target Outreach for Republican campaigns.

Back in 2005, Sean Holman at Public Eye Online reported on a heavily loaded Xentel telemarketing poll leading up to the Vancouver civic elections. Their questions :

Number One: "The Vancouver Sun today says that the campaign is getting dirty and scare tactics are starting to fly. Does this make you more or less likely to vote?"  

Two: "It says in the Sun that Jim Green left COPE in tatters and with a great big debt. Does this make you more or less likely to vote?"  

And three: "Both Sam Sullivan and Jim Green are accusing each other of dirty tricks and negative campaigning. Does this make you more or less likely to vote?"

Xentel has merged with the Cons #1 voter marketing firm - working, as RMG puts it, "exclusively with right-of-centre campaigns ".  Does this make you more or less likely to vote?
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