Dismissing Conservative suggestions that a ‘rogue operator’ could be behind the ‘robocalls,’ interim Liberal leader Bob Rae said the real blame for any election trickery rests with the political culture the Prime Minister has created in the Tories.
Mr. Rae’s remarks came in response to a Postmedia News-Ottawa Citizen report that found a continuing Elections Canada investigation has traced the calls to a call centre with Conservative connections.
Mr. Harper was yesterday forced to deny he had any knowledge of the calls and said anyone found responsible would face the full force of the law: “In this case, our party has no knowledge of these calls,” he told reporters in Iqaluit. “It’s not part of our campaign,” he said.
Earlier Thursday, Jenni Byrne, the party’s campaign manager, issued a statement denying any connection. “The Conservative Party of Canada ran a clean and ethical campaign and would never tolerate such activity,” she said.
“The party was not involved with these calls and if anyone on a local campaign was involved they will not play a role in a future campaign.”
The Conservatives appear to be preparing to blame the calls on a young campaign worker.
As Postmedia reported, they have launched their own internal investigation, led by Arthur Hamilton, a Toronto lawyer.
A Conservative-friendly media organization cited two anonymous Conservative party sources and reported that a staff member who had worked on the campaign of Guelph, Ont., Conservative candidate Marty Burke was a person of interest to the investigation.
The Sun News website ran a photograph of a Burke campaign worker, Michael Sona, standing next to Harper at what appears to be a campaign event, claiming he was being investigated by the party in relation to the calls. The photo is credited to the Prime Minister’s Office.
Sona, 23, served as Burke’s communications director during the campaign and is now an executive assistant to rookie Conservative MP Eve Adams on Parliament Hill.
Postmedia News contacted Sona earlier this week and asked him a series of questions about the robocalls, but he did not respond.
Sona was not in Adams’ office on Thursday afternoon. Asked if he would be returning, another staffer said, “Maybe.”
Mr. Rae dismissed the naming of Sona as a tactic, noting that he was identified only after the story surfaced.
“Why would they only find the guy today, after the story has come out? They’ve known about this allegation a long time.”
Rae said the real blame for any election trickery rests with the political culture Harper has created in the party.
“The prime minister has created a Nixonian culture,” Rae said. “This stuff doesn’t happen unless the boss lets it happen.”
“He has allowed to seep into his party and into his organization a culture of attack and, frankly, a culture of deception and dirty tricks, where almost anything goes.”
Sona made headlines in April when he was accused of trying to grab a ballot box used at a special poll station set up for students at the University of Guelph. The Conservative had claimed the polling station was illegal.
Reached in Guelph, Sona’s father said he was unaware his son was being named in connection to the calls.
“He’s not lying or anything,” said Frank Sona, a Guelph minister.
“He’s not a liar. I know he’s very strong principled and stands up for what he believes. I’m sure that’s what he was doing during the campaign.”
Chris Pennings, a volunteer on the Burke campaign, said he knew Sona but had no indication he was involved in any robocalling. “He struck me as a pretty good guy,” Pennings said.
Elections Canada tracked phone records to an Edmonton automated dialing company called Racknine Inc. after an elaborate digital chase that began with a single telephone number that showed up on call displays. Investigators traced it to a disposable “burner” cellphone registered in area code 450, in the city of Joliette, northeast of Montreal.
Using telephone billing records and Racknine server logs, Elections Canada investigators identified the Racknine account holder who sent out the calls.
Matt Meier, owner of Racknine, said he was unaware one of his customers was involved in the calls until contacted by Elections Canada in November.
“We couldn’t possibly have known that it was Racknine that was the initiator of the fake calls,” he said. “I had no idea what the content of the calls were.”
The company does not monitor outgoing calls made by customers through the automated service, Meier said. He estimates 10 million or more phone calls from about 200 accounts went out during the campaign.
Meier and his company are co-operating fully with the probe, he said.
He said he knows whose account was used for the calls, but could not reveal the owner because of client confidentiality and concerns about interfering with the investigation. He said it was someone “down East” — meaning Ontario or Quebec.
The RCMP’s role in the investigation is unclear, but it appears the force is assisting Elections Canada. RCMP officers have approached the Conservative Party, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The robocalls received in Guelph were recorded in female voices in both French and English. They told voters their polling stations had moved to a shopping mall in the city’s downtown, where parking was scarce.
To make the calls, the caller would have had an account with Racknine.
Andrew Prescott, a Burke volunteer and also a Facebook friend of Sona’s, had an account with Racknine through his company, Prescoan.
But Prescott appeared to have been trying to correct the mischief calls. Meier said Prescott’s account was used on election day to send out a message warning supporters to disregard the fake Elections Canada calls.
Prescott could not be reached Thursday, but has denied any connection to the original bogus calls. “I was not involved in the illegal phone calls,” he said in an emailed statement. “I am a legitimate user of Rack9’s services, and have been for several years.”
During the election campaign, a Conservative Party spokesman denied any Tory campaigns were involved, saying “these calls are not from local or federal Conservative candidates or the party” — a claim that now appears to be false.
Liberal supporters in a dozen ridings, mostly in Ontario, reported mysterious harassing calls, often late in the evening or early in the morning, where rude callers from a phone bank pretended to be working for the Liberals. The calls seem to have been an attempt to alienate Liberal voters in ridings where the Liberals and Conservatives seemed to be in close contests.
The continuing Elections Canada probe is led by former RCMP fraud investigator Al Mathews, who previously worked on investigations of former Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski and former prime minister Brian Mulroney in the Airbus affair.
The Conservatives’ internal investigation is being conducted by Arthur Hamilton, who has been the party’s lead lawyer for years, making representations to the Gomery Commission and investigating MP Helena Guergis and Rahim Jaffer for the party in the “busty hookers” saga.
Hamilton did not respond to a request for comment, but sources say he is interviewing people who worked on the Conservative campaign.
In addition to Racknine’s work for Alberta Conservative candidates in the federal election, Meier also has been involved with the provincial Wildrose Party in Alberta. Racknine’s voice-broadcasting service, marketed as 2call.ca, hosted a hospitality suite at the most recent Conservative convention in Ottawa in June.
Meier says the firm is non-partisan and is trying to help Elections Canada.
“What I provided to Elections Canada was comprehensive,” he said in an interview this week. “They know everything. They have every single message recorded by the individuals who did this. That’s something I hope will assist them greatly in determining who made these calls.”
He realized his firm was linked to the deceptive calls only when Mathews showed up unannounced at his company’s office on 50th Street in Edmonton last November, armed with an order to produce records.
Elections Canada spokesman John Enright said the commissioner does not comment on ongoing investigations, but confirmed an investigation into “some complaints regarding unsolicited telephone calls in which a violation of the [Elections] Act may have occurred.”
Mathews has travelled to Guelph to interview people who received the calls on election day, including United Church minister Sue Campbell, who is the wife of Green Party candidate John Lawson.
Campbell had just returned home after voting on the morning of election day when a call came in saying her polling station had been moved to the Quebec Street Mall in downtown Guelph.
“At first, I thought. ‘Oh, that’s strange,’” Campbell recalls. “Upon reflection, I thought, ‘This can’t be right. Why on Earth would it change on the day election?’”
She wrote down the digits on the caller ID — the number in Quebec — and called Elections Canada to complain.
Internal Elections Canada emails obtained under Access to Information legislation show officials were rattled by the calls.
At 11:06 a.m., election officer Anita Hawdur sent an email to to legal counsel Karen McNeil with the header: “URGENT Conservative campaign office communications with electors.” Hawdur reported that returning officers were calling to ask about the calls. McNeil responded by asking Hawdur to alert Rennie Molnar, the deputy chief electoral officer. He later emailed Michel Roussel, a senior director: “This one is far more serious. They have actually disrupted the voting process.”
Around the same time, Guelph Liberal MP Frank Valeriote got a call at his home, telling him that his campaign staff was hearing from Liberal supporters in the riding about the same kind of bogus Elections Canada calls.
What they first thought were a few nuisance calls, the Valeriote campaign recognized was an orchestrated campaign to discourage his supporters from voting.
Voters who ended up in the wrong place and were turned away were unlikely to persist and go to another polling station. A campaign worker was quickly dispatched to the mall, armed with a binder of polling maps, so he could redirect supporters back to the right place. Within an hour, more than 100 voters had turned up at the mall.
The phoney calls also were causing headaches for campaign staff working for Conservative candidate Marty Burke’s campaign. Radio stations were passing on a warning from Elections Canada about the erroneous messages.
Long-distance phone bills obtained by the Citizen and Postmedia show that the Guelph campaign called Matt Meier’s cellphone once at 11:08 a.m. and then the Racknine main number at 7:11 p.m.
Andrew Prescott, a volunteer with the Burke campaign, used Racknine to send out calls warning supporters about fake Elections Canada messages.
Though he used Racknine to make these calls, there is no indication Prescott was involved in the original mischief.
“I was not involved in the illegal phone calls. I am a legitimate user of Racknine’s services, and have been for several years,” he said in an email. “I am a devoted believer in free and fair elections. I would never partake in ANY illegal activities, and openly advocate for everyone to play by the rules.”
Meier confirmed Prescott’s story and said he is satisfied Prescott was not involved in the fake Elections Canada calls.
Opposition MPs pounced on the Postmedia News-Ottawa Citizen report about the robocalls and said that, despite the denials, it was clear the Tories stood to benefit from what appeared to be a co-ordinated effort to discourage Liberal or NDP supporters from getting to the ballot box.
Interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel issued a letter the party sent to Commissioner of Canada Elections William Corbett, asking him to investigate fully.
But an Elections Canada investigation, aided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, has been under way since immediately after the May 2 vote.
The Conservatives refused to say how much business they did with Racknine during the spring campaign. An invoice filed with Elections Canada shows the company billed the party’s national campaign for voice-broadcasting work done through its service. The party passed on part of the costs for a set of robocalls to Harper’s local campaign in Calgary Southwest.
New Democrat MP Pat Martin said the calls were a “disgusting” interference with the electoral process and said there could be “no more heinous crime against democracy.”
Martin said it was not credible to suggest the campaign of phoney calls on election day was co-ordinated by “a couple of hillbillies in Edmonton” acting alone.
“It was not some rogue punk out in the boondocks. It’s just not plausible.”
Martin denounced the dirty tricks calls as a tactic borrowed from U.S. Republicans.
Liberal MP John McCallum said his party doesn’t have a “smoking gun pointing at Stephen Harper” but he encouraged the Conservatives to co-operate with the investigation.
He said the election calls and other harassing calls in Ontario ridings likely cost at least one Liberal MP a seat. In Guelph, however, Liberal incumbent Frank Valeriote increased his margin of victory over 2008, despite the calls he says were aimed at his supporters.
Opposition MPs admitted there is little chance a parliamentary committee would look at the use of the fraudulent robocalls as the Conservative majority gives them control over committee agendas.
Opposition parties have criticized the Conservatives in the past for allowing young staffers to take the fall for wrongdoing, saying they are too ready to “throw them under the bus” to protect senior politicians.
In 2010, Sebastien Togneri, a staffer for then-public works minister Christian Paradis, resigned over allegations that he inappropriately meddled with an access-to-information request.
That same year, Conservative MP Kelly Block fired young staffer Russell Ulyatt after he leaked a confidential pre-budget report to Conservative lobbyists.
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: postmedia
No comments:
Post a Comment