Mr. Holland, who lost to former ambassador and Conservative star candidate Chris Alexander by just more than 3,000 votes, told The Hill Times there were so many calls inundating the riding he does not believe the cost could have been covered by the local Conservative campaign, and that many or most of them must have come from outside the riding.
An assistant to Mr. Alexander, Alexandra Day, told The Hill Times in an email she was unable to reach Mr. Alexander Tuesday evening to see if he wished to respond to Mr. Holland’s statement.
Mr. Holland cited other voting irregularities, which his campaign noted to local Elections Canada polling officials along with the inexplicable phone barrage, that included members of the riding’s growing Afghan community turning up to vote, but finding their names had already been counted as having cast ballots.
“The riding was bombarded with calls, and in every conceivable language. It certainly struck us that the cost of being able to have that many calls and do it in that many languages was well in excess of whatever a campaign limit would allow,” Mr. Holland said.
The former MP said his campaign officials consulted a voter-contact firm that many Liberal candidates hired for the election, Prime Contact, to ensure that his own calling firm was not somehow mistakenly placing the calls.
“On our side, inexplicable at the time, we were getting people being called as many as 15 times a day, and we couldn’t source where those calls were coming from. We went back to Prime Contact, they insisted it wasn’t them,” Mr. Holland said.
Mr. Holland said he realized during the recent controversy, which originated from an Elections Canada investigation into fraudulent election day calls in the Guelph, Ont., riding and has spread to Liberal and NDP allegations of complaints about attempted vote-suppression in more than 50 ridings, that the pattern was the same his supporters experienced in Ajax-Pickering.
The Elections Canada investigation in Guelph centres on a telephone number the electoral agency traced to the campaign of Conservative candidate Marty Burke and involves confirmed fraudulent robocalls purporting to be from Elections Canada and wrongly advising voters that their poll sites had changed. No one from the campaign has claimed responsibility, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) and top party officials and MPs have insisted they and the Conservative Party were unaware of the Guelph Elections Act violations.
But Liberals and New Democrats have argued in Parliament during a three-week controversy that the number of complaints that have surfaced in so many other ridings, including newly registered complaints at Elections Canada over the past two weeks, means others in the party, other than one or more workers on the Conservative Guelph campaign, must have been aware of untoward robocalls elsewhere.
The two major voter-contact firms that worked for Conservative candidates and were number one and number two in terms of number of campaigns and billings, Responsive Marketing Group and Campaign Research, have stated they did not take part in fraudulent phone calls and have noted no allegations have been made against them.
A lawyer with the law firm Fasken Martineau, representing Responsive Management Group, also known as RMG, has informed The Hill Times furthermore RMG did not conduct robocalls for the Conservative party during the 2011 election campaign, and a spokesperson for Campaign Research who is also the firm’s general counsel, Aaron Wudrick, reiterated to The Hill Times earlier this week that his firm was not involved in any harassing or fraudulent calls during the election and has not been contacted by Elections Canada.
Campaign Research, which was chastised last December by Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer (Regina-Qu’Appelle, Sask.) for a live-call campaign it mounted against Liberal MP Irwin Cotler (Mount Royal, Que.), worked on at least 39 Conservative candidate campaigns in the election, and was paid a total of $389,890 by the campaigns, according to their expense returns with Elections Canada. RMG conducted voter contact work for 109 candidate campaigns and was paid a total of $1.26-million by the campaigns, according to returns filed with the elections agency.
“We categorically have said we’re not involved with those calls, nothing fraudulent,” Mr. Wudrick told The Hill Times. “When we make any call that is recorded, first of all we always identify who is calling, we identify the company that we are calling from and anyone who records a message for us to send, we always listen to before we send out, which is why we are able to speak with a degree of confidence about what we did or didn’t do.”
Mr. Wudrick, in response to an emailed question from The Hill Times, said he believed Campaign Research also worked on Mr. Alexander’s campaign, apart from the 39 campaigns that have reported payments to the firm. Mr. Alexander’s return lists a payment of $16,990 for election surveys, a category under which voter contact is included, but shows only that the supplier was the Ajax-Pickering Conservative Electoral District Association. The firm the EDA hired would be listed in its expense returns later this year. Other candidates also list their electoral district associations as suppliers, an accepted practice under election accounting rules when the association hires a service on behalf of a candidate, whose campaign pays the association.
Both Campaign Research and RMG conducted voter contact for Conservative candidate Mr. Burke in Guelph, but Postmedia and the Ottawa Citizen have reported an Elections Canada investigation traced the fraudulent robocalls to Guelph voters to an unidentified campaign worker, and no allegations have been made against RMG or Campaign Research.
Campaign Research was selected as a Conservative voter contact firm for some of the closest races in the election, including at least two that are under dispute amid allegations of harassing phone calls or polling station irregularities, two Toronto ridings Eglinton-Lawrence and Etobicoke Centre.
Campaign research conducted voter contact work, identifying Conservative support and getting out the vote on behalf of candidates, in 14 closely fought races from Montreal to Vancouver Island.
Robocall firms most often place calls from a central location at a major city.
Mr. Holland, whose riding featured visits by prominent cabinet ministers regularly as the Conservative Party threw all it could into the campaign to have Mr. Alexander elected, said he believes the deluge and harassing nature of the phone calls cost him the election.
“There is no doubt this could have cost us several thousand votes, I mean it was rampant, it was happening all over the place and it was certainly something that was turning people off our campaign,” he said.
Mr. Alexander increased the Conservative vote in the riding by 6,326 votes from the 2008 election. Mr. Holland also increased his support from the 2008 election, but by only 106 votes. His support had slipped to 21,675 votes in 2008, when the party ran a disastrous campaign in support of a carbon tax, from the 25,636 votes Mr. Holland won in 2006.
Mr. Holland said the furious assault against him in the 2011 election, and a well-funded third-party campaign against him by opponents of the federal long-gun registry, likely hurt his chances of recovering the support he lost in 2008.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Tim Naumetz
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