Lynne Steele, who has managed several election campaigns for Toronto Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul’s, Ont.), told The Hill Times on Thursday, coincidentally only two hours prior to the unprecedented announcement from Elections Canada, that complaints of fraudulent and harassing calls from Liberal voters in her riding—as well as outright voter intimidation on the way to the ballot boxes—began coming in even before the polls closed last May 2.
Ms. Bennett, whom a Conservative insider admitted this week is among a list of Liberal MPs the Conservatives would like to defeat, raised a complaint in the Commons last week about a voter who only last week complained of two calls in the campaign—one before voting day and one shortly before she head to the polls—telling her that her polling station had changed and, when she replied she had already voted, that she could vote twice. Oddly, the caller claimed to be a Conservative, she said.
“What we’ve felt over the last number of campaigns [in St.Paul’s riding] is there doesn’t seem to be too much action on the ground, it’s like it’s all being done centrally, you go by and there’s nobody there,” Ms. Bennett told The Hill Times.
The St. Paul’s riding became the subject of dramatic news stories during the campaign, with incidents of property damage, even ruptured automobile brake lines, and destroyed lawn signs as the contest became heated. Ms. Bennett won the riding by 4,545 votes and with 40.6 per cent of the vote.
“We had lots of complaints and we actually filed an official report with Elections Canada,” Ms. Steele said. She said that the campaign had not heard back as of Thursday.
Similar to complaints in other ridings, most prominent in Eglinton-Lawrence electoral district in Toronto, where former Liberal MP Joe Volpe lost a hard-fought battle against now Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, the callers identified themselves as calling from the Liberal Party, placing calls late at night, early in the morning or several times a day. Like the complainants in Mr. Volpe’s riding, members of the riding’s Jewish community were telephoned during evening meal hours on Friday, the Jewish Sabbath day.
“If all of this is true, and it’s still allegations at this point, I do believe we need a commission on this, it’s too big now, it’s gone to too many ridings,” Ms. Steele said. “It’s coast to coast, and I do believe we’ve got a government that’s passing laws that may not be a legitimate government.”
But Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand, while confirming the 700 new complaints stemming from the attention given to an Elections Canada investigation into confirmed fraudulent calls to voters in the Ontario riding of Guelph, where robocalls placed into the riding purported to be Elections Canada alerts that poll sites had changed, advised Canadians not to jump to conclusions.
“I advise caution about drawing conclusions based on possibly inaccurate and incomplete information,” he said in a statement emailed to journalists and news agencies covering Parliament Hill.
“Immediately following the 2011 general election, the commissioner of Canada Elections deployed resources to investigate complaints of fraudulent or improper calls. Since then, over 700 Canadians from across the country have informed us of specific circumstances where they believe similar wrongdoing took place. I appreciate the interest that Canadians have shown in this matter and thank them for their continued collaboration,” the statement said.
Mr. Mayrand said he would “welcome” the chance to appear at the Commons committee responsible for election issues, the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, to explain the agency’s investigative procedures.
Earlier in the week, a spokesman for Campaign Research, a Conservative-connected telephone research firm that conducted voter identification and contact for at least 40 key Conservative campaigns, including some of the closest races in the country as well as campaigns featuring star Conservative candidates and Liberal MPs the Conservative party particularly wanted to defeat, told The Hill Times his firm wanted Elections Canada to clear the air and “quantify” the number of complaints it has received since the controversy began.
Aaron Wudrick, general counsel for Campaign Research and a former Conservative candidate campaign manager, made the comment after Elections Canada disclosed that a majority of 31,000 “contacts” it had received over the previous three weeks were online form letters of concern.
“If I were Elections Canada I would want to quantify the number of complaints,” Mr. Wudrick said. “If they could quantify, you know, we received ‘X’ number of calls about being sent to the wrong poll, ‘X’ number of calls in the middle of the night, I think that would go a long way to shedding more light on the scope of it too.”
The Elections Canada statement did not include details of the nature of the 700 complaints.
Mr. Wudrick said he welcomed the election agency’s decision to provide more information.
“I would just say that anything that gets us closer to shedding light on the truth is something we welcome very much,” he said.
Ms. Steele’s statement to The Hill Times included an allegation that has not so far been raised in the recent controversy—that allegedly Conservative scrutineers attempted to intimidate voters at polling stations.
“They were big guys, they would block the way of people coming in to vote, they would be buddy, buddy with the Elections Canada staff, in terms of making sure they got chairs for them, brought them bottles of water,” Ms. Steele said. “There was a lot of untoward things going on, comments from them like, ‘We don’t need bingo sheets [the nickname for voter lists given to scrutineers to keep track of identified supporters casting ballots] because we’re only here to make sure that our votes get in and others might not.’”
Ms. Steele said Elections Canada sent senior officials to maintain order.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Tim Naumetz
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