Pierre Poutine called voters in ridings across Ontario — not just Guelph

The robocall made by the shadowy Pierre Poutine, misdirecting voters to the wrong polling stations on election day last year, was sent to people across Ontario, not just the riding of Guelph, according to phone records obtained by the National Post.

The call that claimed to come from Elections Canada was sent out to 5,053 recipients in the 519 area code that covers Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Windsor and Sarnia.

But it was also received by 35 people in downtown Toronto, 74 in the 905 suburban belt surrounding the GTA, 14 in the 613 area code that includes Kingston and Ottawa, 22 in the 705 code area that includes Barrie, Sudbury and North Bay and one person in Thunder Bay.

The revelation that the Guelph robocall went out across Ontario may explain why there have been complaints in ridings such as Ottawa Vanier and Trinity Spadina — two ridings the Tories had no hope of winning.

People familiar with the Conservative Party’s voter information database say whoever orchestrated the Guelph call likely used the non-supporters list for the riding.


“The database makes mistakes. We try to fix the supporters side but no-one pays attention to the non supporters side — the data is not maintained,” said one source.

The Conservative Party has been trying to find out who Pierre Poutine phoned, in order to confirm suspicions that calls from Guelph spilled into other ridings. They have not been able to access those phone records — until now.

It’s likely the Tories will now use the information to suggest the voter suppression tactic was limited to Guelph. It seems entirely possible that people as far north as Thunder Bay received a robocall purporting to be from Elections Canada, redirecting them to vote at a mall in Guelph.

A CBC Television story Thursday suggested misdirection calls were recorded coast-to-coast and interviewed people who said they received calls sending them to the wrong polling station. Yet only one person from outside Ontario said the call was a robocall claiming to come from Elections Canada.

The rest were either live calls or came from the Conservative Party. There were 20,000 voting locations in last year’s election — 127 of which were moved during the campaign — so thousands of Canadians received legitimate calls from political parties alerting them to the move.

Elections Canada revealed Thursday that over 700 Canadians from across the country have contacted them because they suspected “wrong-doing.”

In his press release, the chief electoral officer, Marc Mayrand, urged Canadians to be “cautious about drawing conclusions based on possibly inaccurate and incomplete information.”

The facts remain rarer than hen’s teeth but the news that the Pierre Poutine call was sent out across Ontario suggests the extent of the wrong-doing was more limited than some of the coverage would have us believe.

Meanwhile, the search for Mr. Poutine goes on.

Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke provided a witness statement to Elections Canada investigators earlier this week. He is not suspected of being involved and is said to have added “next to nothing” to the investigation.

As the National Post revealed last week, Elections Canada now has the Rogers Hi-Speed Internet Protocol address used by Pierre Poutine to set up the robocall.

Original Article
Source: national post
Author: John Ivison