The office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections has assigned veteran dirty-tricks investigator Ronald Lamothe to conduct inquiries, the Star has learned.
Elections Canada logs 31,000 complaints in robo-call scandal
As Lamothe heads to Thunder Bay to interview former RMG call centre workers, Conservative party officials have undertaken a massive project to review audio recordings of every call made by RMG staff on the party’s behalf in the last campaign, a source said. A spokesperson for the Conservative party denied that a review of the calls was taking place.
Does Elections Canada have the clout to enforce laws?
The party was concerned by revelations in the Star Monday from former call centre workers who raised questions about whether they’d misinformed voters, and admissions that some had shortened their scripts advising voters of poll location changes.
Lamothe is the assistant chief investigator in William Corbett’s office, and a former Ottawa police officer whose massive affidavit in 2008 laid out an elaborate scheme by the Conservative Party to move money from national coffers into and out of the accounts of local campaigns in order to skirt the national spending limit on advertising during the 2006 campaign.
Lamothe’s interviews led to a search warrant and raid on party headquarters, Elections Act charges against the party and four senior officials, and a war of words between the governing Conservatives and the elections watchdog that lasted nearly four years.
Even now, Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists as he did last Friday the two situations are very different. The party “based our judgments on what we thought were the rules at the time. In this case, our party has no knowledge of these calls, they’re not part of our campaign.”
But in November, the party pleaded guilty, paid a $52,000 fine, and charges were dropped against the officials, which included now Senator Doug Finley.
Lamothe is a patient man.
He once received a coveted gold medal, the Canadian Banks Law Enforcement Award, for his cool handling of a long and dangerous hostage-taking at a bank that was resolved with no violence and saw the bad guys jailed.
He joins Allan Mathews, a former RCMP inspector who worked on the Eurocopter and Airbus investigations and is the certified fraud examiner assigned to the Elections Canada investigation team. Mathews swore an affidavit in support of a probe that has, to date, largely focused on Guelph and another unrelated company, RackNine Inc. of Edmonton, which makes “robo-calls” using pre-recorded voice messages.
That affidavit revealed new details of robo-calls directing voters to the wrong polling station in ridings in Windsor, as new reports emerged elsewhere of possible misdeeds in Calgary, and Vancouver.
Joe Comartin, the NDP MP for the riding of Windsor—Tecumseh, said Thursday that his wife, Maureen, received an automated telephone call in which a man’s recorded voice told her the voting booth had been moved. A similar call came in to Andrew McAvoy, an NDP campaigner who ran under the party’s provincial banner in October.
“We reported it that day and I think we did a follow up with the local returning officer . . . and got assurances they would pursue it,” Comartin said. “Then we just never heard anything more about it at all. I had actually given up hope.”
In court documents, investigator Matthews says he was able to track the calls back to RackNine Inc. and has alleged links to the campaign of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke.
Comartin, who won his seat with almost 50 per cent of all votes cast, suspects the calls were designed to harass and distract him when he should be focused on getting voters out to the polls, or to reduce the “per-vote subsidy.”
“If the result of this is thousands of people don’t vote across the country it’s that many fewer dollars going into the hands of opposition parties.”
Similar instances of what would appear to be outright attempts to illegally prevent voters from casting their ballots have been reported elsewhere.
“The very same thing happened to me, and this is disgraceful,” wrote 83-year-old Florence Grotttenberg of Calgary in a letter to the NDP.
“On voting day, I received a call from ‘Elections Canada’ telling me I must change my polling station and vote at some school far away in the south end of Calgary,” she said.
In fact, the polling station was located in the lobby of her apartment building.
For days now, opposition MPs have hammered the Conservatives over reports of misleading and harassing phone calls to voters, such as calls late at night or on the Sabbath to Jewish voters. Some of those calls have been traced to a telephone number based in North Dakota.
On Thursday, the Conservatives tried to blame the Liberals themselves for orchestrating the harassing phone calls, saying they used a company based in the U.S.
“We have done some checking. We have only found that it was the Liberal party that did source its phone calls from the United States,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said.
Conservative party officials gave secret, unannounced briefings to select reporters — the Star was not invited — but the offensive misfired as party officials mixed up two companies with the similar names. Liberal interim leader Bob Rae said later that the Canadian firm used by the Liberals has no connection with the one based in the U.S.
“They made an allegation with respect to phone calls coming from the United States. That allegation is categorically false,” Rae said.
“You have to understand the Conservatives are showing all the signs of desperate stonewallers.”
He accused Harper of ignoring growing complaints of voters who say they got phone calls deliberately misleading them about their voting locations.
“The Prime Minister and his colleagues have a remarkable ability to turn themselves into victims at the same time as they literally smear thousands of Canadians who are now complaining because they are aware of a pattern,” Rae said.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Tonda MacCharles, Allan Woods and Bruce Campion-Smith
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