Elections Canada has time-stamped logs detailing between 25,000 and 30,000 phone calls — including 7,500-10,000 “connects” — all of which were made during the election campaign, someone familiar with the documents said Monday. “All of this work was conducted solely during the writ period,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Del Mastro, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is under investigation by Elections Canada for alleged breaches of campaign finance law related to his 2008 campaign in Peterborough.
Del Mastro insists he has done nothing wrong and told media in his riding this weekend that he would produce records this week that would show he had broken no rules.
It is unclear how Del Mastro will explain why his campaign disclosed only $1,575 of work with Holinshed Research Group, and not the $21,000 in voter identification and get-out-the-vote calls the company said it made during the writ period. If the higher amount had been declared, Del Mastro’s campaign would have exceeded his campaign spending limit, a violation of the Elections Act punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to five years in prison.
In March, an investigator with the agency obtained a court order compelling Holinshed to hand over a long list of records pertaining to the Del Mastro campaign.
Those records have since been provided to the agency. They include detailed employee records listing the names of approximately a dozen staff members who worked the phones in Holinshed’s call centre on Elgin Street in Ottawa, and call logs recording the details of 630 hours of calls into Del Mastro’s riding during the election.
Elections Canada was also provided with the “scripts” that the call centre workers read on the phones when they reached voters and asked if they planned to support Del Mastro on election day.
Del Mastro told the Peterborough Examiner on the weekend that he plans to soon release documents that will show everything in his campaign was on the up and up.
“We have full invoices that support all of our elections spending,” he told the paper. “I will be coming forward with our records.”
But when he was asked by a Liberal MP in the House when he would produce these documents, MP Pierre Poilievre said that Del Mastro had provided all the records four years ago, when he filed his report with Elections Canada.
In an interview Monday, Del Mastro said he stands behind his statements, which show a payment of $1,575 for election work to Holinshed.
“There was, unquestionably, a certain amount of calling that was paid for and reflected in our records, that was undertaken by Holinshed research,” he said. “With respect to anything else you’ve heard, obviously that’s hearsay.”
After the election, Del Mastro contracted Holinshed to set up a constituency mapping program for his riding, but eventually their relationship turned sour and Holinshed sued in small claims court, seeking payment for the mapping work.
In association with that lawsuit, Holinshed filed a quote — signed by Del Mastro’s campaign manager, John McNutt — a week into the campaign, ordering $21,000 worth of work for election calls. None of the allegations in that lawsuit has been proved.
Del Mastro said Monday the contracts with Holinshed “were cancelled and fully refunded,” and said he will soon release documents that show all his election campaign paperwork is accurate and complete.
Del Mastro is upset that Elections Canada has been investigating him without his knowledge.
“I think all Canadians and all parliamentarians should be disturbed with how this story has taken over,” he said. “I think there are a lot of very serious questions for Elections Canada to answer on this, with respect to the fact that apparently — not that they will confirm it — they are looking into something like this, when the first call upon receiving the complaint should have been to me, and allowing me to go through things with them and go through our records, and see if there are any questions that remain.”
Elections Canada spokesman John Enright declined to comment on Del Mastro’s criticism of the agency’s investigative process on Monday.
No charges against Del Mastro have been laid and none of the allegations in the court order has been proved in court.
Del Mastro said he is thinking about complaining that his privileges as a member of Parliament have been breached.
Del Mastro has served as the Conservative government’s lead spokesman on the “robocalls” file, which involves allegations of dirty-tricks phone calls intended to misdirect non-Conservative voters to the wrong polling locations in the 2011 election.
Opposition MPs have called on Del Mastro to step aside until the investigation is complete, claiming he will be in a conflict of interest commenting on Elections Canada business while he is being investigated by the organization.
“I’m doing my job as I am expected to do,” Del Mastro said Monday.
Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey said the party has no comment on documents showing Holinshed made calls for Del Mastro during the election.
“Elections Canada has not asked us anything about this, nor have they told us that any such documents exist,” he said. “So I’m not going to comment on documents that I don’t even know exist, let alone haven’t seen.”
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: GLEN McGREGOR and STEPHEN MAHER
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