On Tuesday, Elections Canada investigator John Dickson called a worker from the Ken Dryden campaign in Toronto’s York Centre to check whether his campaign was responsible for repeated late-night calls received by a voter in Ottawa West-Nepean.
The campaign worker, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, said he told Dickson the Liberals had nothing to do with the strange call.
The report, and others from Burlington and the suburban Toronto riding of Bramalea-Gore-Malton, show that investigators are actively pursuing allegations that someone made tried to discourage opposition supporters from voting in the May 2011 election by making fraudulent and harassing calls to voters.
Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand has said that the agency has received 1,394 complaints “alleging specific occurrences” in 234 ridings across Canada.
This week, Elections Canada investigator Jean-Pierre Bornais sent a message to a voter in Bramalea-Gore-Malton to request that she provide information about her telephone company.
The voter had filed a complaint during the campaign alleging she had received harassing calls before the May 2 election. She later followed up with another complaint, submitted through the online reporting form Elections Canada set up after the robocalls scandal broke in February.
“As part of our investigation, we would like to know the name of the company that was your phone service provider at the time of the last Federal election,” Bornais wrote.
The same email was sent to another voter in Burlington, Ont., who had previously complained about a robocall she received on election day misdirecting her to the wrong polling location.
The requests from Bornais are consistent with reports that surfaced in March, when voters in Northern Ontario said they had been contacted by Dickson, and asked to provide the names of their phone companies.
In order to track down the source of harassing or misleading calls, investigators would likely require a court order requiring specific phone companies to provide electronic records of incoming calls to their customers.
Since election day, investigators have been trying to get to the bottom of the “Pierre Poutine” robocall, which sent voters in Guelph to the wrong polling station, getting court orders to follow the electronic trail. Investigators have been frustrated in their probe by a series of gaps in that trail, seemingly the result of a well-thought-out plan to avoid detection.
Commissioner of Canada Elections Yves Cote refers any findings of wrongdoing to Director of Public Prosecutions Brian Saunders to decide on laying charges.
It appears, though, that the public may never know if the case has been referred to Saunders. Both Elections Canada and Saunders’ office are refusing to say whether any report from investigator has been referred to prosecutors.
Dan Brien, a spokesman for the DPP, said it’s up to Elections Canada to make that information public, while Elections Canada spokesman John Enright said in an email, “I cannot comment upon any of the steps related to an investigation or on the timing of those steps.”
In an online interview with the Globe and Mail on Thursday, chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand said Cote’s office is determined to “get to the bottom” of fraudulent calls from the 2011 election amid new of signs of an active investigation in ridings in Toronto and Ottawa.
“The one thing that I can assure you is that the Commissioner’s office is diligently pursuing this matter and is sparing no effort in bringing this investigation to completion,” he said. “This investigation is like peeling an onion — there are many layers, including phony names, false addresses, false phone numbers, proxy servers, hidden IP addresses, to name but a few reported in the media. But rest assured that the commissioner is determined to get to the bottom of this, and so am I.”
A source with knowledge of some aspects of the investigation said last week that investigators continue to pursue leads in the Guelph case.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Stephen Maher & Glen McGregor
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