Some voters vented their frustration with unsolicited calls from the Conservative Party on websites used to track the source of annoying telemarketing calls.
On sites such 1-800-NOTES and whocallsme, voters complained about Conservative calls from the same numbers cited in a flurry of frantic emails at Elections Canada in the last three days of the campaign.
On April 30, two days before the vote, a poster going by the name “LoriB” reported receiving a call from 902-800-1015: “They told me the location where I vote on Monday has changed. I called Elections Canada and was told the location has not changed and I was not the first call they had today asking the same thing.”
The following day, a poster calling herself “Carlie” wrote that she received a call from Conservative MP Peter Braid’s Kitchener-Waterloo campaign telling her that polling stations had been moved: “Of course, there are no ‘last-minute’ changes to voting locations,” she wrote. “This is clearly a prank, if not an illegal ploy by Conservatives to confuse voters they have identified as not voting for them in an attempt to misdirect them on May 2.”
The web postings are consistent with the confusion and anxiety expressed in internal Elections Canada emails about suspicious calls reported by voters in six different provinces. One official feared the calls were part of a “scam” and another called them “mischief.”
The emails, obtained under the Access to Information Act, show that in the days leading up to the last election, officials at the agency twice emailed Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton to ask why voters across the country were getting calls, putatively from Conservatives, telling them their poll locations had changed.
A day later, Hamilton wrote back, saying they had looked into the calls and found they were merely intended to ensure that voters had the correct locations printed on their Voter Identification Cards.
It is unclear what, if anything, the party did after Hamilton received these warnings, because subsequent emails from Elections Canada show officials reporting that the incidence of the calls had increased.
Conservative campaign manager Guy Giorno and the party’s director of political operations, Jenni Byrne, did not respond to emailed requests for comment on Monday.
Both have previously stated that they are confident the campaign did not engage in voter suppression calls.
On Monday, neither they nor party spokesman Fred DeLorey responded to emails asking what steps the party took to deal with communications from Elections Canada, confused voters and Conservative volunteers who brought the calls to their attention.
In an email sent on April 29, Elections Canada official Sylvain Lortie emailed his colleague Sylvie Jacmain to say that some voters in Saint Boniface, Man., had reported receiving misdirecting calls from people who identified themselves as Conservative representatives. In another email, Lortie indicated that the calls had apparently been stopped by Conservative party headquarters “at the request of the local association.”
On Monday, John Tropak, campaign manager for Shelly Glover, the Conservative MP for Saint Boniface, declined to say who the campaign contacted in Ottawa to ask the party to stop the bad calls.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said repeatedly. “I get it but I don’t have any knowledge about anything like that whatsoever.”
Local Conservative campaigns appeared not to play any role in the calls. Ken Morgan, the Conservative campaign manager in Guelph, where a fraudulent robocall sent opposition supporters to the wrong polling station, even sent a complaint to Elections Canada about live calls that misdirected Conservative voters there.
Morgan has never agreed to be interviewed in Elections Canada’s investigation of the Guelph robocall and recently moved to Kuwait to take a teaching job.
In the House of Commons on Monday, NDP and Liberal MPs pointed to the emails as evidence of a Conservative voter suppression effort, something the party has always denied.
NDP MP Charlie Angus said “the defence of the Conservatives is starting to crumble because now we have the information to access documents that reveal that Elections Canada was so concerned about voter fraud, it believed the Conservative Party was ‘running a scam’ and its investigators traced the calls back to a 1-800 number that went to the Conservative Party headquarters.
In his response, Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre did not address the emails and instead said the party was cooperating with Elections Canada in Guelph, insisting the Tories ran a clean and ethical campaign.
The seemingly slow pace of Elections Canada’s probe into voter-suppression allegations is becoming a concern, interim Liberal leader Bob Rae later told reporters.
“I don’t have an explanation as to why it would be taking Elections Canada so long to indicate where it’s going and how it’s proceeding with this investigation,” Rae said.
“I’m increasingly hearing concerns from Canadians that Elections Canada is not moving with the kind of clarity and the kind of speed that they would expect of an organization which is intended to ensure Canadians that the electoral process in Canada is fair.”
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: STEPHEN MAHER AND GLEN MCGREGOR
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