OTTAWA—The federal Conservatives are arguing that eight voters challenging election results on the basis of allegedly receiving misleading robocalls are really stand-ins for a left-leaning political advocacy group.“There are many pieces of evidence that points to the fact that the Council of Canadians is the true applicant here,” argued Arthur Hamilton, lawyer for the six Conservative MPs whose electoral victories are being challenged in Federal Court on Monday morning.
Lawyers for the eight voters from six federal ridings are in Federal Court this week to face off against lawyers for the six Conservative MPs who won seats in those ridings last year.
The case stems from allegations of vote suppression that surfaced earlier this year following reports that voters received robocalls directing them to the wrong polling stations during the federal election last year.
Last week, it was revealed that Elections Canada, which does not support the separate case before the Federal Court this week, is conducting a criminal probe of these tactics in 56 of the 308 federal ridings.
On the first day of hearings, Hamilton asked Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley to throw the case out on the basis that it is “champerty and maintenance,” a legal term describing an attempt to benefit from a lawsuit brought forward by someone else.
Hamilton argued the eight applicants in the case are really just lending their names for a case being spearheaded and financially supported by the Council of Canadians for political and financial gain.
“The Council of Canadians has the right to hold views that oppose the government of the day . . . Where they cross the line is by putting up what we say are notional applicants and they are running the agenda in those applications,” Hamilton said in court.
The Council of Canadians was benefitting financially by soliciting donations to help fund the case, which helps build their fundraising database for future campaigns, he said, noting that “data is gold”.
“The much greater windfall here is on the political side. If you bring down six Conservatives, you are ahead of the game. You are sinking the Harper agenda,” Hamilton said as he argued how the Council of Canadians could benefit from a court case that is not asking for any financial remedy.
“Winning doesn’t even have to matter,” Hamilton said.
“This has been going for nine months. There has been no end of public discourse — pro, con, ridiculous, not ridiculous — throughout the media. This is commonplace in the parlance of current Canadian politics. That is its own victory for those who wish to oppose the government of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. Just the fact that it is being talked about to that extent it can erode the credibility or erode the brand which is Prime Minister Harper or the Conservative party, that is its own victory,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton said it would be fine if individual voters, always having the intention to launch legal proceedings, found a backer in the Council of Canadians.
The problem here, Hamilton alleged, is that the Council of Canadians chose the ridings it would focus on, picked the applicants they would name in the case, and provided them with a legal argument to explain why they did not launch proceedings earlier.
“The source of each one of their positions is the same,” Hamilton said.
The applicants — represented by Steven Shrybman, a lawyer for the Council of Canadians who is also on its board of directors — will begin to argue their response to the champerty and maintenance motion later Monday afternoon.
The eight voters are seeking to overturn the election results in the hotly contested ridings of Nipissing—Timiskaming in Ontario; Elmwood—Transcona and Winnipeg South Centre in Manitoba; Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar in Saskatchewan; Vancouver Island North in B.C., and Yukon.
All six ridings were won narrowly by Conservatives.
The Conservative candidate won by just 18 votes in Nipissing—Timiskaming.
A byelection would be called in any riding where the 2011 voting results were nullified by the courts.
To make their case, the applicants are drawing on reports of misleading phone calls, purportedly from Elections Canada, that tried to steer voters to bogus polling stations. Other voters say they got harassing phone calls through the night from people claiming to be from rivals of the Conservatives in the ridings.
Their case also draws on a survey of 2,872 voters in the six ridings by pollster Frank Graves of EKOS Research Associates.
That survey found that Liberal, Green party and NDP supporters were more likely to receive the misleading calls than Conservative Party of Canada backers. It estimates that as many as 6,000 Canadians may have been deterred from voting in the six ridings.
“These activities were clearly targeted at (non-Conservative) voters in a manner that is highly improbable to have happened by chance,” their court documents say.
Graves is expected to undergo cross-examination at 2 p.m. on Monday.
The applications suggest the Conservatives’ detailed voter database, known as Constituent Information Management System, is the “most likely source” of information used to make the “illicit calls.”
In its own court filing, the Conservative Party of Canada says the applicants have nothing more than “statistics and argument” to back their attempt to toss six sitting MPs from the House of Commons.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Joanna Smith
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