OTTAWA—One of eight voters in a Federal Court challenge of the results in six ridings from the 2011 general election disputed on Monday arguments from the Conservative Party lawyer that the voters waited too long to complain about allegedly fraudulent phone calls on voting day and were in effect pawns for a public interest group, the Council of Canadians, that has campaigned against Conservative government social and economic policies.Thomas Parlee, a retired Canada Post manager and tour operator in Whitehorse, Yukon, who travelled to Ottawa to attend Federal Court hearings in the case that began Monday, said he learned only after a media firestorm ignited by a Postmedia News report last February that an automated phone call he says he received on May 2 election day, claiming to be from Elections Canada and informing him his polling location had been moved, would have been illegal.
Mr. Parlee, after witnessing Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton deride the applications he and the seven other voters have filed asking the court to annul the elections in their ridings on grounds that widespread fraudulent or harassing calls interfered with voter rights to cast ballots, told The Hill Timesthat when he got the call he thought it was “something that smelled, that was fishy,” but it did not strike him that could have been illegal until Postmedia News reported an extensive Elections Canada investigation into fraudulent automated calls, known as robocalls, that were eventually confirmed to have been made to 7,000 voters in the Guelph, Ont., electoral district.
Contrary to Mr. Hamilton’s argument to Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley that none of the eight voters took any action until the Council of Canadians began a campaign to find voters who they believed had been targeted by calls attempting to direct them to incorrect voting locations, Mr. Parlee said he remembered the call during the February controversy and filed a complaint before he had even heard of the Council of Canadians, led by Maude Barlow, one of Canada’s best-known public interest activists who has advocated against a range of policies and measures of both Conservative and Liberal federal governments for years.
Mr. Hamilton—who at one point in the Monday hearing was chastised by Judge Mosley for attacking the motives of the lead lawyer representing the voters, Steven Shrybman, because of his standing as a director of the Council of Canadians and past criticism of the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.)—was arguing that the case should be thrown out of court because the council, for ulterior political motives, was attempting to benefit from the lawsuit by using it to raise money and also to put itself in the “vanguard” of groups opposed to the Harper government.
Mr. Hamilton claimed none of the voters complained prior to the campaign that the Council of Canadians launched in early March, soon after the Postmedia News report on the Guelph case. That Elections Canada investigation has continued, but investigators have been unable to identify the perpetrators because of an elaborate scheme used to hide their tracks through a for-hire automated call firm in Edmonton and the use of a single disposable cellphone to upload phone numbers for thousands of voters in Guelph, primarily Liberal supporters.
Asked about Mr. Hamilton’s argument during a break in the hearing, Mr. Parlee told The Hill Timesabout the call he received.
“It was an automated call,” Mr. Parleee said during an interview in the large marble-floored foyer outside the Federal Court chamber in the Supreme Court of Canada building in Ottawa.
“There were live calls and there were automated calls. I know two people who got live calls on election day or near election day,” he said. “Even at the time [February] this media event happened, I recalled it then, ‘I got one of those calls.’”
Mr. Hamilton, aside from arguing that the Council of Canadians is the mastermind of the court challenge and leading it along for its own political and financial ends, also claimed the voters did not meet a Canada Elections Act provision that gives a 30-day time limit, from when any voter first learns of an election irregularity or possible corrupt practice, to take legal action to try to have the election overturned.
Mr. Shrybman argued the 30-day opportunity to lodge complaints began when Postmedia News published its first story on fraudulent calls on Feb. 22.
“Let’s put it this way, after the media got a hold of it, did a story about it, I decided to, again, talk to my returning officer, who is an acquaintance who I know in Whitehorse, and she said, ‘Well you should make your complaint,’” Mr. Parlee told The Hill Times. “So I actually made a complaint with Elections Canada, before the Council of Canadians brought it up. Then the Council came along, and they were inquiring on robocalls, so I gave them the information I had just given to Elections Canada, and then I got a call from Schrybman.”
Mr. Parlee said even up to that point, following the media uproar, he had been unaware the phone call he recalled was likely an illegal act.
“I wasn’t even aware that it was an illegal activity, during the news story or even after the news story. It was something that smelled, that was fishy, and I participated,” he said.
Mr. Parlee said further that as he was involved in preparing and signing his affidavit to help launch the court case and more details emerged, including claims from many voters who remembered calls about changes to poll locations that they had received live telephone calls from the Conservative Party earlier in the campaign asking them if they were going to support their local Conservative candidate.
A survey of voter recollections of phone calls in the 2011 election the Council of Canadians commissioned from Ekos Research pollster Frank Graves found thousands of voters received calls about poll station changes, and that voters who early in the campaign told the callers they would not be voting Conservative were 10 times more likely to receive calls advising them of poll changes in the final days of the campaign and on voting day.
“It was even two months after that [when he signed the affidavit] that I found out from my wife that she got an initial call from the Conservative Party of Canada. The first call to my wife, it was a live call, the first one. I didn’t know anything about that until I had to sign an affidavit,” Mr. Parlee said.
Mr. Hamilton also challenged Mr. Graves’s evidence and in an extraordinary courtroom cross-examination on Monday and attempted to destroy his credentials as an impartial social scientist.
Mr. Hamilton accused Mr. Graves of failing to accurately report past financial contributions to former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and the riding association of current Liberal Leader Bob Rae (Toronto Centre, Ont.). At one point as Mr. Hamilton hectored Mr. Graves, Judge Mosley intervened, limiting him to questions about a follow-up affidavit Mr. Graves had sworn about the reliability of the automated phone-call polling method he used for the voter recall survey.
The court record in the case contains hundreds of pages of evidence from both sides on the reliability of such a survey, a form of behavioural research that is accepted in market situations and social research, but has a novel application in the voter court challenge.
Meanwhile, a Conservative MP whose northern Ontario riding is at the centre of the court case, Jay Aspin (Nipissing-Timiskaming, Ont.), told The Hill Times as the hearing date neared, that he has a clear conscience, no matter what happens, and that he wants the court and other investigations to get to the bottom of the allegations.
Mr. Aspin said also that the Conservative Party provided his team in the northern Ontario riding with a campaign manager from party headquarters in Ottawa because a local organizer who would have done the work was “burned out” from two municipal campaigns in North Bay, Ont., where Mr. Aspin was a longtime civic and school board politician.
“I can tell you from my record, this is my 14th election, I’ve been in politics for 34 years, mostly local, so I’m not a neophyte, as far as campaigning is concerned, and I can tell you my record has been clean as a whistle,” Mr. Aspin said in an interview last week with The Hill Times.
“I had a heck of a campaign team together, but we didn’t have a manager, because the manager was burned out, we had the mayor run, and the deputy mayor and they didn’t win, and the guy who ran the campaign was burned out and he didn’t want to do it,” Mr. Aspin said.
“A guy from Ottawa, a fellow from Ottawa, Joe Dow, he came in from Ottawa,” he told The Hill Times. “He came in from Ottawa, that’s the only piece we’re missing, and he did a bang-up job, and he was an experienced party guy, so he knew, you know, how to tap into the party apparatus.”
“The only feeling I have is, get to the bottom of whatever happened, just get to the bottom of it, for the sake of the voting system, the good voting system we have. I’m confident that we didn’t do anything wrong, because, I know we had the system we have, and I know we were implementing the system through my campaign manager, and I know what we were doing, and I know there was nothing untoward, so I have a clear conscience,” Mr. Aspin said.
The other ridings being challenged were won by Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan (Vancouver-Island-North, B.C.), Conservative MP Kelly Block (Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, Sask.), Conservative MP Joyce Bateman (Winnipeg-South Centre, Man.), Conservative MP Lawrence Toet (Elmwood-Transcona, Man.) and Conservative MP Ryan Leef (Yukon).
Annette Desgagné, a Thunder Bay, Ont., woman who worked as a caller in the riding for the Conservative Party’s principal voter-contact firm during the election campaign, Responsive Marketing Group Inc., swore in an affidavit after the media controversy earlier this year that she and other RMG callers believed that in the last few days of the campaign they were being given incorrect information about poll locations to pass on to voters.
She identified Mr. Aspin’s Nipissing-Timiskaming, Ont., riding as one of the ridings where she called voters. Transcripts of the calls Ms. Desgagné made to three of the ridings in the court case show that though she told voters she reached that Elections Canada had changed poll locations, she did not claim to be calling from Elections Canada. However, in several of the calls, Ms. Desgagné does not identify herself as calling on behalf of the Conservative Party. In two calls, into the Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona, Man., she appears to give voter households information that conflicts with their understanding of where to vote.
RMG has adamantly denied the allegation, and its chief operating officer, longtime federal and provincial Conservative voter-contact expert Andrew Langhorne, has testified through a sworn affidavit and deposition cross-examination in the Federal Court case.
“As chief operating officer of the company, we would never agree to run a campaign that tries to direct non-supporters to the wrong poll location," Mr. Langhorne said under cross-examination by prominent human rights lawyer Marlys Edwardh, a partner in the same law firm where Mr. Shrybman is a partner.
“We just don’t have, it just wouldn’t happen in our organization. It would not be accepted. All management levels would object to it. We wouldn't even discuss it,” Mr. Langhorne testified.
Mr. Langhorne said in response to other questions from Ms. Edwardh that the Conservative Party prepared the caller scripts which his firm used as the template for all its calls, and insisted that information about voter preferences that were identified early in the campaign were not included in calls made to get out the vote in the two days before the election day and on the May 2 voting day itself.
Mr. Langhorne said that information was purged from RMG’s computer system, but he could not say when the deletion of that information on hundreds of thousands of voters began.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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