Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Conservative call centre company granted bankruptcy protection

The Conservative party’s main fundraising and voter contact firm announced late Friday that it has been granted bankruptcy protection to allow it to restructure.

At the beginning of the month, iMarketing Solutions Group (iMSGI), formerly known as Responsive Marketing Group (RMG), laid off workers at call centres across the country. In November, the firm announced it planned to delist from the Toronto Stock Exchange. In December, it announced it had arranged a $3.5-million loan after posting a $3.9-million loss in the quarter ending Sept. 30, 2012.

The company was born in 2010 of a merger between RMG, which did mostly political work, and Xentel, a Canadian-based company that worked in telemarketing and charity fundraising in the United States, a business that, according to a company report, has been getting more difficult because of growing consumer resistance to telemarketing.

In a release late Friday afternoon, iMarketing said that it “intends to continue to operate in the normal course.”

A spokesman for the Conservative Party of Canada said Friday the company’s work for the party will continue as usual.

“It remains business as usual with RMG – the Party’s fundraising continues,” said Fred DeLorey in an email.

While the company is under court-ordered protection from its creditors, it will be run by Upkar Arora, of MorrisAnderson. Arora did not immediately reply to a request for comment Friday evening.

According to his biography on MorrisAnderson’s website, for eight years Arora “has taken on direct principal roles actually acquiring mid-size companies in distress and then refinancing, repositioning, and selling these companies while assuming an active ongoing management role as CEO, COO or President.”

Although the numbers aren’t made public, insiders say the company does millions of dollars worth of work for the Conservative Party of Canada every year, raising money from supporters with telephone pitches, identifying supporters and getting out the vote on election day.

RMG developed as the dominant Canadians Conservative voter contact firm from roots in Ontario provincial politics under former premier Mike Harris.

In 2003, then-president Michael Davis convinced Canadian Alliance organizer Tom Flanagan to give the party’s work to RMG, and together the party and the company developed CIMS, the Constituency Information Management System, the Conservatives’ powerful database.

“Our relationship with RMG linked nicely with our development of CIMS,” Flanagan wrote in his book, Harper’s Team. “RMG was already familiar with a CIMS-style system because of the work they had done with the Ontario PCs, and CIMS provided a receptacle for the hundreds of thousands of records generated by RMG’s large-scale calling programs.”

When the Ottawa Citizen reported on iMarketing’s layoffs last week, chief executive officer Andrew Langhorne played down any difficulties the company was having.

“The nature of our business often necessitates ramping work up and down based on business requirements,” he said in an email. “While some of our employees have received a short term layoff notice, we are also currently hiring employees in some centres for new projects.”

There is no mention of Langhorne’s ongoing role with the company in the release announcing it had been granted protection from its creditors.

The release predicted brighter days ahead for the company.

“The company is confident that the protection resulting from the CCAA filing will provide the company with the stability it requires in order to advance and efficiently execute a restructuring plan that is in the best interests of its customers, creditors, employees and other stakeholders,” it said.

Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Stephen Maher

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