According to Michael Sona, the only person so far charged in the Robocalls Affair, the Crown has decided to proceed against him by indictment rather than summary conviction.
“What this means is that if convicted I will go to jail. What this means is now we have to win the case,” he said.
Whether that represents legal reality or not, whether Sona’s future holds jail, a fine, or acquittal, the one, the overwhelming question, is this: Apart from a dress-up appearance on Halloween, a spoof for friends, is Michael Sona the cellphone fraudster who tried to steal a riding, Pierre Poutine?
“No, I’m not,” he says, firmly, finally and without the slightest ambiguity.
According to Sona, the genesis of Robocalls — and the oft-stated view that the riding of Guelph was somehow its epicentre — was a press release he issued on May 2, 2011 at 10:13 a.m. as the director of communications for the Marty Burke campaign. It was issued just minutes after the infamous Pierre Poutine calls were made.
In the press release, Sona condemned the misleading calls whose purpose was to send voters to the wrong polling stations: “This is absolutely false and has no place in the democratic process … We hope that the perpetrators of these unethical actions will cease these tactics immediately.”
The press release was picked up by the media and had an unexpected consequence. Sona says he received a furious call from Conservative Party headquarters — asking him what the hell was going on in Guelph.
“I started to explain the calls that had been going out misdirecting people, but that wasn’t what they were mad about. They wanted to know why I had issued the press release. They ordered me to make no further comments that day. That’s the way it was, very rough, tons of stress. HQ wanted to control everything — every event, every debate — even our website, which they took over.”
It had been a brutal campaign between Liberal Frank Valeriote and Conservative Marty Burke, a battle in which the Liberal prevailed. Part of the nastiness had been mutual vilification — which included robocall campaigns. Michael Sona was a warrior in that scorched-earth battle, writing the robocall scripts in Guelph.
“We were getting hit by unidentified robocalls, very, very negative stuff. We wanted to mount a robocall campaign against Frank Valeriote that couldn’t be traced back to us — Frank the Flip-Flopper. But none of us knew how to do it. So I asked John White (a fellow campaign worker) and he told me to contact Matt McBain (Conservative war room official) to find out. McBain emailed White to see if I was okay, White said I was on the team and a good guy and to go ahead and talk to me. We talked. I later texted McBain but never heard back.”
(Both White and McBain have told Elections Canada investigators that they advised Sona against any shady operations the party wouldn’t stand for.)
Although White and McBain apparently worried about breaking ethical and perhaps legal standards, Michael Sona reports receiving some nudge-nudge, wink-wink advice from senior party officials that was less rigorous when it came to playing politics by gentleman’s rules during the 2011 general election.
“We were told that that they weren’t telling us to go out and destroy the other guys signs, but if we did, the best thing to use was oven-cleaner. The guy said acetone would work just as well and we could get plenty of that from the printing company we were using. Then one of the top guys told us how to get around spending limits, which I thought was funny, since they were still tangled up in the In-and-Out thing.”
Michael Sona may be the only person charged in the Robocalls Affair but he says he isn’t the only one who believes that he has been treated shabbily — by parts of the media, Elections Canada, and most especially by the Conservative Party of Canada.
Sona sees bitter irony in the fact that, although he has worked for cabinet minister James Moore and Conservative MPs Rob Moore and Eve Adams, he was denounced by an anonymous informant in either party HQ or the PMO. He says that some senior Tories, including the prime minister’s parliamentary secretary, have privately expressed sympathy for his predicament.
“Harold Albrecht (Conservative MP for Kitchener-Conestoga) has spoken to caucus against what was done to me and Dean Del Mastro has given me support. A lot of them are wondering where the party is going to get its volunteers next time out after what’s happened to me.”
(Del Mastro is currently awaiting the disposition of his own case with Elections Canada involving election expenses.)
What happened to Sona, including the bizarre gloating of Conservative Party headquarters when he was charged, has also upset local Tories in Guelph. Both the candidate in 2011, Marty Burke, and his wife have resigned from the Conservative riding association. They, and a number of volunteers who have also quit, think Sona got a raw deal and that the truth will come out in court.
Michael Sona certainly got a raw deal from Sun TV. According to Sona, the government-friendly news agency outed him in the Robocalls Affair without ever interviewing him. After the fact, they refused what he described as an offer to do either an on- or off-the-record interview.
Later, when EC investigator Al Mathews corrected the public record by retracting a previous court document alleging that Sona had talked about a misleading poll-moving call with Matt McBain, Sona asked for an apology from Sun TV.
“Kory Teneycke and I had lunch. He gave me some good advice. But they wouldn’t do a story on the false quote about me that Mathews had to take back.
“He told me that nobody cared about the story anymore. I care about it.”
No one knows exactly what evidence Elections Canada has to support the charge against Michael Sona, but it will have to be more than what is on the record at this point — that Sona purchased the “burner” phone and credit cards that were later used by Pierre Poutine to send a fraudulent robocall to 7,000 opposition supporters in Guelph. Some points to consider:
— Sona has never denied that he wanted to mount a robocalls attack on his candidate’s opponent that couldn’t be traced back to the campaign.
— Sona never had a RackNine account, though others on the campaign did.
— Sona did not have administrative status on the query-based CIMS system, though others on the campaign did.
— Furthermore, Sona says that he informed party headquarters during the 2011 campaign that his CIMS account was “broken” and asked that it be fixed.
So how could he have gained access and downloaded the highly confidential list without administrative status, without a working account, and without detection? He was not the party’s voter ID Director and says he personally knows of interns who have been fired for merely browsing on the closely guarded CIMS database.
So far, investigators have not explained publicly the mystery of the missing download file that would show who actually did access CIMS. Why not?
A lot of people, including one cabinet minister’s chief of staff who contacted Sona, thought it was going to be “In-and-Out all over again”, with authorities showing up with court orders at Conservative Party headquarters on Albert Street to seize computers. Did that happen? If it didn’t, can anyone explain why not? And if it did, what — if anything — was found?
Finally, since fraudulent robocalls were used in scores of other ridings, as confirmed by Justice Richard Mosley, are we to assume that Michael Sona cloned himself and was responsible for 800 specific allegations in almost 200 ridings? Could that be why Sona’s lawyer said that the only way to get to the bottom of this swamp is through a public inquiry? Could that be why he is appalled by the intensity of the government’s full court press against his client?
Meanwhile, on a personal level, Michael Sona has paid a heavy price for being the only man charged by Elections Canada over “Pierre Poutine’s” handiwork.
“When I was charged, my father couldn’t go to the mailbox without some guy with a camera jumping out of a van and taking his picture. Half of my contact list deleted me. People I knew actually crossed the street if they saw me coming.”
So with court dates ahead, and a toxic cloud of allegations darkening his world, the future looks very different for Michael Sona than it did just over a year ago before Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor broke the robocalls story on their way to the Triple Crown of journalism. He had come to Ottawa to immerse himself in government for a few years before entering the world of lobbying or communications in the private sector. The learning curve was vicious — and it comes down to this:
“I’ve learned three things from the Robocall Affair. Talking points aren’t always right; friends are fickle when you get in trouble; and I trusted the Conservative Party way too much. And one other thing. I’m ready to fight now and I’m ready to win.”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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