PARLIAMENT HILL—Conservatives in Guelph, Ont., who worked on the campaign at the epicentre of a controversy over fraudulent phone calls targeting Liberal voters in the 2011 federal election are ready to “talk” to Elections Canada investigators, a lawyer with one of the voter-contact firms that worked for the Conservative candidate in Guelph says.Aaron Wudrick, general counsel and a spokesman for Campaign Research Inc., told The Hill Times Thursday he hopes an Elections Canada investigation gets to the bottom of allegations that a Conservative campaign aide in the riding used a disposable cellphone and Edmonton-based robocalls to flood the riding with fraudulent calls purported to be from Elections Canada, as well as investigations into similar complaints in at least 14 other electoral districts.
Mr. Wudrick, whose firm conducted voter-contact telephone surveys to identify supporters of Conservative candidate Marty Burke in the riding and get them out to vote, said he is “as much in the dark” as everyone else about who might have been behind the Guelph calls that claimed to be Elections Canada alerts notifying voters that polling site locations had changed, and other forms of harassing calls alleged to have taken place in other ridings.
Campaign Research conducted voter-contact telephoning for 39 Conservative candidates in the 2011 candidate, for total fees of $400,000. Responsive Marketing Group Inc., which the Conservative Party has used through several elections, worked on 97 Conservative candidate campaigns, and was paid a total of $1.4-million. Responsive Marketing Group also conducted voter-contact work on Mr. Burke's Guelph riding, and billed the campaign $15,000.
No allegations have been made against either company, and Mr. Wudrick said Elections Canada has not contacted his firm. There is no evidence RMG’s or Campaign Research callers deliberately misled electors.
Mr. Wudrick said he opposes misleading and harassing phone calls, targeting voters who support opposing candidates, on ethical grounds and also because it is “not an effective tactic” in the sophisticated technological battleground that election campaigns have begun.
“If you’re misdirecting somebody to a location, that could theoretically be inadvertent, but if you’re calling somebody at a bad time, I just don’t see how that possibly could be accidental, but, as of yet, I’m as much in the dark as yourself or anybody else in Ottawa, or in the political circles. I do not know, [nor do I] have any idea, who is responsible for that. I hope Elections Canada finds out, since the longer this drags on it’s certainly not good for us,” Mr. Wudrick said as he outlined his views on aspects of the controversy so far.
“I understand, one thing I have heard is that there are people in Guelph who are prepared to talk about it further,” said Mr. Wudrick, a former Conservative candidate campaign manager who also takes part in the voter-contact aspects of Campaign Research. “I assume that they are speaking with Elections Canada now, which is why they’re not speaking about it to the media or to the party, or anybody else, but I understand that, I mean there is a serious investigation underway there, so hopefully that uncovers at least some of the activity.”
The former communications director for Mr. Burke, who lost to Liberal Frank Valeriote by more than 6,000 votes, resigned from a post with Conservative MP Eve Adams (Mississauga-Brampton South, Ont.) shortly after a joint news report by Postmedia News and The Ottawa Citizenrevealed that Elections Canada was investigating the alleged fraudulent calls placed to Guelph voters. But the campaign aide, Michael Sona, later issued a statement saying he was not behind the calls and that he hoped that “the real guilty party would be apprehended.” Mr. Sona said the calls also targeted Conservative supporters.
Since the controversy began, Elections Canada has taken the unprecedented step of announcing it had received such a “large volume of complaints,” with 31,000 "contacts" from voters, that it would conduct a wider investigation, likely with the help of the RCMP, and eventually present a report to Parliament. This week, the electoral agency went further, posting a complaint form on its website so voters could contact Elections Canada directly.
Mr. Wudrick said the concern over many complaints that have surfaced following the Guelph revelations, over telephone calls that other voters had received informing them their polling stations had changed shortly before voting day, may be misdirected.
Mr. Wudrick said such confusion is normal for all voter-contact firms, which identify voters and also call them later in campaigns to ensure they turn out to vote and go to the right polling station.
“There are different elements to this whole voter suppression scandal, if you want to call it that,” Mr. Wudrick said. “You identified the Guelph stuff, as I think something everyone agrees is a problem and really needs to be seriously looked into. I categorize them in two ways, there is the misdirection calls, which are a function of telling people to go to the wrong place, and then there is the harassment calls, which are the rude people, late night people, calling Jewish people on the wrong day. I think the misdirection stuff, I can say as someone who has worked on campaigns, it’s fairly common and I think it’s inadvertent on the part of every party.”
“I would love to have a list where if I have 1,000 identified Conservative supporters and 50 different voting lists, that the thousand are all actually Conservative supporters, because they won't be," Mr. Wudrick said. "It will be 80 eight per cent correct, but there will be a couple, 10 or 20 per cent that aren’t."
Mr. Wudrick said it would also be perfect if “the voting locations are also all correct, and they won’t all be correct. It will be a couple that are not correct and so the effect is that the overlap of some incorrectly-identified voters, plus some incorrect locations, is that some people are going to be sent to the wrong spot, and I don’t think that’s deliberate on anyone’s part—our party or any other party that does this.”
Mr. Wudrick said some voters are so enthusiastic during an election that they confirm support for any party.
“People say, ‘Why don’t you have a more accurate data base?’ I would love to have a more accurate data. I would love to be able to say definitely that every single person we’ve identified as a supporter is a supporter” said Mr. Wudrick, whose last job as an election campaign director was in 2008 for Conservative MP Peter Braid (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.), who narrowly defeated former Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi.
“But the reality is some people are just nice on the phone, and they end up on multiple parties’ lists,” he said. “The other thing one of my colleagues pointed out to me is often we get a household with a husband and wife and they will be supporting different parties, and so if we call the husband and he identifies as a Conservative and then later on the wife is on the phone and she identifies as a Liberal and we call later telling someone to go out and vote, thinking it’s a Conservative, but the wife is on the phone, she is thinking ‘why are they calling me, I identified as a Liberal,’ that also occurs in a number of households.”
“The harassing phone calls, that is a mystery to me, and that is what I think is the real issue under all of this, and I think in a way it’s unfortunate that every type of annoying phone call has sort of been lumped in together here, because I think if someone is calling on the Sabbath at 9 p.m., obviously there is no mistake involved,” he said.
In the Commons on Thursday, after government and opposition parties debated the robocall controversy for a day, both sides supported a Liberal motion recommending that Parliament give the chief electoral officer more power to access expense and spending records of all parties following an election.
Original Article
Source: Hill Times
Author: Tim Naumetz
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