Party of One (12 page)

After Postmedia journalists Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor broke the robocalls story on February 23, 2012, country-wide demonstrations erupted demanding a public inquiry to reveal the identity of the alleged election cheaters. Stephen Harper steadfastly refused to call an inquiry, practising instead his government’s 3-D approach to damage control: deny, deflect, and delay—and, if possible, catch the next plane out of town for important international work.

Part of the effort was public relations on the ground. Senator Mike Duffy was dispatched to downplay the scandal in the media. On February 27, 2012, Duffy appeared on Jordi Morgan’s Halifax radio show on News 95.7, claiming that it wasn’t “us doing it” and that the Conservatives welcomed the investigation. Duffy then offered an intriguing conjecture: the calls could have been made by what he called unnamed “third parties.” “I don’t believe it was the Conservative Party,” he said. “But if something is going on, don’t forget, we have all these other groups. . . . People have to remember that it’s not just political parties that are operating during a federal election campaign. Under the law, we have all kinds
of interested third parties that are operating in election campaigns, and I think that’s where we have to be careful.”

Duffy didn’t say who these “third parties” were. It was enough to merely suggest a mysterious culprit to draw attention away from the Conservatives. Besides, as the senator made clear, “This isn’t the end of the world here. But it is something that needs to be investigated and frankly it burns my butt, because the dirty tricksters are at it and I don’t think anybody in politics likes this.” Duffy ended the interview by telling Morgan’s radio audience that in his forty years covering politics, Stephen Harper was “the straightest politician [he had] ever covered.” In less than a year, mired in the Senate expenses scandal, Duffy would offer a very different appraisal of how things were done in Stephen Harper’s PMO.

Although the Harper government and Conservative Party headquarters continued to protest their innocence in the robocall affair, the party’s credibility suffered a serious reversal. In late January 2013, Saskatchewan residents began receiving an interactive push poll, a robocall critical of draft changes to the boundaries of federal ridings in the province proposed by the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for Saskatchewan. With thirty new seats up for grabs across the country in the 2015 election, the new riding boundaries were crucially important public issues. The push poll asked residents if they agreed with a plan that would damage “Saskatchewan values” by pitting rural and urban voters against each other. No message accompanied the robocall to say who had commissioned it.

Saskatchewan Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski and Conservative Party spokesperson Fred DeLorey denied that the party was doing the polling, but the reporting team of Maher and McGregor weren’t buying it. Maher thought he recognized the voice on the recording from their previous robocall stories. To test their theory, the reporters hired an American forensic audio analyst to study
the voice. It turned out to belong to Matt Meier of RackNine, the same firm used by the Conservatives—and “Pierre Poutine”—to make robocalls in the 2011 election. This time, Meier couldn’t claim he didn’t know the content of the message going out, because he himself had recorded it. Glen McGregor, who had reported Fred DeLorey’s denial that Conservatives were behind the poll, was shocked. “The Saskatchewan riding boundary robocalls story was utterly astounding to me,” said McGregor. “The idea that the Tories would be so brazen as to hire RackNine in the midst of the Poutine case, to make such dirty tricks calls, then to cover it up, lie to me about it—Just wow. . . . Providing patently false information, on the record, to a reporter is the worst thing a spokesman can do. Because of this, he [DeLorey] has very little credibility in my view.”

The Harper government’s deputy House leader, Tom Lukiwski, was livid. Blindsided by the illegal push poll in his own province, he immediately told Saskatoon radio station CKOM that the calls were “deceptive.” He went further on a CBC radio call-in show, declaring that Jenni Byrne, the party’s most senior official, should be held responsible: “I don’t know which party official it would be, but I know that Jenni Byrne, who is executive director, said, well, ultimately the buck stops with her. She should take full responsibility.”

Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair accused the Conservatives of lying about the call. After denying the story, Fred DeLorey now said that there had been an “internal miscommunication.” The prime minister insisted, “The party has already explained that it has followed all the rules and the law in this situation.” But the CRTC requires that all robocalls identify their sponsor. The Saskatchewan push poll did not declare that it was being paid for by the Conservative Party, and for that reason it was illegal.

After some serious bumps, things began shifting the government’s way in the robocalls affair. Matt Meier threatened to sue
NDP MP Pat Martin unless he apologized for remarks he had made about RackNine’s involvement in the Guelph robocalls. Martin obliged, but Meier sued him for $5 million anyway. The case was eventually settled out of court. Ironically, in late May 2013, the CRTC announced that RackNine had agreed to pay $60,000 in fines for fifteen illegal robocalls campaigns sent out on behalf of political parties from March 2011 to February 2013. These included six campaigns for the Wildrose Party and two for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, all made without identifying who was behind the messages. The “Pierre Poutine” calls from Guelph were not part of the CRTC penalties. However, the federal Conservatives were fined $78,000 for doing the Saskatchewan boundary push poll without a declaration of origin.

The best break the Harper government got in the robocalls affair came at the expense of the Liberals. The riding association of the Liberal MP from Guelph, Frank Valeriote, was fined $4,900 for making illegal robocalls two days before the 2011 election. The anonymous calls attacked the Conservative candidate’s position on abortion. (This was the phone campaign against Marty Burke that Michael Sona wanted to counter with a barrage of calls aimed at Frank the Flip-Flopper.) Valeriote cooperated fully with the CRTC when he learned the call did not include identifying information, and told reporters, “I take full responsibility and apologize for the infringement.” After the CRTC levied the fine in August 2012, Harper never missed an opportunity of mentioning that the only person convicted in the robocalls affair was a Liberal—MP Frank Valeriote. It was a clever attempt at shifting the focus.

Maude Barlow and the Council of Canadians (COC) had earlier called the prime minister’s bluff. Just a month after the robocalls story broke, the COC began filing court applications on behalf of nine voters seeking to overturn election results in seven ridings won by the Conservatives because of alleged cheating. One
challenge was later dropped. Reflecting the view of thousands of Canadians, the COC believed the case was of “fundamental importance to our democracy” and was “both critical and unprecedented.” The COC observed that although the Conservatives claimed they wanted to get to the bottom of the robocalls affair, “They seem to be doing whatever they can to prevent this case from being heard by a judge.” The COC was referring to the fact that the Conservatives had filed a 750-page legal brief asking the Federal Court to dismiss the challenges by Maude Barlow and her organization. Lawyers for the Conservatives argued that no evidence showed that anyone had actually been denied the right to vote. Strangely, those same lawyers seemed uninterested in the fact that if the Conservative Party had nothing to do with deceptive robocalls, the party’s database had been hacked, pilfered, and used to break the law.

Despite efforts by the lawyers for the Conservatives, the Federal Court ruled that the Council of Canadians’ suit could proceed. The council’s lawyer, Steven Shrybman, asked Elections Canada to provide the COC with details of complaints from voters in two hundred ridings. Ultimately, the results in six ridings in the 2011 election were challenged by voters in Federal Court, who were supported by the Council of Canadians. The case wrapped up in mid-December 2012. Although the Conservatives would claim victory when the judgment came down in May, it was in fact a stunning confirmation of electoral fraud in Canada—driven by Conservative voter information buried deep inside the electronic fortress of CIMS.

Federal Court justice Richard Mosley ruled that widespread telephone fraud targeting non-Conservative voters had taken place, likely based on CIMS, but not enough evidence had been presented to overturn the voting results in the six electoral districts. In an indictment of what went on, Mosley wrote, “There was
an orchestrated effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election campaign by a person or persons with access to the CIMS database.” The COC had brought to light evidence of fraud in multiple ridings outside Guelph but no proof of the fraudster: “There is no evidence to indicate that the use of the CIMS database in this manner was approved or condoned by the CPC,” the judge wrote. “Rather the evidence points to elaborate efforts to conceal the identity of those accessing the database and arranging for the calls to be made.”

In a rebuke of the Conservative Party’s claim that it had always cooperated with investigations into robocalls, the judge also noted that the Conservatives had actually engaged in “trench warfare” to prevent the civil case from coming to a hearing on the merits. If Canadians believed the party line, either someone was trying to frame the Conservatives, or the party had been the victim of an elaborate theft without their knowledge. As Andrew Coyne pointed out in his column,
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someone had committed massive electoral fraud that could only benefit the Conservative Party, but apparently had done it without the party’s involvement.

The two seminal scandals of the Harper years intersected on what must have been a bad day in the PMO. On the same day as the Mosley decision, May 23, 2013, Senator Mike Duffy spoke to reporters for the first time since the bombshell report by CTV’s Bob Fife charging that the prime minister’s chief of staff had given the senator $90,000 to pay off improper expenses. Duffy said he wanted a “full and open inquiry” and promised to reveal what had happened: “I think Canadians have a right to know all the facts and I’m quite prepared, in the right place and time, to give them the whole story.”

After eight months of living under a cloud of suspicion created by senior members of his own party, Michael Sona made a fateful decision. Once he heard elections commissioner Yves Côté
recommend charges in the Guelph robocalls case after a twenty-one-month investigation, Sona went public. The figure at the eye of the storm gave an interview to the
Huffington Post
and later to the
Ottawa Citizen
, making the point to anyone who would listen that many of the alleged facts about him in the affidavit of Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews were wrong. With the prime minister refusing demands for a judicial inquiry, and frustrated by the fact that he had been fingered by anonymous senior Conservatives in the Guelph case, Michael Sona reached for the ultimate megaphone: network television.

In an attempt to clear his name, Sona appeared on CBC’s
Power & Politics
on October 31, 2012. He told host Evan Solomon that his name had been leaked to the media by anonymous party sources and that he was not going to “take the fall” for something he didn’t do. On the main point—who was responsible for the deceitful Guelph robocalls—he categorically denied that he was “Pierre Poutine”; nor did he know who was. Sona’s suggestion seemed to be that important players in Ottawa had been deeply engaged in the Marty Burke attack campaign. Guelph was a targeted riding for the Conservatives, and HQ was “very involved” in trying to take it from the Liberals.

Sona told Solomon that Nick Kouvalis, a principal partner of Campaign Research, a company used by the Conservative Party in the 2011 election, was in the Guelph riding between eight and twelve times doing voter outreach. (Kouvalis countered by tweeting that he was in the riding twice.) Kouvalis had been campaign manager for Rob Ford in 2010, and worked for thirty-nine campaigns in the 2011 election, most of them in Ontario. The company was hard-nosed in its approach to politics. A formal complaint was lodged against Campaign Research for suggesting to voters in Liberal MP Irwin Cotler’s riding of Mount Royal that Cotler was about to retire, which was untrue. When Cotler complained
to the Speaker of the House that his privileges as an MP had been breached by the false campaign, Speaker Andrew Scheer investigated. Though he did not make a finding that Campaign Research had breached Cotler’s privilege, Scheer called the deceptive phone campaign “reprehensible.” Kouvalis did not seem to be overly concerned. As he told Postmedia, “We’re in the business of getting Conservatives elected and ending Liberal careers. We’re good at it.”
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As for Sona, he wanted people to consider how credible it was that one person in a notoriously top-down operation could be responsible for the complex and nationwide voter deception caper that was robocalls. As he put it to me, had a “twenty-two-year-old guy managed to coordinate this entire massive scheme when he didn’t even have access to the data to be able to do this?” In fact, there were five workers on the Guelph campaign who did have access to the CIMS database during the election: Andrew Prescott, John White, Ken Morgan, Trent Blanchette, and Chris Crawford. Crawford, White, and Sona gave evidence to investigators. Prescott initially refused, then granted a telephone conversation, and finally cancelled a subsequent formal interview with Elections Canada investigators.

Morgan and Blanchette refused outright to speak to Elections Canada, Morgan by email in April 2012. Four months later, he moved to Kuwait. Not even the dogged reporters who had broken the robocalls story could get to him, as Glen McGregor told me. “Did everything we could to contact him,” said McGregor. “I even spoke to the father of his American girlfriend in Kuwait City. He would never talk to us. Still won’t. He’s a huge open question in robocalls.” Though Morgan remained incommunicado, he revealed glimpses of a lonely man on Twitter between November 7, 2012, and June 7, 2013: “Missing Canada today. Family, food, smells . . . even politics.” Even the name of his blog site—“The Captain’s
Quarters 10,410 kilometres from home”—showed the depth of the isolation he felt.