Party of One (63 page)

1
  According to a lawyer very familiar with the CIMS system, the information collected is almost scary. They even know if an individual voted in the last election, as well as a voter’s probable voting intentions. The connection between RMG and the Conservative Party apparently goes back to 2003.

2
  Byrne was national campaign manager for the Conservative Party during the 2011 election. She became director of political operations for the party in 2009 but returned to the PMO as co–deputy chief of staff in August 2013.

3
  Meier said the caller referred to knowing someone in the Conservative Party. Meier claimed that he concluded that someone had given “Pierre” his contact information, and even though he didn’t know who that person was, he accepted “Pierre’s” business because he was obviously connected.

4
  Meier gave Mathews a copy of three PayPal forms called “Transaction Details.” The PayPal documents identified “Pierre Jones,” of 54 Lajoie Nord, Joliette, Quebec, J6E 3B3, with an email address of
[email protected]
. The information was confirmed only insofar as there was a prepaid credit or debit card linked to the name, ensuring payment. When “Pierre Jones” contacted PayPal on May 1, 2011, he logged in each time from IP address 64.64.11.139, using the email address
[email protected]
. This was the same address used to communicate with RackNine.

5
  Meier told Mathews that the session logs he recovered identified two IP addresses as having been used by both clients #45 and #93 between April 30 and May 2, 2011. Unlike Prescott, client #93 used only two IP
addresses. The proxy server IP address appears in the session log four times, and was used by client #93, the dubious “Pierre Jones.” The IP address 99.225.29.34 appears numerous times in the session logs, and was related to use by client #45, Andrew Prescott. It was the IP address of the Marty Burke campaign.

6
  Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor, “Harper advisor delayed robocall witness interview for legal advice, email showed,” Postmedia News, November 14, 2013. Retrieved August 8, 2014, from
http://o.canada.com/news/harper-adviser-delayed-robocall-witness-interview-for-legal-advice-email-shows
. It takes almost three months for investigators to get an opportunity to speak to Prescott on February 24, 2012, and then only after the story breaks in the
National Post
, and briefly by phone with Arthur Hamilton on the line. Even if Byrne needs to consult a lawyer, is this a reasonable amount of time if you are doing everything you can to assist in the investigation? By the time Byrne sends her email to Prescott on November 30, Matt Meier has been in touch with both Prescott and the Party, after his visit from Elections Canada, according to court testimony at the Sona trial.

7
  Maher was the engaging cavalier of Ottawa journalism, who sailed, played the guitar, and “caroused” to escape from the rigours of highimpact journalism. He had his professional roots on the East Coast, working first in Gander for Robinson Blackmore, a chain of weeklies owned by Newfoundland businessman Harry Steele. He then moved to Nova Scotia where he was the restaurant critic for the
Chronicle Herald
until he was sent to Ottawa to cover federal politics. His charm was disarming. Behind the ladies’ man was a first-class mind that worked imaginatively on the stories he chose to pursue.

8
  McGregor’s hallmark as a journalist was exceptional research, based in part on wizard-like computer-assisted reporting skills. He had worked at the
Ottawa Citizen
since 1998, but his beginnings in the business were with
Frank Magazine
, the satirical publication that often pulled the tail of the establishment with outrageous stunts, and clever, if unorthodox, approaches. McGregor loved it:

“The most fun were the telephone pranks—calling up public figures with ludicrous premises and asking them to respond. My favourite was the Brian Mulroney Defence Fund, where I called up former PC cabinet ministers and asked them to contribute to his legal costs over Airbus.
Barbara McDougall committed to fifty bucks. Everyone else . . . ‘Uh, let me get back to you.’”

When not taking on the government, McGregor has a unique way of easing the pressure of Hot Room journalism on the Hill: “I follow an ’80s alternative rock band called Pixies around. It’s my mid-life crisis, flying to their shows. Cheaper than sports cars, hair transplants and mistresses,” he quipped.

When the government’s amiable stenographers in the right-wing media hit back at McGregor for his “Dumpster diving” journalism, it was usually a reference to his days at
Frank Magazine
. They also attacked him for the fact that his mother had once been Ed Broadbent’s communications director. What they didn’t know was that while the late Mrs. McGregor was doing that job, her son was running messages for Opposition leader Brian Mulroney.

9
  Sona told me in a March 9, 2014, interview that Al Mathews told him he didn’t know about Sona until he saw his name in the press.

10
  Initially in the investigation the information was described as “missing.” Blanks in the access logs could possibly mean the identifying data about who made the downloads had been removed by someone. CIMS is closely guarded; authorized people on individual campaigns can access data for their riding with a unique password, but not data for another riding. Only headquarters can do that.

11
  Early in 2013, Rougier left the federal party to work for the Ontario Conservatives and Tim Hudak. The provincial Conservatives lost on June 12, 2014. Rougier had also worked for Julian Fantino during his winning 2010 by-election campaign in Vaughan.

12
  Although it is not listed on his CV, White was reputed to be involved in the development of C-Vote. The new super-system was intended to replace CIMS for the 2015 election, but had some glitches and was not user friendly. There were so many complaints from the ridings, the acting executive director of the party put out a memo just before the Conservative convention in Calgary reinstituting CIMS: “To be clear, we will never again deploy C-Vote in our ridings.” Conservatives had spent over $7 million on C-Vote, which would have taken at least 280,000 donations of $25 to build.

13
  White, who holds a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Guelph, is the chief technical officer at UnlimitedViz Inc., an
information technology and services company he founded. Over the past ten years he has become an expert in Microsoft SharePoint and business intelligence platforms, and has won numerous awards for his work.

14
  The amendment also removes the problem of why the Conservative Party apparently did nothing when one of its campaign workers allegedly tried to get information from headquarters about making poll-moving calls.

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1
  On March 25, 2011, the Harper government was given the contempt of Parliament citation because it was withholding details of proposed bills and cost estimates from Parliament, including costs for the F-35, the G8 and G20 Summits, the cost to the federal treasury of planned reduction of corporate tax rates, cost of its crime bills, etc. The government eventually fell because of it.

2
  By studying workers in Canada, Britain, Australia, and America, Muttart had concluded that working-class voters were “crucially responsible for the rise of centre-right leaders like Harper, Australia’s John Howard, and Margaret Thatcher.” Like Jenni Byrne and Ray Novak, Muttart had worked for the Reform Party since he was a teenager. He joined the Harper team in 2004 and scripted daily messages. Muttart was chief of staff for Harper from 2006 to 2009, and helped the party cast itself as the champion of Canadians who “work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules.”

Muttart returned to Canada in March 2011, to work on contract during the May 2, 2011, election as a key strategist for Harper. (He travelled back and forth to his home base in Chicago.) But he was suddenly dropped on April 27, 2011, after an apparent attempt at swiftboating Ignatieff backfired.

On April 20, 2011, Sun News ran a story by Brian Lilley: “Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning.” The story said, “He was on the front lines of pre-invasion planning when he worked in the US.” Then on April 27, 2011, Sun Media Corp. president Pierre Karl Peladeau published a photo that Sun News and former Harper spokesperson Kory Teneycke said it had received from Muttart. Apparently, according to an editorial by Pierre Peladeau, Muttart had also given the Sun a clip from a Pentagon press briefing in which an American colonel thanked Ignatieff for his work in preparation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

According to an
Ottawa Citizen
blog dated April 27, 2011, Peladeau said Muttart had given the
Sun
a fake photo of Ignatieff in combat gear. The photo showed a group of soldiers in front of a military helicopter holding rifles, supposedly in Kuwait prior to the US invasion of Iraq. One of the men was supposedly Ignatieff, but it wasn’t.

The Conservatives claimed they had told Sun News they couldn’t verify the photo. Muttart’s PR firm Mercury issued a press release saying Muttart had provided verbal overviews and material to Sun Media about Ignatieff and the war in Iraq, and Sun Media used the information provided: “At no point did Muttart tell Sun Media that he had positively identified Ignatieff in the photo in question.”

The odd thing was that Mercury had been actively involved in the creation and development of Sun TV. Muttart had worked with Sun News to develop the network’s original logo, and framed the network’s “straight talk” language. Muttart had also introduced potential advertising clients to Sun News. Yet Peladeau now claimed, “It is my belief that this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff ’s campaign but in the process to damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News.”

3
  See “Two Republican Dark Money Groups Spent $311 Million Last Year,” Bloomberg, November 18, 2013, for reference that AFP focuses on voter turnouts according to president Tim Phillips. See “The GOP War on Voting,”
Rolling Stone
, August 30, 2011, for information about the American Legislative Exchange Council (funded in part by Koch brothers) and the information on Weyrich.

4
  AFFIDAVIT OF ANNETTE DESGAGNE (sworn April 13, 2012) Federal Court of Canada, Court File No. T- 633-12. This five-page affidavit is a revealing document for voters concerned about the robocalls scandal.

5
  See Commissioner of Canada Elections, Summary Investigation Report on Robocalls, April 2014. Retrieved from
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=com&dir=rep/rep2&document=index&lang=e
.

The April 24, 2014, Elections Canada report by commissioner Coté found that incorrect poll locations were provided to some electors, and some nuisance calls occurred (see page 4 executive summary). The problem was proving intent to prevent an elector from voting for a particular candidate. The Elections Canada evidence had to be beyond a
reasonable doubt. (Under current case law, it is not illegal to impersonate Elections Canada.)

Item 93 page 22 of the Elections Canada report reads: “Investigators found that a number of RMG callers told electors at which poll location they should vote, rather than asking electors to verify the poll location indicated on their VIC as outlined in the script. As well, a number of the RMG calls identifying a specific poll location provided incorrect information.” Elections Canada did a sample study of 1,000 calls made by RMG to compare them to 126 complainants calls (see page 23 of report). Wrong poll location information was provided in only 1 percent of the sample cases, but among actual complainants, RMG provided incorrect poll location information 27 percent of the time.

6
  Andrew Coyne, “Judge finds smoking gun in robocalls scandal but who pulled the trigger?
National Post
, May 24, 2013. Retrieved July 31, 2014, from
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/05/24/judge-finds-smoking-gun-in-robocalls-scandal-but-who-pulled-the-trigger/
.

7
  According to the election commissioner’s report on April 24, 2014, Campaign Research “called 89 complainant numbers during the election.” The company does not retain recordings of calls, so “investigators were unable to determine the call content.” Investigators were told the callers did not provide electors with poll location information.

8
  Stephen Maher (with files from Glen McGregor): “Party lawyer’s presence in robocall witness interviews may pose problem, lawyers say,”
canada.com
, September 10, 2013.

9
  Johnson, who is disabled, was living in Ottawa, where he attended All Nations Church. He graduated in the spring of 2011 with a degree in political studies from the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon. That summer he worked in the PMO, moving in the fall for a few months into the office of Senator Doug Finley. After that, he took a ninety-day job with Human Resources Development Canada in Gatineau in February 2012. While he was there, his parents faxed him with good news: his $43,000 student loan had been forgiven [it is unknown by whom]. Like Michael Sona, Johnson had plans to eventually open his own political consulting business based on the experience he was gaining in Ottawa. Some very senior Conservatives had lent Johnson their support. Guy Giorno, the PM’s former chief of staff and national campaign chair for the 2011 election, helped Johnson to apply to the commissioner of lobbying for an
exemption from section 10.11 of the Lobbying Act. That way, he’d have a better chance at getting a job in the private sector, without going through a laundering period before going to work for a firm that did business with government. In the end, Giorno himself hired Johnson as his assistant at the Ottawa office of the law firm Fasken Martineau.

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