Party of One (7 page)

It was only the beginning.

three

THE DEMOCRACY BANDITS

It’s so strange. Where did everything go wrong for a government that came into town on accountability? When the Conservatives were elected, many in the base wanted massive changes to government, but the raison d’être was “incrementalism.” I can’t tell you the amount of times I had to use that line in unofficial communications. I believed it too! I guess corruption happens the same way. It doesn’t just swoop in and take over everything. It starts as a little action, a little boundary pushing, a little rule-breaking. And before you know it, your incrementalism on breaking the rules has led to entire elections being tainted.

—Michael Sona, June 25, 2013, to the author

L
ike Watergate, Canada’s worst election scandal went almost unnoticed at the time. On May 2, 2011, election day, at 10 a.m., Guelph resident Susan Campbell received an automated message telling her that her polling station had been moved.
Her caller ID told her that the sixty-three-second message was coming from telephone number 450-760-7746. The scratchy female voice said, “This is an automated message from Elections Canada. Due to a projected increase in poll turnout, your voting location has changed. Your new voting location is at the Old Quebec Street Mall at 55 Wyndham Street North.” The voice repeated the message and gave a toll-free number to call if the voter had any questions. An apology was also offered for “any inconvenience that this may cause.” It sounded official, especially when the entire message was repeated in French. There was just one problem. Campbell had already voted and no change had been made to her polling location. After dialling the toll-free number given in the automated message, only to find that it was out of service, she smelled a rat. Campbell copied down the number of the automated call from her caller ID and reported it to Elections Canada.

On that spring Monday, Susan Campbell had no way of knowing that what had happened to her was happening to thousands of other people in Guelph. Ben Grossman told authorities that he voted at 9:30 a.m. and returned home just after 10:00 a.m. to find a voice message from a blocked number telling him his polling station had been moved across the city. He too forwarded the information to Elections Canada.

At 11:06 a.m., elections officer Anita Hawdur sent an email to legal counsel Karen McNeil: “URGENT Conservative campaign office communications with electors.” Returning officers were calling Elections Canada to ask about fraudulent phone calls, and not just in Guelph. Similar calls were being reported from other locations in Ontario, and in Manitoba and British Columbia. An alert was sent to the deputy chief electoral officer for electoral events at Elections Canada, Rennie Molnar, who then emailed senior director Michel Roussel: “This one is far more serious. They have
actually disrupted the voting process.” Meanwhile, the Liberal candidate in Guelph, MP Frank Valeriote, issued a statement saying his campaign office had received complaints about the misleading calls. He passed on the evidence to Elections Canada and the Guelph police.

Other irregularities occurred as well. In Montreal, residents of an apartment complex showed up to vote and found that their names were already crossed off the voters list. In Etobicoke Centre, reports came in that Conservative officials had disrupted voting at a polling station. Radio stations began broadcasting warnings about the misleading automated phone calls. In Guelph, where nearly seven thousand calls were made, the university put out a campus-wide email warning that the message about polling location changes was false.

At first, Valeriote thought he was dealing with a few nuisance calls, but he quickly realized it was nothing less than an orchestrated effort to discourage his supporters from voting. In Guelph at least, someone was trying to steal the election. Voter suppression, a well-known campaign tactic in US politics, was virtually unknown in Canada. Valeriote sent a campaign worker to the mall with a binder of polling maps to redirect Liberal supporters to the correct polls. Within an hour, one hundred misdirected voters had turned up at the false location. They were angry and frustrated. Parking was hard to find at the Old Quebec Street Mall, and some of the adjacent streets were under construction. The crowd soon doubled. When they realized that they’d been duped, some people hurried to vote at the correct location. But several voters tore up their voter information cards on the spot. The would-be voters included disabled people using walkers and mothers with strollers, and some had been dropped off by friends because of the difficulty with finding parking. Now they were stranded. The level of “inconvenience” was significant.

The returning officer for Guelph was deluged with calls from voters who had received the same misleading call as Susan Campbell and Ben Grossman. The phony calls were also causing problems at the campaign headquarters of Conservative candidate Marty Burke, or at least they appeared to be. At 10:13 a.m., just ten minutes after the misleading calls began, Michael Sona, Burke’s communications director, put out a press release condemning the scam: “Today, many of our supporters have received misleading phone calls regarding voting in the General election,” the twenty-two-year-old said. “This group is telling them that their polling location has changed. This is absolutely false, and has no place in the democratic process.”

Sona’s expeditious action would seem to warrant praise. Instead, his press release elicited what he described as a “furious” call from national Conservative Party headquarters. They wanted to know “what the hell was going on in Guelph.” When Sona answered his cellphone, he found Fred DeLorey on the line. Normally evenkeeled, the Conservative Party’s spokesperson was angry. Sona recalled, “I started to explain the calls that had been going out misdirecting people, but that’s not what they were mad about. They wanted to know why I had issued a 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. . . .”

The voter suppression scandal actually began before election day, and it wasn’t confined to Guelph. Three days before the general election, complaints began arriving at Elections Canada. People reported “robocalls” in Guelph, and “live” calls in other places where someone allegedly impersonating a representative of Elections Canada was redirecting voters to the wrong polls. As emails to Elections Canada later indicated, Canadians across the country believed they had been targeted by people calling on behalf of the Conservative Party of Canada. This was days before
Michael Sona’s press release focused the national media’s attention on Guelph as the epicentre of what would eventually become the robocalls scandal, and months before a fellow called “Pierre Poutine” emerged as the mysterious villain of the piece.

On April 29 at 8:16 p.m., Sylvie Jacmain, the director of field programs and services for Elections Canada, sent an email to agency lawyer Ageliki Apostolakos, reporting problems in the ridings of Saint Boniface, Manitoba, and Kitchener-Conestoga, Ontario: “It seems representatives of Mr. Harper’s campaign communicated with voters to inform them that their polling station had changed, and the directions offered to one would lead her more than an hour and a half from her real voting place. . . .” The Conservative campaign in Saint Boniface itself got in touch with party headquarters “who were doing the calls,” a reference to the party’s legitimate automated messaging. Then Elections Canada’s lawyer emailed Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, informing him of what was happening. The elections watchdog wanted some answers.

It took Hamilton twenty-seven hours to respond. When he did, he told Elections Canada that Conservative campaign workers had simply been contacting voters to ensure they were going to the right polling stations. Just after midnight on May 1, Hamilton replied to Apostolakos’s email, stating that “a number of our candidates have had to confirm the proper location of polling stations to a number of supporters during their respective get-out-the-vote efforts. The calls being made by our candidates request the voter to confirm his or her polling stations. There is no indication by the caller that the location may have changed, or words to that effect. And no voter is being directed to a polling location one and a half hours away from the correct polling location.” Three years later, we would learn from the commissioner of Elections Canada’s report that the Conservative Party provided a script to Responsive
Marketing Group (RMG) for a national campaign that included this line to be used by its callers: “Elections Canada has changed some voting locations at the last moment. To be sure, could you tell me the address of where you’re voting?”

But in his response to Elections Canada, Hamilton flatly denied that a voter had been misdirected to a polling station far from her correct poll—at least by the Conservatives. Within hours of Hamilton’s denial, Elections Canada had received reports of misleading calls from eleven different ridings. Another email was sent to Hamilton, with the information that some voters had recorded the originating phone numbers of the robocalls, which led back to the Conservative Party. The calls were being received from as far east as Avalon, in Newfoundland and Labrador, and as far west as Prince George–Peace River, in British Columbia. Dismissing the evidence, Hamilton stuck to the party line in a reply to Elections Canada officials at 10:45 a.m. on election day, and re-sent his email. If someone was playing dirty politics, he stated firmly, it wasn’t the Conservative Party of Canada.

What looked like a bizarre national scam now had Elections Canada buzzing. According to an internal email, “It’s right across the country except Saskatchewan; a lot of the calls are from electoral districts in Ontario. It appears it’s getting worse. Some returning officers reported that the calls are allegedly identifying Elections Canada.” From party headquarters, Fred DeLorey also denied that the Conservative Party was trying to mislead anyone; it was just calling supporters to get out the vote. His explanation was strange. Why would there be so many protests if the Conservatives were merely calling their own supporters? It appeared that someone had a list of non-Conservative supporters and was using it to send out misdirections to people who would not be voting for Stephen Harper’s party. Still, top Tories kept to their speaking points. Conservative campaign co-chair Guy Giorno told CTV
News that voter suppression was “a despicable, reprehensible practice and everybody ought to condemn it.” Giorno denied any party involvement, as did the man who won all the marbles in the controversial election, Stephen Harper.

Meanwhile, in the riding of Guelph, those involved in making the fraudulent calls had gone to a lot of trouble to make them difficult to trace. The callers had paid in cash for a “burner” cellphone, prepaid for the service time, and used two false names: “Pierre Poutine” and “Pierre Jones.” The credit cards used to pay for the robocalls were prepaid, and were purchased from two different Shoppers Drug Marts in Guelph. As NDP MP Pat Martin said after the story broke, “Who the hell uses a burner cellphone and is not trying to hide something? Only dope dealers and Hells Angels and Tony Soprano use burner cell phones.” A burner phone is perfect for both privacy and anonymity. Since users pay in advance for service use and can pay in cash, they are not required to sign a service plan, and no payment record exists that can establish the identity of the user.

The trail that investigators would later begin to follow backtracked to a point just before election day on May 2. On April 30, 2011, Ken Morgan, the campaign manager for Conservative candidate Marty Burke, sent an email to campaign worker Andrew Prescott. Prescott was contacted because he was responsible for “voice drops,” or automated calls to select groups of electors. Morgan, and another member of the campaign, Michael Sona, asked Prescott for the contact information for the company he used for that purpose, RackNine Inc. In the 2011 election, Matt Meier, the owner of RackNine, worked only for Conservative clients and did not advertise. In order to engage his services, you had to be introduced by a current client or be someone he knew, at least according to what he later told Elections Canada investigators. Andrew Prescott was the perfect person to make the introduction because he had
worked with RackNine on other political campaigns since 2010, knew Meier, and had the number for his direct line.

That same April night, at 6:49 p.m., someone purchased a $75 prepaid Visa card at Shoppers Drug Mart on Scottsdale Drive in Guelph. Fifteen minutes later, just over a kilometre away, a person walked into Future Shop on Stone Road West in Guelph and bought a prepaid Virgin Mobile cellphone. The buyer later activated the phone under the name “Pierre Poutine,” ostensibly a resident of Joliette, Quebec.

According to an Information to Obtain (ITO), a court document sworn and filed by Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews, at 7:19 p.m., an unknown person created an email
account—[email protected]
—using an IP address at the Burke campaign headquarters. An hour and a half later, the burner cellphone was activated through a cell tower 1.6 kilometres from the Burke campaign office. Then, shortly after 9 p.m., someone using the name “Pierre Jones” called Matt Meier’s direct line and set up a new RackNine account. That call was placed just three and a half hours after Andrew Prescott had provided Meier’s personal contact information to Morgan and Sona.

The next day, May 1, 2011, three more prepaid gift cards were purchased at a different Shoppers Drug Mart—a MasterCard for $200, a Visa for $150, and a second Visa loaded with $35. At 9:19 p.m. on election eve, “Pierre Jones” logged on to RackNine. A minute later, “Pierre Jones” accessed RackNine again. His IP address was noteworthy: it was the address used by the Burke campaign. The gift cards were used to transfer money to a PayPal account, and that account was used to reimburse RackNine. By design, the payment email was sent through a proxy server that hides the originating IP access location. Someone was doing his best to make sure that the payments to RackNine couldn’t be linked back to the Burke campaign.