Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (38 page)

Turner took up the cause during Question Period in the House of Commons in the fall of 2007: “Millions of Canadians may have had their privacy breached and their trust misused by members of this House. This is due to CIMS, a database run by the Conservative party, which each party MP has installed in his or her office. Unknown to millions of constituents, personal information is routinely fed into this database, which experts are calling a ‘chilling’ breach of ethics.”

No matter how much the Conservatives deflected the charges about CIMS, the revelation about an all-knowing, Big Brother–style database could actually explain a lot. How had the Conservatives known to send greeting cards to members of cultural communities, celebrating their holidays? Reports kept surfacing about these unexpected, at times unwelcome, bits of mail from the Conservative government. Members of the gay and lesbian community were startled in 2012, for instance, when they received an email from Immigration Minister Jason Kenney boasting of what the government had done for gays and lesbians abroad. It turned out that he had obtained the emails from a petition sent to his office in 2011. Some Canadians felt a bit creepy about the idea of the population getting sorted into lists this way. Michelle Kofman, a Jewish Canadian who lived in Thornhill, a Liberal-held riding the Conservatives coveted, wrote a letter about her concerns to the
National Post
, which was published on September 29, 2007:

On Monday, I received a postcard from Stephen Harper. The front of the card featured his lovely family, and on the back, my family was wished a “Happy New Year.” Besides the fact that it was ten days later than the actual Jewish new year, this card raises the question: How does the prime minister know I’m Jewish? Did his office acquire this information from the most recent census? If so, is this an appropriate use of this information? Is this gesture strictly for political gain?… This public relations initiative appears to be using my ethnicity to win support in the pending federal election. Does the PMO really think there is any sincerity there? I hope the development, printing and mailing of this card was paid for by the Conservative party, and not the Canadian taxpayer. And if the intentions were purely genuine, then I expect a beautiful Hanukkah card in my mailbox this December.

That wasn’t the first such letter printed in the
National Post
either. A man with the surname Lee wrote of how he had received a Chinese New Year card, even though he had no Chinese origins. What kind of Conservative direct marketing was this? Where were the ruling Conservatives getting the data that allowed them to send out these greeting cards to target audiences? Suspicions immediately ran toward the database—technology run amok. Former Conservative party and Parliament Hill staffer Michael Sona, who became entangled in his own controversies over the CIMS database and “robocalls” in 2012–13, said it was part of his job working in MPs’ offices to feed constituent information into the Conservative database. This was true for other staffers, too, he said. However, the party also had lots of volunteers to sift through names and come up with these lists, according to Richard Ciano. “That’s the advantage that we have, that volunteer labour to do that stuff. I know that sometimes the output of it concerns people, but at the end of the day, it’s stuff that we’re observing in public.”

Moreover, the Conservatives aren’t alone in doing this kind of cultural outreach. There are services that supply analytic software to databases to help decipher the cultural origins behind names on the voters’ list. Pitney Bowes, a British firm, supplies one such system, called Spectrum, that boasts that it can do “name matching” from more than two hundred countries to help databases get their spelling correct. The Liberals, with their own historic ties to cultural communities, bought this software to augment their own database, called Liberalist.

The use of these databases also further entrenched the reality of the “permanent campaign” in Canada. Where once parties only made occasional forays to people’s doorsteps, through doing periodic door-knocking or distributing pamphlets through the mailbox, now the political offices had the technology and resources to make voter contact a full-time job, whether an election was in progress or not. It also meant that when an official campaign got under way, parties didn’t have to waste precious time identifying where possible support would lie. Thanks to these databases, the campaign honchos already knew where they should fine-tune and concentrate their “customer relationship management” at the micro-level in all the ridings. Political parties were increasingly seeing Canadians as potential consumers of their “product,” twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The Conservatives had applied this permanent-campaign technique to advertising, and the same would be true for its direct-marketing efforts.

Call Display

What’s most amazing is how the booming database industry popped up in the very heart of Canadian politics without much notice from the media or even some of the political players themselves. That would start to change late in 2011, when the extent of the direct-marketing business in politics started to register on the public radar. Irwin Cotler, a Montreal Liberal MP, was shocked to find that a scant few months after the 2011 election Conservatives were busily phoning people in his riding, testing to find which of his constituents would switch from the red team to the blue team if he stepped down. He apparently was unaware that in marketing politics, the campaign never stops.

Residents of the Mont Royal riding received calls in the fall of 2011 that began with a preamble about “rumours” of a Cotler resignation. If that happened, the callers asked Cotler’s constituents, what party would you support in a by-election? The calls were traced back to a firm called Campaign Research, owned by two Conservatives: Richard Ciano and Nick Kouvalis, who had helped Rob Ford get elected as mayor in Toronto and who served as Ford’s first chief of staff.

Cotler, incensed by the calls, had no intention of stepping down and was furious at the way this bit of direct marketing had made his constituents doubt his commitment to the job he had campaigned to win only months earlier. Cotler made several vigorous protests to the House of Commons about this interference in his duties, and Speaker Andrew Scheer eventually ruled that the tactic was “reprehensible.” But Conservatives, who openly acknowledged hiring Campaign Research to do this job, were unapologetic. One party official anonymously told the
Globe and Mail
, “If the Liberals spent as much time doing voter ID instead of complaining about political parties doing their work, they’d be in better shape than they are today.”

Kouvalis made a rare TV appearance in late 2011 to defend the practice and was similarly unabashed. He claimed that the Conservatives had learned from Liberals how to play hardball politics, and that these calls were part of the playing field. “My job is to end Liberal politicians’ careers. That’s what I get paid to do. It’s not pretty, it offends some people, but that’s what I get paid to do,” Kouvalis said. “We’re a service provider and we’re good at what we do and we follow the rules.”

Not long after the Cotler controversy died down came another, larger potential blow to the political parties’ direct-marketing efforts. In an explosive front-page story by Postmedia reporters Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor, news emerged in February 2012 of a major Elections Canada investigation into fraudulent phone calls in Guelph during the 2011 election. Recipients of these calls, mainly past Liberal voters, were wrongly informed that their polling stations had moved and that the calls were coming from Elections Canada.

The calls, according to the ongoing investigation, came from automated lists generated by one of the big direct-marketing firms that worked for the Conservatives: Rack Nine Inc., which also did “robocalls” for nine other Conservative candidates in their ridings, including Stephen Harper. This wasn’t unusual. Every modern party has a database that can generate automatic dialling campaigns. What was unusual about this effort was that it involved keeping voters away from the polls, not marketing to potential customers. It’s called “voter suppression” by the tacticians. It’s also called illegal by Elections Canada, which takes a dim view of denying people their fundamental democratic right.

In subsequent days and weeks, the headlines exploded with more reports of fraudulent calls, not confined to Guelph. By the spring of 2013, Canada’s chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand would report that more than 1,400 separate investigations were under way in 247 ridings across the country. The Council of Canadians launched a Federal Court challenge to annul the results in six ridings across Canada because of robocalls, too. Although the council didn’t achieve their goal in the final ruling, Federal Court judge Richard Mosley found in the spring of 2013 that there was evidence of a determined campaign to suppress votes using robocalls and the Conservatives’ database. “Misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country,” Mosley wrote in his ruling. “The purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their voting preference in response to earlier voter-identification calls.” Mosley went on: “The most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database maintained and controlled by the CPC, accessed for that purpose by a person or persons currently unknown to this Court.”

Also in the spring of 2013, former Conservative staff member and campaign worker Michael Sona was formally charged in relation to the fraudulent robocalls in Guelph, though he continued to protest that he was innocent and being made a scapegoat by his party. Sona said in one television interview that the robocalls scheme was a “massive” one, though he did not know the perpetrators.

The Conservatives weren’t the only party that had been playing fast and loose with robocalls, either. In Guelph, again, Liberal MP Frank Valeriote would be fined by the CRTC for massive waves of phone calls that his campaign conducted against Conservatives, for failing to properly identify the calls as coming from the Liberals. The Wildrose party in Alberta was similarly fined $90,000 in the spring of 2013 for wrongful robocalls in the 2012 provincial election, and the Ontario Progressive Conservative party was fined $85,000 for its wrongful use of robocalls. In total, the CRTC levied $369,000 in fines in May 2013 for misleading robocalls and every major political party took a hit: the New Democrats had to pay $14,000 for some automated calls they made in Quebec, while the federal Conservatives were slapped with a $78,000 fine for calls they made to protest against riding-boundary changes in Saskatchewan. Liberal MP Marc Garneau, Canada’s first man in space, was fined $2,500 for calls he made during his unsuccessful campaign to lead his party.

While there were some demands for an outright ban on robocalls in the wake of these controversies—from Democracy Watch, for instance—the big political parties were aware that too much was at stake here. Speaking to a room full of Conservatives attending the Manning Centre’s conference in Ottawa in early 2012, Richard Ciano of Campaign Research warned that the scandal could undo fifteen years of progress in political marketing:

Since the 1990s when customer relationship management approaches became widespread, conservative parties have moved quickly to implement this essential business process into electioneering. And for the last fifteen years we have amassed a considerable lead on the Liberals and NDP in this area, as evidenced by the numbers on our direct response fundraising programs. Why? Is it because we had people with more technical savvy? Is it because the Liberals were stupid? Or lazy? Personally I prefer stupidity as an explanation, but it’s immaterial. The fact that the Liberals and NDP couldn’t get their act together on CRM approaches and direct contact is not our fault. It’s theirs.

In Ciano’s view, the Conservatives’ rivals were whipping up the robocall controversy in a bid to destroy their competitor’s advantage. “Why do the Liberals and NDP want to remove direct contact from Canadian elections? Because, put it bluntly: they suck at it.”

Actually, Ciano was only half right. While the Liberals were indeed far behind the Conservatives in the data game at this point, the NDP had been playing a furious game of catch-up on the marketing front. It was starting to look like “customer relationship management,” at the micro-level, would spell the difference between success and failure in Canadian political salesmanship.