Get ready for a tsunami of BS from the media

Here's the first wave from Harper's henchmen in the media:

Robson, Ottawa Sun: Avoid mob justice on Robocalls. Opposition outrage the real scandal here

Ibbitson, Globe and Mail: The case against a Conservative conspiracy

Solberg, Toronto Sun: Robocalls put serious business on hold

Curry, Globe and Mail: Tory support steady despite robo-call, e-snooping uproars: poll

Grenier, Globe and Mail: If robo-calls were meant to keep voters away, they failed miserably

Greco, CTV News: Harper's ex-chief of staff: Tories ran a clean campaign

A simple, effective way to achieve major voter reform in this Robocall world

I don't know whether others have proposed this idea in the past or not, but a simple and effective way to achieve major voter reform and dramatically increase voter turn-out and citizen participation would be to maintain everything that exists in the voting process as it now stands, with one simple difference. Instead of only being allowed to cast one's vote for the candidate that they support, they would have the alternative of casting their vote AGAINST a candidate on the ballot whom, above all others, they oppose.

This simple extension of choice available to voters would allow them to have a meaningful role in casting their vote in an era where their is often great ambivalence among voters about who could do a better job than the current candidate (in circumstances where an incumbent is on the ballot). Those who have convictions about their candidate of choice will, no doubt, cast their vote as an affirmative vote for that candidate, whereas those who are ambivalent in their support for a given candidate (and hence are the ones most likely to not cast their vote) and now given a new powerful option to cast their vote as a negative vote against a candidate they feel strongly opposed to.

The ballot as we know it, would now have two columns instead of one against the list of candidates. One column would represent an affirmative vote in support of the candidate opposite the x, whereas the second column would represent a negative vote in opposition to the candidate opposite the x.

Think about the effect this would have on voter turnout and citizen participation. It would almost be like a conventional vote and a recall vote (like they have in California, for example) all rolled into one. Additionally this idea would introduce elements of proportional representation into today's system which goes by the name of first past the post.

As we have learned firsthand from the Robocall scandal currently enveloping the Harper government, in which voters were called by unscrupulous persons who impersonated Elections Canada in the hopes of sending targeted voters to bogus polling stations to cast their votes, that voter turnout and conversely voter suppression is an election strategy in its own right, An election strategy that can dramatically effect the election outcome and one that inherently benefits certain candidates over others (even where robocalls are not taking place). This proposal for voter reform I am recommending would take away the element of voter turnout (that is subject to direct tactics of voter suppression) from the dynamics of elections, while achieving all of its other benefits and the extension of voter choice.

The Globe swims in Harper's cesspool too

Let's not forget Harper's admission (on tape no less) that his henchmen, Finley and Flanagan offered a bribe in the form of a $1 million insurance policy to Chuck Cadman, if he would only vote in favour of bringing down the Martin lead Liberals of the day. This is a criminal act (literally, not figuratively)

Let's also not forget that the Globe and Mail endorsed this criminal twice for Prime Minister. Whether newspapers should endorse politicians is a whole separate matter, but one thing's for sure: the Globe swims in Harper's cesspool too!

Exactly how dangerous is Stephen Harper?
Gerald Caplan
Globe and Mail
Friday, Mar. 02,

Robo-gate, considered by many to be a concerted (if so far unproven) assault on democracy, has opened wide the simmering debate about Stephen Harper and his cronies. Are they reformers or revolutionaries? Are they simply a somewhat more ambitious form of the conservatism Canadians have known since John A., just a further notch or three along the traditional Canadian ideological continuum?

Or do they represent a radical transformation, an extreme new form of conservatism that had, until now, been relegated to the lunatic fringe of Canadian political culture? It’s hardly an academic question. You could even say that he future of Canada depends on the answer.

I don’t mean to be disingenuous here. Of course many partisans have already answered this question to their own satisfaction; that includes me, as faithful readers well know. Ever since it was formed from the American-style populist Reform Party and the dead ashes of the Progressive Conservative Party, and with a pugnaciously hard-right Stephen Harper as its leader, the usual suspects have demonized the new Conservative Party as beyond the pale.

Liberals and New Democrats insisted Mr. Harper's baby was a new and unwelcome species, one that was determined to shatter the vague but real consensus that had ruled Canada for so long. For the truth has long been that even while New Democrats had great fun and won some points portraying the PCs and Grits as the entirely interchangeable “old parties,” Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Visa and MasterCard, the NDP too played within certain very broad Canadian parameters.

Of course there were always real differences on a wide array of key policy matters. But on fundamental ethical and process questions, there was crucial agreement, with all parties accepting that real democracy meant accepting certain constraints on their political practices. It’s not always an easy distinction to make, but it can be seen as the difference between hardball and barely legal dirty tricks, between toughness and take-no-prisoners. It’s the dangerous mindset of the type who say – and believe – those not with us are communists/terrorists/child molesters/pornographers. As political scientist Alan Whitehorn has couched it, it’s the difference between “civil rivalry between fellow citizens of the same state [and] all-out extended war to destroy and obliterate the enemy”.

Again, I don’t want to give the false impression that there weren’t real divergences, real animosities, real bitterness. On occasion, the consensus was entirely breached, as when Pierre Trudeau recklessly invoked the War Measures Act – a moment that will forever scar his reputation.

But on the whole there was an underlying civility, a belief that one’s opponents (not enemies) were not going to change the rules of the game – though they might stretch them a fair bit. Signs might be torn down, street people might suddenly turn up at conventions as rabid partisans (though that was largely an inter-mural sport), a deceased chap might occasionally present himself at the ballot box. Nasty insults were exchanged, Question Period was often a zoo. An aberrant American-style Progressive Conservative or Liberal brawler would occasionally threaten the consensus. Nevertheless, there was an overall sense of playing the same democratic game, of getting a kick out of the game, of matching wits with opponents, of some of them even being worthy.

Mr. Harper’s Conservatives, many of us fear, have changed the entire game. In fact for them it’s not a game at all. Like their cherished American Republican role models, when they speak about their war room, they mean it. And in war, it hardly needs saying, there’s little tolerance for democratic niceties.

Do I exaggerate? Listen once again to Tom Flanagan, former Harper strategist and a powerful voice still among conservatives and Conservatives. A Globe piece by Mr. Flanagan before the 2011 election was actually titled “An election is war by other means,” while earlier he had compared the 2008 campaign to ancient wars in which Rome (the Conservatives) defeated Carthage (the Liberals) and “razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would grow there again.” This is crazy talk.

The University of Ottawa’s Ralph Heintzman sums up this Harper credo: There is a “lack of sense of inner self-restraint on the part of the Prime Minister, a sense that it is some kind of war and therefore anything is legitimate, that it's quite acceptable for a prime minister to lie, for example, about how our parliamentary democracy works.”

It’s within this context that Robo-gate should be viewed.

Would a party that believed in politics as war hesitate to use the latest technology to keep opponents – the enemy! – from voting? Would a party that has already systematically undermined many traditional parliamentary and democratic niceties, as The Globe’s Lawrence Martin has repeatedly documented, hesitate to violate accepted democratic limits? Does a party that has already been found guilty of violating the election laws and that deliberately attempted to destabilize a sitting Liberal MP deserve the benefit of the doubt?

Here’s the problem. Both sides know with certainty the answer to these questions. Those of us who wouldn’t trust Stephen Harper if he told us today was Friday have no doubt who organized Robo-gate. In fact, I’m informed by a former Conservative operative familiar with both the party and technology that there’s far more to be revealed in this saga. This is said specifically to involve close ties between the Harperites and American Republicans who have been constructing a terrifying, full-blown voter suppression machine, as The Nation magazine, among others, has well documented and CBC Radio’s The Current has noted. I have no idea if this will be found to be true, but based on the record, it is surely not implausible.

Yet Mr. Harper's faithful base, that slightly-more-than-one-third of the electorate on whose behalf the entire government of Canada operates, knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is some kind of vicious Liberal frame-up and that their man is as innocent and pure as the driven white snow we occasionally still get.

Both sides can’t be right here. Let’s all pray mine is wrong.

Nothing to see here folks, just move along

Reality Check: Complaints to Elections Canada

Here are statistics regarding complaints received by Elections Canada in the past five federal general elections:

2000 Federal Election: 382 complaints (Source: Report of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada on the 37th General Election Held on November 27, 2000)

2004 Federal Election: 398 complaints (Source: Report of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada on the 38th General Election Held on June 28, 2004)

2006 Federal Election: 329 complaints (Source: Report of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada on the 39th General Election of January 23, 2006)

2008 Federal Election: 1,392 complaints (Source: Report of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada on the 40th General Election of October 14, 2008)

2011 Federal Election: 31,000 complaints and counting (Source: Statement by Elections Canada, March 2, 2012)

Reviewing the tapes or erasing the tapes?

Election call tapes being reviewed by Conservatives
Investigators planning to interview staff at call centre
By Laura Payton, CBC News
Posted: Mar 1, 2012 3:43 PM ET


The Conservative Party is reviewing tapes of every call made by the Responsive Marketing Group call centre in Thunder Bay, Ont., before Elections Canada investigators arrive next week, CBC News has learned.

Investigators are planning to interview the centre's staff, which the Conservative Party hired to make phone calls to identify and rally supporters in the 2011 federal election.

The news comes on a day when Conservative MPs' counterattack backfired after they accused the Liberals of being behind mysterious election calls — but mixed up the names of the call company they claimed was the smoking gun.

After a week of denials over the role the Conservative Party and a campaign team played in phone calls directing voters to the wrong polling station, and opposition party allegations over harassing calls in other ridings, Prime Minister Stephen Harper pushed back in question period.

The Liberals, Harper said in the House, have said people got misleading phone calls from numbers in the United States. But when two of his MPs tried to offer more details, they named a U.S.-based company that the Liberals have never used.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives hit back against opposition claims over misleading phone calls in the last federal election during question period in the Commons on Thursday.Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives hit back against opposition claims over misleading phone calls in the last federal election during question period in the Commons on Thursday. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae said Harper was smearing thousands of Canadians complaining about the calls.

"The prime minister and his colleagues have remarkable ability to turn themselves into victims," Rae said.

"The prime minister cannot deny the fact that two of the companies that are involved with respect to [campaign] activities are now under serious investigation. Nor can he deny the fact that there is an RCMP investigation ongoing with respect to what happened in Guelph."

Elections Canada is investigating automated robocalls in Guelph, Ont., that tried to send voters to the wrong polling station on election day.

Opposition MPs say they have reports of robocalls or strange, harassing live calls from more than 45 ridings in the lead-up to the May 2, 2011, election. They allege the Conservative campaigns made the rude calls, claiming to be the Liberals, in an attempt to make the Liberal campaigns look bad. Harper says the opposition parties didn't report the calls at the time and are acting like sore losers.
Conservatives mix-up companies

But the counterattack backfired when Conservative MPs mixed up two companies with the same name.

Pierre Poilievre and Dean Del Mastro pointed in question period to Liberal candidates who, they said, used a company based in North Dakota to make calls soliciting support.

"The opposition parties said that [their supporters] received calls from a telephone firm with offices in North Dakota. But the only party who hired a firm with offices in North Dakota was the Liberal Party," Poilievre said.

NDP MP Charlie Angus, who spoke right after Poilievre, pointed out that was incorrect.

"Mr. Speaker, they're going to need to get some better researchers, because there is a firm in North Dakota with the same name, but it actually doesn't work for the Liberal Party," he said.

The confusion centred on three call companies with similar names, including Prime Contact Group, based in Canada, and Prime Contact Inc., based in North Dakota.

A spokesman for Prime Contact Inc. told CBC News that the company has never worked for a Canadian political party or candidate and is not affiliated in any way with Prime Contact Group.

Harper said a third company, First Contact, routed its calls through the U.S. A number of Liberal campaigns used First Contact for calls during the 2011 election and in at least one previous election.

But First Contact owner Mike O'Neill told the CBC's Dave Seglins last April that someone was "spoofing" First Contact's numbers — projecting a fake caller ID — to impersonate his company.
Bogus caller IDs and phone numbers

CBC News conducted its own experiment and found dozens of online companies and services that allow users to create bogus caller IDs and faked display phone numbers. It takes just seconds and can be done for just pennies per call.

A spokesman for Harper says First Contact's servers are in the U.S., so the phone number will appear as a U.S. number.

But O'Neill told Evan Solomon, host of the CBC's Power & Politics, on Thursday afternoon that First Contact does not route calls through the U.S.

"All of our live calls are made from centres in Canada under our direct supervision. All of our data and servers are hosted in Canada. We have never engaged a U.S.-based call centre and we have no links to any businesses operating in North Dakota," O'Neill wrote in an email.

First Contact provided services to more than 80 Liberal candidates in the 2011 election, O'Neill said.

He explained that when companies like his and political parties want to conduct telephone town halls, they are limited "to a handful of telephone town hall providers and their proprietary technology, and all are U.S.-based." The hosts, program moderators and guests are still located in Canada, O'Neill said.

Liberal MP Frank Valeriote, the MP for Guelph, said on Power & Politics while on a panel with Del Mastro that, "it is ridiculous to think that Liberals would try and suppress their own voters from coming out to vote."

"That is just absurd," he said, adding that he thinks it shows the Conservatives are desperate to deflect the accusations.

NDP MP Pat Martin, following question period, said the Conservatives are trying to "muddy the waters" by saying that the Liberals made harassing phone calls to their own supporters.

He also put forward a theory about why Conservatives would allegedly try to suppress the vote in ridings where they were headed for clear victories.

"I'm telling you why, because they're trying to starve their political opponents for resources. Every vote that they divert from the polling station for our party is $2 less per year over four years," he said, referring to the per-vote subsidy that parties receive.
Elections Canada not reporting on investigations

Earlier in the day, a democracy watchdog group urged MPs to demand more from Elections Canada when it comes to reporting on how the agency follows up on complaints.

A spokesman for Democracy Watch says 2,300 complaints were submitted to Elections Canada between 2004 and 2011, but the agency didn't report on whether it investigated or what it found.

"Our MPs have kind of dropped the ball here because what they should have been doing is asking for this information, not only from Elections Canada but from every single watchdog," Tyler Sommers said.

Elections Canada has refused to confirm its investigation in Guelph, although the RCMP has confirmed it is assisting in the investigation.

"It’s likely that the robocall issue is only the tip of the iceberg and that, because Elections Canada hasn’t been disclosing information like they should, there are going to be some serious questions about whether our elections have been fair since 2004," Sommers said.

He said reports of automated calls directing voters to the wrong polling station in Guelph, Ont., in the last federal election are "very disturbing."

Sommers said Democracy Watch will push MPs to demand information about any investigations Elections Canada leads.

"It's very simple. Elections are the cornerstone of any democracy," he said. "Without faith in elections, you can’t have faith in the rest of our democratic institutions."

Sign the petition if you want a full investigation into voter fraud

Petition here

"If there was some type of election fraud scandal, we would have it by now"

Some of things that cross Stephen Harper's lips are truly incredulous in their stupidity and self-servedness. Take for example these two choice comments:

September 15, 2008: "My own belief is if we were going to have some sort of big crash or recession, we probably would have had it by now.”

or this:

‘Absolutely, definitely’ no Tory role in robo-calls, Harper insists

STEVEN CHASE AND DANIEL LEBLANC
Globe and Mail
Feb. 29, 2012

Stephen Harper is categorically denying the Conservative Party’s national campaign was behind misleading robo-calls that confused voters in Guelph, Ont., and elsewhere – even as Elections Canada probes complaints of a separate alleged misdeed: harassing calls impersonating the Liberal Party.

In his strongest statement yet, the Prime Minister sought to distance his campaign machine Wednesday from alleged dirty tricks in the 2011 election. It’s a declaration that could come back to haunt him should evidence ever surface that anyone at Conservative election headquarters on Lancaster Road in Ottawa knew of illegal phone calls.

Canada’s election watchdog is already investigating one Ontario riding – Guelph – where it alleges a political operative hiding behind the alias “Pierre Poutine” engineered an off-the-books scheme using robo-calls and a disposable cellphone to discourage voters from casting ballots.

Opposition parties allege the problem is more widespread – across 30 to 40 ridings – but Conservative partisans privately say they believe whoever was behind the calls in Guelph was perhaps responsible for similar activities in a handful of ridings at best.

“The Conservative Party can say absolutely, definitively, it has no role in any of this,” Mr. Harper told the Commons Wednesday. His office followed up to make it clear he was talking about the national campaign and not the teams fighting individual riding races.

Documents from an Edmonton court this week describe in detail exactly how Canada’s elections watchdog believes someone linked to the Conservative campaign in Guelph tried to suppress the vote for rival candidates on May 2, 2011. The Liberal incumbent nevertheless retained his seat, beating Tory candidate Marty Burke by a sizable margin despite widespread complaints that robo-calls were directing voters to the wrong polling stations.

Separately, the Liberals said Wednesday that Elections Canada investigators have been probing their complaints concerning phone calls made to voters where political rivals allegedly impersonated the opposition party.

For example, the Liberals allege hundreds of voters received phone calls at inconvenient hours from people presenting themselves as being Liberal Party workers. In an apparent bid to alienate electors, these calls arrived at supper time, late at night or on the Sabbath for Jewish voters.

“If this happened in one riding, we would say it was just a prank. If it happened to be two, it might be a coincidence,” interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae said. “When it happens in over 30 ridings, the explanation has to come from the Conservative Party.”

A Liberal official said that Elections Canada is being tight-lipped about the state of this probe, but the agency’s investigators are requesting additional information on the allegations of impersonated phone calls.

“They are taking it seriously; they want our information,” the Liberal official said.

Long-time Liberal MP Joe Volpe, who was defeated in the closely fought Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence last year, complained that electors were flooded with repetitive and harassing phone calls, falsely made in his campaign’s name. Call display showed the calls as originating in North Dakota, likely a ruse to hide their true origin. He lost his seat to Conservative candidate Joe Oliver, now Minister of Natural Resources.

Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, who held on to her riding of St-Paul’s, complained this week in the House of calls to Jewish voters in her riding on the Sabbath, once again purportedly on behalf of the Liberal campaign.

Stories of other sorts of phony calls are also coming to light.

Dorothy Venkiteswaran, a voter in the riding of Kitchener-Waterloo, said she received a call in the days leading up to the May 2 ballot that purported to be from Elections Canada. It was a live caller, not a robo-call, and it falsely informed her that her polling station had changed.

She said she didn’t believe the caller because news stories had warned voters about such misdirects.

Ms. Venkiteswaran said she was surprised the caller specifically asked for her, not her husband – saying telemarketers normally ask for him – and she noted she is likely on a Liberal mailing list because of work she did about seven years earlier for the party in Goderich, Ont.

Elections Canada is also expected to interview workers at the Conservative Party’s main call centre, the Responsive Marketing Group. However, there is no evidence the firm’s callers deliberately misled electors, with Conservative officials pointing out that there are bound to be mistakes in a database containing information on millions of voters.

One of the Conservatives’ veteran campaign organizers, Senator Doug Finley, said his party does not engage in dirty tricks.

“It’s totally overblown,” he said of the current controversy.

Mr. Finley said, in fact, he studied “what you may call dirty tricks” during his career as a Conservative organizer, but his only goal was to find ways to “defend against them.”

Most members of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke’s campaign team have not responded to repeated requests for comment from reporters.

A woman who answered the phone at Mr. Burke’s home on Tuesday said he had been away flying (Mr. Burke is a pilot) and would be back the following day. He could not be reached again on Wednesday, either by phone or in person at his residence. Mr. Burke’s campaign manager, Ken Morgan, has declined to respond to e-mails sent to his personal and riding association e-mail accounts.

One person involved in planning Guelph Conservative events said she believes Mr. Morgan is currently travelling in the U.S. Michael Sona, who ran communications for Mr. Burke during the campaign, released a statement to CTV denying his involvement in the illegitimate calls.

With a report from Kim Mackrael in Toronto