Election: Investigation called ‘top priority’
While the Conservatives say they are assisting Elections Canada to find out what happened in Guelph, it has become clear that through Hamilton and other sources, they have a unique level of access to the details of the investigation.
A top commercial litigator with the Toronto law firm Cassels Brock, Hamilton has been representing the Conservatives since the party was created in 2003. It is possible he knows more about the robocalls investigation than anyone in the country, but he is bound by lawyer-client confidentiality and can’t share what he knows with the public.
Hamilton may have been alerted to the Elections Canada investigation in Guelph after an investigator had paid a visit to the Edmonton offices of RackNine, the company whose voice-broadcasting service was used to make the Guelph call.
RackNine’s owner, Matt Meier, has never said whether he alerted the party to that visit, but rumours of an investigation were circulating in senior party circles before the story broke.
Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews had been methodically investigating the Guelph robocall since a few days after the election, interviewing people who received the fraudulent call, eventually tracing the call records back to RackNine and seizing electronic records from the company.
The day after the story broke, on the same day he talked with Sona, Hamilton set up a conference call with Mathews and Andrew Prescott, a campaign worker who had handled what he said were legitimate campaign robocalls using RackNine during the campaign.
Neither Sona nor Prescott knew it at the time, but Hamilton had known about allegations of unethical election telephone calls for at least 10 months.
In February, Hamilton met with Mathews and Matthew McBain, who worked at the party “war room” in Ottawa during the campaign. McBain told Matthews that Sona had called and sought his advice on making untraceable phone calls. McBain told Matthews he had warned Sona not to make calls like that.
The same day, Mathews and Hamilton sat down with Chris Crawford, a junior political staffer who had worked as the voter contact person on the Guelph campaign, entering data in CIMS, the party’s Constituency Information Management System.
Crawford and Sona had been close friends from their time together at the University of Guelph Conservative club.
When Mathews called Crawford, Crawford called Fred DeLorey, the party’s director of communications, documents filed by Elections Canada show.
DeLorey had met Crawford that summer, when Crawford had played a role in certifying the acclamation of DeLorey’s wife, Marilissa Gosselin, as the Progressive Conservative candidate in the provincial riding of Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, over the objection of another wouldbe candidate.
DeLorey instructed Crawford to talk to Hamilton. On March 5, they sat down with Mathews, and Crawford told him that during the campaign he’d overhead Sona talking with Guelph campaign manager Ken Morgan. They were discussing U.S.-style dirty tricks, such as poll-moving calls.
Crawford told Mathews that he warned Sona that kind of talk was inappropriate. Sona says he may have been talking about dirty tricks, as campaign workers often do, but Crawford didn’t warn him against such talk.
Not long after Crawford helped Elections Canada with its investigation, he was promoted from special assistant to director of parliamentary affairs in the office of intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue, a move that would have nearly doubled his salary.
Byrne says there was no link between the evidence Crawford offered and his promotion.
“Mr. Crawford relayed to Elections Canada information he thought they should know and he is comfortable with the accuracy of what he conveyed,” she said in an emailed statement Thursday.
“No promotion or raise for Mr. Crawford was in any way related to the assistance he provided to Elections Canada. The Conservative party has always assisted Elections Canada in this matter, and has always called upon anyone with anything that might be relevant to convey it to Elections Canada.”
Hamilton has also acted as a go-between, passing on party records requested by Mathews.
Three of the campaign workers who were involved in the Guelph campaign have declined to help Elections Canada with their queries.
Prescott, whose RackNine account had used the same Internet address as the account that was used to make the Pierre Poutine call, left his job at a local hospital amid the negative publicity associated with the investigation.
He later moved to Calgary, taking a position with a computer firm without political ties.
Prescott continues to deny any wrongdoing, pointing to his religious faith and insistence on following the rules. Morgan, who is believed to have never spoken with Elections Canada investigators, moved to Kuwait, where he is teaching. He has declined to discuss the case with reporters.
Meier endured intense media attention when the story first broke, including a verbal attack from New Democrat MP Pat Martin, who, faced with a defamation lawsuit, subsequently apologized and agreed to a legal settlement reputed to involve tens of thousands of dollars.
After the story made headlines, Meier went through his electronic files, closely examining session logs to see who had accessed his system to send out the Guelph call.
He discovered an Internet Protocol address that investigators later tracked back to a Rogers Internet account believed to be that of the headquarters of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke’s campaign.
In March 2012, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand appeared before a Commons committee to deliver a stunning statistic: His office had received reports of misleading calls from 200 ridings across the country. By the end of the summer, the agency had logged 1,394 individual complaints about calls.
Over the past year, Mathews has filed a series of sworn statements in court to compel Rogers and other phone and Internet companies to hand over electronic records.
Mathews’ narrative over these statements is rich with detail of prepaid credit cards and ‘ burner’ cellphones. His court updates have been frequent enough to keep the robocalls story brewing over the past year.
But, frustratingly, there is no clear indication of who Mathews believes was responsible.
The most recent court document from Mathews is dated May 2012. Since then, the trail appears to have chilled. What looked to be promising leads — credit cards, call records and the IP addresses — have all fizzled out.
The key players in the Guelph campaign all either continue to deny any involvement in the calls or refuse to speak publicly.
Two days after the first robocalls story broke, Postmedia and the Citizen reported on a pattern of election calls extending beyond the Guelph epicentre. These were from live callers, not pre-recorded messages.
Campaign workers from ridings across the country had described calls that they thought were intended to harass and annoy non-Conservative voters. The wide distribution of these calls raised the possibility of a co-ordinated attempt to suppress votes that could not be pinned on a few rogues alone.
In March 2012, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand appeared before a Commons committee to deliver a stunning statistic: His office had received reports of misleading live calls from 200 ridings across the country. By the end of the summer, the agency had logged some 1,394 individual complaints about misleading calls.
To some, the sudden of influx of complaints was due to intensive media coverage. People who called Elections Canada to complain so long after the election were fabricating their stories to fit the narrative, the theory held.
Last fall, however, emails surfaced showing Elections Canada had been inundated with complaints about misleading phone calls even before the May 2 election day — and long before robocalls became a national story.
Among the first people to hear about these calls outside of the agency was lawyer Arthur Hamilton.
Three days before the election, on April 29, 2011, Elections Canada lawyer Ageliki Apostolakos wrote to Hamilton after voters in two ridings started reporting strange calls from the Conservative party that gave them erroneous locations for their polling stations.
“In the course of the last half-hour, Elections Canada has heard that two representatives of the Conservative campaign office are communicating with electors in two electoral districts to inform them that their polling station has changed to another location,” Apostolakos wrote.
Hamilton responded just after midnight the following night — 27 hours later, according to time stamps on the emails — writing that because some polling locations had been changed, some Conservative candidates were contacting voters to ensure they were going to the right places.
“The calls being made by our candidates request the voter to confirm her or his polling location,” Hamilton wrote, saying he had looked into Elections Canada’s concerns.
This second branch of the robocalls affair — the live calls outside of Guelph — is also still under investigation. Elections Canada has hired more investigators on contract and seconded resources from other departments to help look into the hundreds of complaints.
The probe, however, seems to moving slowly. Only in November did the agency go to court to obtain records from Rogers, Shaw and Videotron telephone subscribers that would start that leg of the electronic chase. To trace these calls back to their origins will likely take several more requests for production orders. It could be months or years before that branch of inquiry concludes.
The Conservative party always insists it is proactively reaching out to help investigators, but in the documents filed in court in November, investigator John Dickson reported that he had waited almost 90 days for Hamilton to arrange interviews with party officials.
As time passes, the trail may be growing colder as records are routinely purged and staffers change jobs. Chris Rougier, the key voter contact official who worked directly for Byrne during the campaign, lining up political calls and helping manage CIMS, recently left the federal party to work for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.
From the day the story broke, the Conservatives have stuck to a consistent talking point on robocalls.
“Our party has no knowledge of these calls,” Harper told reporters a year ago. “It’s not part of our campaign.”
Byrne, the party’s director of political operations, issued a statement last February that has been echoed again and again in the Conservative defence of allegations about robocalls: “The party was not involved with these calls and if anyone on a local campaign was involved they will not play a role in a future campaign.”
Privately, Conservatives continue to suggest that the Pierre Poutine calls were likely the work of a few mischief-makers while the wider pattern of calls across the country was either a hallucination by anti-Conservative partisans or the result of bad data provided by Elections Canada. They are adamant that the prime minister would never countenance unethical calls, pointing out that he gave campaign workers a pep talk in which he warned them to avoid breaking rules.
Meanwhile, led in court by Hamilton, the party has actively defended a legal challenge brought by an advocacy group, the Council of Canadians, seeking to have the election of six Conservative MPs overturned. The council contended that live and pre-recorded calls changed the outcome of the votes in those ridings. A decision in that case is expected sometime this spring.
But a bizarre development last month has cast new light on the party’s willingness
Despite what appears to be an intensive investigation, there have been no arrests, no charges and no sign that Elections Canada has unmasked the suspect or suspects known by the pseudonym ‘Pierre Poutine.’ Nor is there any indication of who, if anyone, was behind the wider campaign of misleading phone calls across the country.
to push the envelope using telephone technology, and has shown that the Tories continue to work with a company involved in the Guelph robocalls case.
One night at the end of January, some Saskatchewan residents began receiving a robocall that was highly critical of proposed changes to the boundaries of the federal ridings in the province. An independent commission had recommended creating five urban seats in Regina and Saskatoon, a redraw that is expected to improve opposition parties’ chances in the 2015 election in a province the Tories had long dominated.
This robocall took the form a ‘push poll’ that asked respondents if they agreed with a plan that would pit urban areas against rural and destroy “Saskatchewan values.”
The Conservative party initially denied any involvement with the calls — “We are not polling,” spokesman Fred DeLorey said in an email — but only later, after the calls were traced back to RackNine, did the party admit involvement.
DeLorey issued another statement admitting that the calls should have identified the party as originator. He blamed a “internal miscommunication” for the earlier denial.
Conservative sources says DeLorey did not know he was passing on incorrect information, but do not say how he came to believe the party was not behind the calls or why the party didn’t correct the record until linked to the calls.
If charges are ever laid over robocalls, in Guelph or elsewhere, investigators would first file a report with Yves Cote, the Commissioner of Canada Elections and official responsible for enforcing elections law.
Cote would then decide, based on this report, whether to refer the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Brian Saunders, who would in turn consider the evidence and decide if charges are warranted. That process could take months or years. To date, no one from Elections Canada or Saunders’ office will say whether any complaints have been referred to the DPP.
With each passing month, a quick resolution seems less likely. Consider the timeline of the last major elections investigation, the so-called in-and-out case, which wasn’t resolved until November 2011 when the Conservative Party plead guilty to spending violations in the election held nearly six years earlier.
The agency says little about its investigation, but Cote this week told Postmedia News that it is progressing.
“This is a very complex investigation. I have highly competent and motivated people assigned to the file, and while we are limited in the tools at our disposal to gather all of the evidence, we have been making significant progress,” he said in the rare statement.
“This continues to be the top priority for my office.”