Quick resolution unlikely, say the two reporters who broke the story,
AFTER A YEARS, MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS
ne year ago today, a nervous 23-year-old political staffer sat in his office on Parliament Hill closely watching the first TV reports on a story that would later be dubbed the robocalls scandal.
That day, Postmedia News and the Ottawa Citizen had revealed that Elections Canada investigators had made a link between a Conservative call centre company and a fraudulent election day robocall in Guelph, Ont.
Michael Sona had worked as communications director on the Conservative campaign in Guelph in the 2011 federal election, making headlines when he tried to shut down an unauthorized advance polling station on the University of Guelph campus.
Sona, who later took a job working for a Conservative MP, had been mentioned briefly in the story about the Guelph robocall. He had declined to comment when reporters called, referring queries to the party.
The atmosphere was tense for Sona and other Conservatives who had fought the Guelph campaign. The opposition had seized on news that calls sent through a voter contact firm with Tory connections had directed voters to the wrong polling station.
The government was scrambling to distance itself from whatever had happened in Guelph. Conservatives were quietly telling reporters it was likely the work of rogue operatives.
Sona says he was keen to learn who these operatives were and was shocked by what happened next.
Just after noon, on the Conservative-friendly Sun News Network, host Brian Lilley said sources had identified the culprit.
“We’ve been talking to sources here at our Ottawa bureau ... and they’re pointing towards one individual in particular,” Lilley said. “His name is Michael Sona.”
Within an hour, Sona’s face was on TV screens and websites everywhere, forever linked to the scandal. Sona had, in Parliament Hill parlance, been thrown under the bus. His political career was in ruins.
Now, 21 months after an Election Canada investigation began and a year after the story first made headlines, we know far more about what the agency believes happened in Guelph on election day, May 2, 2011.
But 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 reported across the country.
Sona has been neither implicated nor vindicated by the investigation. Robocalls, in Guelph and elsewhere, remains an unsolved case.
When Michael Sona saw the TV story that named him, he suspected the leak came from the highest levels of the Conservative Party. The Sun’s TV channel has close ties to the government. Its most senior executive, Kory Teneycke, was former director of communications for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a close friend and ally of Jenni Byrne, the political director at party headquarters who managed the 2011 campaign.
Sona tried to call people at party headquarters to find out who had fingered him, but nobody was answering.
“I called all morning,” he recalls. “Nobody would pick up the phone. Finally, Arthur Hamilton called.” Hamilton, the party’s lawyer, wanted to know what had happened in Guelph. “He asked me a couple of basic lawyer questions,” says Sona. “‘Did you do it? Do you know who did?’ He asked me questions about specific vendors.”
He also told Sona: “We’re just two guys talking here,” Sona recalls. Later that day, Sona was out of a job.
In the months that followed, Hamilton would become the party’s go-between with Elections Canada, arranging interviews and obtaining documents and data at the request of investigators.
A year after they broke the story that came to be known as the robocalls affair, GLEN McGREGOR and STEPHEN MAHER report that a quick resolution to a case that began during the 2011 federal election remains elusive.
KEN MORGAN
Morgan served as campaign manager to Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke, the most senior position on the team. Morgan has never spoken publicly about the robocalls case and, according to court documents, has refused to be interviewed by Elections Canada investigators. He is a former candidate for Guelph city council and onetime head of the local Conservative riding association. Last year, he helped organize the Guelph riding association’s annual dinner, which featured former Conservative national campaign manager Sen. Doug Finley as keynote speaker. Morgan obtained a teaching degree in 2010 and last fall moved to Kuwait to teach English.
MICHAEL SONA
Sona was initially identified by Sun News Network as the culprit behind the robocalls in a report soon after the story broke. Sona vehemently denies any involvement and blames the Conservatives for scapegoating him with a leak to the media. He immediately resigned from his job as an aide to Conservative MP Eve Adams when the story first made headlines. In court documents, Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews describes how another campaign worker, Chris Crawford, said he had heard Sona discussing U.S.-style dirty tricks, including “calling non-supporters late at night, pretending to be Liberals, or calling electors to tell them their poll location had changed.” In recent months, Sona has gone public to protest his innocence and pressure Elections Canada to find the person responsible so he can be cleared.
JOHN WHITE
John White, a volunteer working on Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke’s campaign, was contacted a week before the 2011 federal election by central campaign worker Matt McBain, who wanted to know whether he should return Michael Sona’s calls about setting up untraceable calls. White vouched for Sona in an email exchange with McBain on April 26-27, 2011. McBain provided copies of his exchange to Elections Canada investigators. White, a friend of Chris Rougier, is a talented computer entrepreneur. His company, UnlimitedViz, is said to provide mapping services to the Conservative Party of Canada.
ANDREW PRESCOTT
Prescott worked as deputy campaign manager for Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke and was the go-between with RackNine, an Edmonton telephone marketing company, on calls he says were sent out on election day in response to the misleading Pierre Poutine robocall. According to Elections Canada investigators, someone connected to Prescott’s account at RackNine within minutes of someone logging into the Poutine account. Prescott’s account was also accessed from the same two Internet Protocol address used to access Poutine’s account. Prescott denies he was in any way involved in the misleading phone calls. He spoke to Elections Canada in February and has since retained a lawyer and declined to speak to investigators again. Prescott had been active in Guelph provincial and municipal campaigns before the 2011 election. He says he lost his job as a systems administrator at a Guelph hospital because of the adverse publicity surrounding the Poutine case. He has since moved to Calgary.
CHRIS CRAWFORD
Crawford was in charge of the Guelph candidate Marty Burke campaign’s access to the Conservative party’s CIMS database of voter information. He gave a statement to Elections Canada investigators saying he’d heard Michael Sona and Ken Morgan in the Burke campaign headquarters talking about “how the Americans do politics.” Crawford was once a close friend of Sona’s. He has refused to comment on the robocalls case. Crawford now works for Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue. He was promoted from special assistant to director of parliamentary affairs and caucus liaison last spring.
CHRIS ROUGIER
Rougier came up in politics through the Carleton University Conservative club, winning national renown for setting up a website in 2005 — stickittohim. com — encouraging people to mail gum to then-prime minister Paul Martin to protest David Dingwall’s expenses. At the time of the 2011 election, Rougier was voter contact manager for the Conservative Party of Canada, contacting phone vendors to arrange for voteridentification and get-out-the-vote calls. He called RackNine’s customer support line the day before election day, a call the party says was for “legitimate purposes.” This winter, Rougier left the party and took a position doing voter outreach with the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.