Tory party takes disciplinary action after membership list shared

The Conservative party is demanding that the National Firearms Association destroy a party membership list that it appears to have illicitly obtained from one of the camps in the recent leadership contest.

“We are aware that our members are being contacted by an outside organization,” the party said Friday in a Facebook post.

“We will be issuing a cease-and-desist letter to the organization in question, demanding that they destroy the list.”

The party did not identify the outside organization but the post came after numerous Conservatives complained through social media that they’d received a letter this week from the National Firearms Association, seeking a donation.

They suspected that the association had obtained their names and addresses from the party membership list, distributed to each of the 14 candidates during the leadership race, which concluded last weekend with the election of Andrew Scheer.

The party did not name the culprit but said it has “identified the parties responsible for sharing the information, and will be taking disciplinary action against them.”

Conservative party executive director Dustin van Vugt earlier confirmed suspicions that a leadership camp was to blame in a response Thursday to one of the complaints posted on Facebook.

“We salted the list given to leadership campaigns so will check to see if we can determine where the list came from,” he wrote, suggesting the party included fictitious information in the list given to each camp to allow it to trace leaks.

“If we find the source, they will have broken the rules and can still be fined from their compliance deposit.”

Each candidate had to pay a compliance deposit of $25,000. The party can withhold repayment of all or part of the deposit from any leadership campaign that broke the rules.

“We regret that this incident has occurred,” the party said. “We have always taken our members’ privacy very seriously, and will continue to do so.”