O’Toole used call centre in U.S. to contact Tory voters

OTTAWA—Erin O’Toole, running for the leadership of the federal Conservative party promising to stand up for Canadian workers, used American ones on his campaign.

A U.S. call centre was hired in May by a Canadian vendor the O’Toole campaign uses to contact party members, his campaign confirmed.

“There was one small project where they needed overflow capacity in a short amount of time, and because of a lack of availability of Canadian conservative political call centres (as other campaigns had hired them), the project was sent to an American call centre that could handle the work needed,” O’Toole campaign spokesperson Melanie Paradis said in an email.

“Having said that, most of the calls from our campaign to members have been conducted by Canadians.”

Paradis said Canadian firms are currently able to fully handle the O’Toole campaign’s requirements.

“All of the professional Canadian conservative voter-contact firms that can handle the high volume needed are contracted by the MacKay campaign, putting them in conflict,” she said.

BRIDGEWATER, N.J.—President Donald Trump didn’t know the significance to Black Americans of the date and location he chose for his first campaign rally since the coronavirus pandemic more than three months ago, key Republican supporters of the president in Congress said Sunday.

Trump had scheduled the rally for June 19, known as Juneteenth because it marks the end of slavery in the United States. Tulsa, Okla., the location for the rally, was the scene in 1921 of one of the most severe whiteon-Black attacks in American history.

Black community and political leaders denounced the move and called on Trump to reschedule. He resisted until late Friday when, in a rare turnabout, Trump tweeted that he had moved the rally to June 20, out of respect for the view of supporters and others who had asked him to.

“There’s special sensitivities there in Tulsa, but Juneteenth is a very significant day, so my encouragement to the president was to be able to pick a day around it,” Sen. James Lankford said Sunday.

Sen. Tim Scott said he was “thankful” that Trump rescheduled the rally.

“The president moving the date by a day once he was informed on what the Juneteenth was, that was a good decision on his part,” said Scott, the only Black Republican senator.

Scott said it wasn’t clear to him that Trump’s planners understood the significance of June 19.