Tories can’t hang up on phone call scandal

t doesn’t have a catchy moniker yet, like most good scandals, but it likely will soon. Whether it ends up being called Robogate, Roboscam, the Robocall scandal, or some other name, one thing is certain, it won’t be called the great phone fizzle any time soon, much to the chagrin of the federal Conservatives.

Then again, just as interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae was building up a real head of steam levelling credible allegations of electoral tampering against the Tories during last spring’s federal election, his own party’s dirty tricks pulled the rug out from under him.

A completely deflated looking and sounding Rae stood in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon to announce that it was a Liberal party research staffer, Adam Carroll, using a parliamentary computer who started up the Vikileaks30 Twitter account two weeks ago that published salacious, personal information about Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ ugly divorce.

The normally spirited and eloquent Rae, was very subdued and at a loss for words before apologizing unreservedly to Toews, who accepted the apology.

Voters won’t easily forget that polling and call centres hired by the Conservatives were involved in what appears to be vote suppression tactics.

But if the Tories think that Vikileaks will undermine the Robocall scandal for long, someone needs to send them a wake-up call in the middle of their dreams to inform them that this scandal could turn into a real nightmare for the party that won past elections on the promise to be more ethical than the Liberal party, which stole more than $300 million of taxpayer money in “an elaborate kickback scheme” known as AdScam. Tens of millions of dollars have still not been paid back to taxpayers by the Liberal party.

What’s more, apology or not, the damage to Toews’s reputation may never be restored. If online comments are any indication, many people who supported Toews in the past say they would never vote for the man again, now that they know he had an affair and impregnated another woman while married to his politically supportive wife, who was prepared to keep up appearances for his benefit. That he is alleged to have then cut his ex-wife off from financial support, as revealed in his divorce documents, seems to be the last straw for many.

So, while this is a temporary loss for the Liberals when it comes to momentum, Vikileaks may very well end up being a giant slayer. After all, these kinds of salacious details aren’t easily forgotten.

Voters won’t easily forget that polling and call centres hired by the Conservatives were involved in what appears to be vote suppression tactics either.

Unlike the Vikileaks dustup, which really does appear to be the work of one person, it defies credibility that a lone person is responsible for organizing the computer-generated robocall plan — as well as livevoice calls — to as many as 37 competitive ridings at play in the last election.

University of Calgary political science professor Barry Cooper, a staunch conservative, says if some kind of central direction is uncovered in this story, it will hold serious political consequences for the Tories.

“It does sound pretty serious,” admitted Cooper. “I was in the gym (Sunday) and I was watching Bob Rae, and for what must be the first time in history, I agreed with him.”

Besides directing some voters to the wrong places to vote through computerized automated calling machines, live callers also did so. Some even identified themselves as working for Elections Canada.

As revealed in the Toronto Star on Monday, hired callers with a Thunder Bay, Ont., company were given a script in the days before the May 2 election telling voters that Elections Canada had changed their voting locations.

One caller with Responsive Marketing Group even called the RCMP to report her concerns that some of the information they were giving was often wrong.

The Tories claim they made about six million calls to supporters to try to get them out to vote in the days leading up to the election. Since the calls are automatically dialed, it’s possible that a voter in one riding was mistaken for one in another riding and told to go to the wrong place. It’s certainly conceivable and that seems to be the script Tories are going to stick to. However, usually when something looks this suspicious, there’s ample reason for it.

There are also allegations that live calls were made, for instance, to religiously observant Jews on the Sabbath pretending to be from Liberal candidates, but were never sanctioned by that candidate.

Elections Canada and the RCMP are investigating all of these allegations.

Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor with the University of Toronto, says corrupting the electoral system is nothing new. What is new is the technology, which makes calling voters much cheaper than in the past.

“We’ve always had zealous people who are willing to corrupt the system. We used to have the names of dead people on the voters’ lists, or people being paid $5 to vote, we may still have that, but what is new is where people are called and told that their polling station has been moved,” Wiseman said.

Although voters tend to have very short attention spans, if wrongdoing is found and charges are laid, there’s a possibility that criminal trials could take place during the next election cycle in 2015, in which case, the scandal could be the robogift that just keeps on calling up Tory smut.

Unlike the in-and-out election spending story that landed the Conservatives in political hot water several years ago, the robocall story is easy to understand and will have greater traction and staying power. No matter what moniker this scandal ends up getting, one thing is certain: it’s got as much stamina as one of those robo callers.

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