Del Mastro sent to jail for election-law violation
Ex-Tory MP was once on ethics panel
PETERBOROUGH, Ont. — Former Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro was taken by police van Thursday from the courthouse in his hometown of Peterborough, Ont., to a maximum-security jail, ferrying him into history as the first former member of Parliament imprisoned for violating Canada’s election law.
Del Mastro, 44, was sentenced Thursday to one month in jail for overspending on his 2008 election campaign, breaking his own spending limit, then filing a false campaign report.
Ontario Court of Justice Judge Lisa Cameron said Del Mastro bears a high “moral culpability” for the spending and his “significant attempts” to hide it.
“He was prepared to be deceitful about it,” she said, calling the offences “an affront to the principles of our democratic system (that) must be regarded as quite serious.”
Del Mastro began serving his sentence immediately, but could be released on bail, pending an appeal of the guilty findings, at a hearing Friday morning.
The jail sentence marks a stunning fall for the former parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
At the height of his career, he sat on the House of Commons ethics committee and regularly defended the Conservative Party in question period on allegations about the illegal robocalls sent to voters in the 2011 election.
But on Thursday, a flushed and shaken Del Mastro, his eyes puffy, was led from the courtroom by police while his wife, Kelly, and other family looked on.
Cameron additionally imposed a second one-month jail sentence to be served concurrently with the other, and a four-month conditional sentence of house arrest, followed by 18 months of probation.
Del Mastro must also repay $10,000 the judge said he owed the Peterborough Conservative riding association.
In October, Cameron found Del Mastro hid the costs of voter contact and get-outthe-vote calls made for his campaign in the riding of Peterborough by paying the supplier, the now-defunct Holinshed Research, with a personal cheque for $21,000.
Had the amount been properly included in his election spending report, his campaign would have exceeded its legal spending limit.
He was also found guilty of breaking the personal campaign cap of $2,000 and of filing a false return with Elections Canada to conceal the overspending.
Del Mastro’s official campaign agent, Richard McCarthy, 68, was given a two- month conditional sentence of house arrest and 12 months of probation for his role in the offences.
He may not serve as an official agent for five years.
Cameron said Thursday that it wasn’t possible to know if the spending affected the outcome in the 2008 election, which Del Mastro won easily, but that this wasn’t material to the sentence.
“Cheating is cheating,” she said. “They spent too much money and knew it.”
Del Mastro’s lawyer, Leo Adler, said his client was disappointed by the sentence.
“I think it’s a shock to anybody who has gone through their life without a single criminal blemish to all of a sudden be told that you have to go to a jail,” he said.
“A month is a substantial period of time for someone who has never been there,” he added.
Adler’s appeal cites what he contends are numerous errors in the way Cameron considered evidence at trial.
Crown prosecutor Tom Lemon had suggested a sentence of nine to 12 months in jail, but said he was satisfied that Del Mastro will serve time behind bars.
“Given the nature of the conduct here, I think anything short of jail was not appropriate,” Lemon said outside the court.
There were lots of exit ramps on the highway that led from the House of Commons to the big house, but Dean Del Mastro drove past them all.
In November, in his last speech in the House of Commons, he said: “I often tell people that I have a distinct design flaw. It is that I was not built with a reverse gear. I only know how to go forward, and I will press forward.”
He pressed forward all right, pedal to the metal, to the Central East Correctional Centre, where he was to sleep Thursday night.
If he had had a reverse gear, or even a steering wheel, he could have avoided the cell where he sits as I write this.
He whizzed past Exit No. 1 during the 2008 campaign, when he cheated just to pump up his margin of victory. He only won the Ontario riding of Peterborough by a few thousand votes in 2006, but he testified during the trial, believably, that he knew he would hold the seat in 2008.
He wanted, though, to increase his margin. He said a veteran strategist told him the Liberals would be less likely to see the riding as winnable in the future if he piled up votes.
The campaign had a $92,567 limit, but spending got out of hand because he spent $75,238.39 on ads.
The receipts on file at Elections Canada show he was blowing through money like a car dealer trying to clear out last year’s inventory. He even bought T-shirts with The Dean Team printed on them.
His campaign used vehicles with flashing blue lights on the roof.
“The slogan of the campaign was Go Nowhere Quietly,” he said.
But he quietly wrote a personal cheque for $21,000 to pay for political calls from Holinshed Research, then hid that payment by cancelling cheques and faking an invoice.
He told his riding association that the money was actually for a customized mapping program. He signed a contract for that program, but when Holinshed delivered it, he refused to pay.
That was Exit No. 2. If he had paid we’d likely have never learned of his overspending. But Del Mastro, by then a parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, may have thought he was too important to have to pay his bills.
Holinshed took him to small claims court. When the company’s owner, Frank Hall, learned that Del Mastro had not declared the expense, he informed Elections Canada, which began an investigation.
In 2012, when Glen McGregor and I reported on that investigation, Del Mastro feigned outrage that Elections Canada had not informed him of it, but investigators had called his campaign officials, who surely told him.
That was Exit No. 3. If he had ’fessed up then, claimed that a member of the Dean Team had failed to fill out the paperwork properly, Elections Canada might have let him off with a compliance agreement.
Instead, Del Mastro, presumably with the prime minister’s blessing, repeatedly attacked Hall and Elections Canada.
He claimed that when Elections Canada prepared their case against him, they offered him a plea deal, which would have had him pay a fine and keep his seat. That’s likely a lie, but they did make him some kind of offer, which he rejected. That was Exit No. 4.
Then, when the trial began, he appeared to direct his own defence, giving a preposterous version of events, expecting to somehow buffalo Justice Lisa Cameron, which his lawyer must have told him was unwise.
When she found him guilty, he told reporters on the courthouse steps: “I know what the truth is. That’s her opinion. My opinion is quite different.”
On Thursday, Cameron ruled that Del Mastro will do a month in jail, four months’ house arrest and 18 months’ probation.
“He was prepared not only to break the rules but to be deceitful about it,” she said. “This type of cheating and lying will result in serious sanctions.”
Del Mastro needs to go to jail to deter politicians from this kind of cheating and lying in the future, she said.
That’s just her opinion, but it’s tough to argue with it.