Robocalls
Kept a Quebecer from voting in the last federal election, he says in court documents.
Daniel Speik, of St-Colomban, says he didn’t vote in the last election because of robocalls that told him his polling station had moved.
A few days before the election, Speik received two or three automated calls identified as coming from Elections Canada, telling him his polling station had moved, much like more than 1,000 Canadians who have filed complaints about deceptive election calls.
But Speik is the only complainant, in court documents made public so far, to say the call stopped him from voting.
A former community college biology teacher who had moved to the small community north of Montreal, he said the call confused him, and he didn’t know the location of the new polling place, so he didn’t vote.
“I’m new here from three years, and I don’t know really where they changed the place, so I didn’t go to vote,” he said Wednesday.
Speik is one of the complainants listed in two court documents recently released by Elections Canada as part of its investigation into 1,399 complaints of misleading or harassing telephone calls across the country during the last election.
Speik contacted the agency after media reports about the “robocalls” scandal in March. Elections Canada investigators sifted through the complaints, contacted the complainants and then sought court orders concerning complainants who received their phone service from Shaw, Videotron and Rogers.
The Conservatives have insisted there is no evidence anyone was prevented from voting by fraudulent poll-moving calls.
In the House of Commons on Monday, Pierre Poilievre, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport, twice made that point when asked about the calls.
“There is not a single person who is a single witness who has come forward in this case to say that he or she was not able to vote,” he said.
Most of the complainants listed in the Elections Canada documents were not prevented from voting by the calls, but the investigation in Guelph, Ont., reported some voters sent to the wrong polling station by a robocall ripped up their voter cards in anger.
And Leeanne Bielli of Toronto, one of nine voters who filed election challenges in federal court based on fraudulent calls, filed an affidavit stating she didn’t vote because she was confused by a call telling her her polling station had moved.
Bielli dropped her challenge when Conservative researchers discovered she lived in Don Valley West, not Don Valley East, as she believed.
Many of the complainants reported receiving voter-identification calls before the election in which they said they supported opposition parties.
Speik said he received such a call, and likely identified himself as planning to vote for the Bloc.
He said that he didn’t think much about the call until he saw a report on the news.
“When I saw it on TV, I said ‘Oh my God, I got one too.’ ”
Speik says he now believes the call was an attempt to stop people from voting.
“They sent that to many people to stop them from voting,” he said. “That’s sure.”
The reports from Shaw and Videotron describe 65 calls from across the 57 ridings across the country, including 20 in Quebec. The complaints concern both live and recorded poll-moving calls.
The Conservatives reject suggestions they engaged in voter-suppression calls in the last election, and say the federal court case is a partisan attack by political opponents who don’t like the election results.