Landlord sues Tories for unpaid office rent
Party denies owing for campaign HQ
The Conservative Party skipped out on paying the rent due on its campaign headquarters in Ottawa’s east end last month, according to a lawsuit filed by a property management company.
The party last year shut down the sprawling 19,000-square-foot campaign office in a two-storey Lancaster Road office building that it had rented since 2007.
According to a statement of claim filed shortly before Christmas, the Conservatives never paid the rent for the month of December and left owing more than $39,000 on the lease.
The legal action was launched by a numbered Ontario company affiliated with Elk Property Management, the Ottawa firm that owns and manages 2713 Lancaster Rd.
None of the claims in the lawsuit has been proved in court.
The Tories say they have no knowledge of any lawsuit — they may not have been served with the claim yet — and insist they paid what they owed.
“Everything has been paid for and, in fact, we have left the place in better shape than when we took possession of it,” said party spokesman Fred DeLorey.
The Tories showed off the state-of-the-art campaign HQ to journalists in April 2007, when the threat of sudden election hung over Stephen Harper’s first minority government.
The facility featured a TV studio with satellite uplinks, training facilities and a “war room” with banks of computers and phones used for voter identification and get-outthe-vote calls.
Opposition Liberals dubbed the building “the Fear Factory” and journalists covering elections moaned about the $25-to-$30 cab ride required to get to the distant outpost near the Science Museum.
The party held onto the space for nearly five years because of the constant threat of an election, which disappeared after the Tories won a strong majority in 2011.
“In times of minority government, we need to have a campaign HQ ready at a moment’s notice, but given the next election is years away it doesn’t make any sense financially to keep it,” DeLorey said.