Saskatchewan values
Mystery calls tout ‘Saskatchewan values’
Tories deny involvement in a robocall poll critical of changes to federal ridings.
A Conservative party spokesman denied the Conservative party is behind a mysterious robocall poll critical of changes to federal ridings that could cut into the Tories’ electoral dominance in Saskatchewan.
Some Saskatchewan residents reported receiving the automated poll calls from an unknown source on Thursday night. The pre-recorded message claimed that proposed changes to the province’s 14 ridings would set urban areas against rural and amount to an attack on “Saskatchewan values.”
The call then asked recipients to press the number 1 on their telephone keypads to indicate they are opposed to this attack.
One recipient of the telephone poll call said the prerecorded message claimed to come from a firm called Chase Research. There is no sign of any company in Saskatchewan with that name.
The message also provided a phone number in Regina to call back for more information about boundary changes. That number was answered on Friday by a generic recorded message saying the party was unavailable.
Glen Olauson of Saskatoon, who received the call Thursday night, said if he hadn’t known about the boundaries commission already, he would have been left with a negative impression of them.
“It was pretty misleading, the language that it was an attack on Saskatchewan values,” he said.
“I thought it was pretty biased. It was a very leading question.”
Liberal MP Ralph Goodale says he believes Conservatives are behind the calls.
“They should fess up that this is their little gambit,” he said.
Goodale, the only MP in Saskatchewan who is not a Conservative, says some of the language used in the call echoed Conservative talking points on what he says is the party’s desire to gerrymander the riding redraw.
“The tone of it was so blatant, even using phrases that Conservatives had used, talking about destroying Saskatchewan values and fomenting an urban-rural split. It’s (a) real slander job.”
He noted the Tories admitted they had orchestrated a similar “push poll” in 2011 that erroneously suggested longtime Montreal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler would resign his seat.
Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey denied the party had any involvement.
” We are not polling,” said DeLorey in an email.
Saskatchewan won’t get any of the 30 new federal seats being added across the country for the 2015 election, but an independent boundaries commission has proposed changing the shape of the existing ridings to accommodate a fast-growing urban population.
The current boundaries are thought to favour conservative politicians by combining urban areas with rural areas. Regina and Saskatoon are each divided into four ridings that contain both city blocks and large swaths of rural areas.
That makes it harder for Liberals and New Democrats to win seats, because their stronger support from city dwellers is diluted by mixing in traditionally conservative rural voters.
The Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for Saskatchewan has proposed creating two exclusively urban ridings in Regina and three in Saskatoon but the move doesn’t sit well with some Tories.
This week, Saskatchewan Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski was quoted in the Hill Times newspaper questioning the changes proposed of the boundaries commissions across the country. He said some MPs he spoke to “don’t think the maps really take into account communities of interest” and he pointed to the ridings in some provinces where the geographic size of some rural ridings would increase.
While the decision on boundary changes is left to parliament, it would be highly unusual for MPs to reject the recommendations of the nonpartisan boundaries commissions.