Dirty tricks calls targeted Liberal voters
Live calls, apparently from a call centre, aimed to annoy or mislead Liberal supporters in key ridings
An analysis of reports of mysterious harassing phone calls during the May 2011 election points to the existence of a systematic voter suppression campaign targeting Liberal voters in tightly contested ridings.
Unlike the recorded “robocalls” under investigation by Elections Canada, these calls came from live callers, likely from a call centre. A Postmedia News- Ottawa
Citizen investigation based on interviews with dozens of campaign workers has identified 14 ridings — mostly closely fought districts in southern Ontario — where electors reported receiving fake live calls. Many got calls in the middle of the night from callers claiming they represented the local Liberal candidate.
Jewish voters in two ridings complained of receiving repeated phone calls at meal time on the Saturday Sabbath.
People who received the calls report that the callers would phone repeatedly, irritating the recipients, and then speak to them rudely.
Volunteers at local Liberal campaigns were confused when they received complaints from supporters, and the party did not counter the tactics or record instances in a systematic way.
Whoever was organizing the calls appears to have been working from lists of Liberal supporters, which could have been compiled through voteridentification calls that all the parties use.
Deceptive calls
The deceptive live calls were made in ridings where Liberals and Conservatives were in tight races. For example, high- profile Liberal MPS at the top of Conservatives’ target list — such as Ruby Dhalla and Mark Holland — were not targeted.
But from the beginning of the election, campaign staff working for Joe Volpe, in the Toronto riding of EglintonLawrence, were hearing reports from Liberal supporters about strange phone calls.
Jewish voters were being called repeatedly on the Sabbath, which Volpe’s veteran electoral team was careful to avoid doing. Others complained about early- morning and late- night calls putatively from Volpe’s campaign and some supporters asked why the sign they ordered hadn’t shown up.
On the afternoon of April 11, a phone in Volpe’s own campaign phone bank rang. Volunteer Marsha Sands described the call in an affidavit.
“I picked it up and said hello several times. No voice responded but I could hear voices in the background. I then said, ‘ Hello, speak please. You’ve called me.’
“A female voice, soft and young- sounding, said, ‘ Are you going to vote for Joe Volpe in the up and coming election?’ I responded, ‘ Who are you? Where are you calling from?’ several times.
“The caller said, ‘ The Conservatives.’ I said ‘ What? Who are you?’ Response: ‘ Um, we are conducting a survey.’ ”
The caller asked if Sands would like a Volpe lawn sign and hung up when Sands pressed her to identify herself.
Volpe’s staff found the number that received the strange call had belonged to a Liberal supporter before it was assigned to the campaign.
Across the country, other campaigns were getting similar reports: fake Liberal calls. The call display often showed a North Dakota telephone number which Internet message boards show is often used for fraudulent credit card scams.
Tracking these kinds of calls is difficult, even with the subpoena powers that Elections Canada used to trace fraudulent election day robocalls to Racknine, the Edmonton company whose equipment handled voice broadcasting for the Conservative campaign. The company says it didn’t know about the calls and is cooperating with Elections Canada.
Calls directed through servers abroad can make it impossible to peel back all the layers of the onion to find the source. North Dakota’s attorney- general warned in 2009 about the use of the state’s area code for fraud calls but said it was difficult to track down the culprits.
Volpe and some other campaigns eventually went to the media to complain about a dirty tricks campaign.
Conservative spokesman Alykhan Velshi said at the time that his party wasn’t involved.
Liberal campaigns are certain that the calls were not made by their own phone banks, and the call received at Volpe’s call bank seems to suggest that.
Conservative spokesman Fred Delorey wouldn’t say whether the party made any effort at the time to determine whether party workers were involved. He said the party ran a “clean and ethical campaign and would never tolerate such activity.”
He said the party is calling on Elections Canada to “get to the bottom of this as soon as possible.”
Liberals believe that, like the robocalls, the live calls were part of a coordinated campaign to annoy their supporters and suppress the non- Conservative vote.
The Conservatives strongly deny suggestions they would do such a thing, and senior Liberals acknowledge they do not believe Conservative campaign chairman Guy Giorno would approve any such campaign. Giorno did not respond to an email on Friday.
Fake calls
While a single person could easily set up the robocall blasts, making a large number of live calls into multiple ridings would be expensive, involve a more coordinated effort and access to the kinds of lists only political parties compile. The going rate for live calls for political campaigns is between $ 30 and $ 35 an hour.
Elections Canada will not say if it is investigating the live calls.
• In Oakville, there were fake Liberal calls, according to the campaign manager for Liberal candidate Max Khan, who is of Pakistani descent.
“Sometimes the calls used a voice deliberately mocking of our candidate, with a fake accent,” said John Mckay. “They were racist.”
• In Saint Boniface, Man., Liberal candidate Raymond Simard realized something was happening in mid- April when volunteers working on his phone bank started to get complaints. Simard was trying to unseat Conservative Shelly Glover.
“I was sitting in my office and our volunteers were all sitting very close to my office,” he said. “A couple times I could hear some of our volunteers saying, ‘ No. It can’t be our volunteers. We’re trained and we’re not rude to people.’
“The next day, I was knocking on doors, walking through some of our strong buildings, and some of our people at the doors were saying, ‘ What are you doing here? You guys just called at seven this morning.’ So obviously it was happening.”
• In Niagara Falls, Ont., Liberal candidate Bev Hodgson, who was trying to win the seat from Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, was victimized, according to Craig Brockwell, her campaign manager.
“We had been receiving complaints in the campaign headquarters that had said, ‘ We don’t need you calling us back any more. We’re not going to vote for your candidate because of the call received last night.’
“They would have been after nine o’clock. They would have been rude. Identifying themselves as Bev Hodgson campaign workers. And they would escalate the conversation and be somehow rude or abrupt, anything to agitate the voter.”
Lost his race
• In London North Centre, Liberal MP Glen Pearson started to get a frosty reception at some doors, with voters telling him they were upset because live callers were telling them he spends six months of every year in Africa.
“It’s one week a year,” he said of the visits. “And it’s in January, when the House isn’t even sitting.”
Pearson believed the calls were timed so that he didn’t have time to respond to the unfair and untrue charges. Pearson has three Sudanese children and visits Africa annually with them.
He lost his race to Conservative Susan Truppe by 1,665 votes. “I’m glad I’m out of [ politics], but I am disturbed that people ended up winning the elections through the demise of democracy,” he said.
• In St. Paul’s, Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett’s campaign had to deal with complaints from Jewish voters who said the campaign was calling them repeatedly on the Sabbath, even though the campaign was careful to never call on Saturday.
The calls referred to her as “Dr. Carolyn Bennett,” which her own campaign never did.