Tory party to take action after NFA uses members list
OTTAWA — The Conservative party is demanding that the National Firearms Association destroy a party membership list that it appears to have illicitly obtained from one of the camps in the recent leadership contest.
“We are aware that our members are being contacted by an outside organization,” the party said Friday in a Facebook post. “We will be issuing a cease-anddesist letter to the organization in question, demanding that they destroy the list.”
Party spokesperson Cory Hann later confirmed that the organization is the National Firearms Association.
The party’s move came after numerous Conservatives complained through social media that they’d received a letter this week from the NFA, seeking a donation.
They suspected that the association had obtained their names and addresses from the party membership list, distributed to each of the 14 candidates during the leadership race, which concluded last weekend with the election of Andrew Scheer.
The party did not name the culprit, but said it has “identified the parties responsible for sharing the information, and will be taking disciplinary action against them.”
Hann said all information about the issue has been given to the party’s chief returning officer for a ruling on “what we believe is a violation of the use of the membership list we supplied to leadership campaigns.”
In a response Thursday to one of the complaints posted on Facebook, Conservative party executive director Dustin van Vugt revealed that the party “salted” the list given to each leadership campaign with fictitious information so that it would be able to trace any leaks.
“If we find the source, they will have broken the rules and can still be fined from their compliance deposit,” he wrote.
Each candidate had to pay a compliance deposit of $25,000. The party can withhold repayment of all or part of the deposit from any leadership campaign that broke the rules.
“We regret that this incident has occurred,” the party said. “We have always taken our members’ privacy very seriously, and will continue to do so.”
However, Michael Diamond, a former spokesperson for Kellie Leitch’s campaign, said it’s not the first time an outside organization has got hold of the membership list. He pointed out that Mainstreet Research conducted polls of party members throughout the leadership race for iPolitics, an online media outlet.
Mainstreet president Quito Maggi confirmed his company had access to a copy of the party membership list, which he said was acquired by iPolitics “from several leadership camps.”
According to Maggi, the party never complained to him about the use of its membership list. Nevertheless, he said Mainstreet has a “solid privacy policy” and, now that the race is over, has already destroyed its copy.
Diamond was among the first to complain about receiving a fundraising pitch from the National Firearms Association, after noticing “dozens of friends on Facebook, none of whom are part of the gun community,” had also received the missive.
“It became very obvious that the common denominator between all of these people was membership in the Conservative party.”
While he’s somewhat concerned about the privacy breach, Diamond said his main objection is that he and thousands of other Tory loyalists spent a year recruiting members in order to “build a better, stronger, bigger” party, not to help some outside organization raise money.