Inside Elections Canada’s Whitewash Report on Election Fraud: Armwaving, Cynicism, Red Herrings
The more cynical readers of this blog will doubtless be unsurprised, but I think that the recent shambles of a “public consultation” embarked upon by Elections Canada is strong evidence that the organizations is conceding its investigation into the 2011 election robocalls, does not intend ever to charge someone with vote suppression (least of all the individual behind “Pierre Poutine”), and instead plans to engage in a grand exercise in theatrical arm-waving in the hopes that public opinion in the agency’s demonstrably negligible capacity to regulate Canadian elections will be restored.
Elections Canada is working towards what will supposedly be a Grand Report on the issue of electrion fraud tabled in the spring. To that end, it’s engaging in public consultations with respect to a draft report proposing some tweaking to the electoral accountability laws. We’ll get to those tweaks momentarily.
The fact that Elections Canada seems to think we’ve progressed from the “investigation” phase of the robocalls file to the “lessons learned” stage, as symbolized in this new policy paper, tells us all we need to know about the agency’s investigation of the robocalls. There was an investigation — we know there was — but it was under-resourced and consequently slow and ineffectual. If Elections Canada expected this to end in formal charges being laid, we’d have to have another round of “lessons learned” reports, and policy proposals, to close off whatever schemes would have been identified over the course of the investigation. It’s unlikely Elections Canada plans to engage in two such rounds of consultations. This is it. Consequently, whoever did commit electoral fraud in 2011 has definitively gotten away with it. Unless they decide to come forward themselves, for some reason, which seems unlikely.
With regard to the consultations, Hill Times reports that Elections Canada has retained a polling firm to do a survey of Canadians’ opinions about political practices, at a cost of $45,000, which sounds utterly pointless to me (what possibly useful results would a survey provide to Elections Canada?). It’s also going to have the right-wing but nonpartisan Institute for Research on Public Policy do a roundtable conference on the subject.
That makes sense. Aside from being one of Canada’s oldest and most well-regarded neoliberal think tanks, the IRPP has a great deal of experience with respect to studying political practices. Its president, Graham Fox, describes himself in his official bio as a former Ontario political candidate, an advisor to Joe Clark and Hugh Segal; he’s also a former secretary to Stephen Harper’s transition team. A year ago, IRPP was given a contract by Harper’s own ministry, the Privy Council Office, on the “political agitation” which resulted in the NDP surge in Quebec in May 2011. I can think of no better group to handle Elections Canada’s little focus group exercise.
Which brings us, at last to the vaunted discussion paper, which bears the exciting and thought-provoking title “Issues Arising from Improper Telecommunications with Electors.” During the 2011 election, Elections Canada claims, an “individual” who was “associated” with “a campaign office” — absurdly, they don’t mention which campaign office — ordered 7676 calls made into Guelph falsely proclaiming themselves to be from Elections Canada announcing a polling station change. Previously filed court documents reveal what is not mentioned in the public report: that the campaign office in question belonged to the Conservative Party, and that the list used to generate those calls was taken from the Conservative Party’s internal database of suspected opposition voters (aka Liberal and NDP supporters). I guess Elections Canada felt these details had no place in a public report. Needless to say, the omission of such details raises severe questions about the integrity of this report as a whole.
Next, Elections Canada reviews some of the “challenges faced” by its investigators, which I take to be read as “reasons why this investigation will never be completed.” The first two are monstrous red herrings: that there appear to be “no written contracts” between political parties and their exclusive telemarkters, and that the financial reports routinely filed by candidates come in too late, and are not detailed enough, to assist an investigation. As I say, these are red herrings. Elections Canada investigators evidently had no difficulty ascertaining that the Conservative Party had an exclusivity contract with its robocall provider (which required “Pierre Poutine” to convincingly pass himself off as a Conservative insider when he placed the Guelph order). Moreover, no one reported the Poutine calls on any public candidate’s expense filing. No one would ever do so. It’s preposterous to think this would be at all applicable.
Elections Canada also complains about the use of various “technological means of anonymity” which “Poutine” used to conceal his identity, the lack of long-term data retention by Internet Service Providers, and, most hilariously of all, it complains that because its investigation warrants were eventually made public by the courts, there was an “influx of complaints and reactions in February 2012″ and “the reputation of individuals and entities may have been negatively impacted.” So nice to see they’ve maintained a sense of perspective here.
On that cheerful note, Elections Canada moves on to their proposals for legal reforms. These are prefaced by a truly asinine disclaimer that “legal prohibitions… are of little impact on those determined to operate outside the law.” Yeah! Why have electoral regulations at all? Mainly for “deterrent value,” says Elections Canada. I’ll take a look at that in my next post, on the proposed reforms.
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the salamander horde
Thank you for the scathing honest appraisal.. the reportage of how another federally funded agency flails and fails to meet its mandate.
Like the moribund and toxic Peter Kent’s fetid & shallow Environment ‘Ministry’, or Keith Ashfield and his abandoned at sea Oceans and Fisheries portfolio, or the swoon for Israel bully boy John Baird.. & lesser lights such as Jason the virgin Kenney, Tony Clement the Muskokan reptile cockroach.. we have Elections Canada.
Yes.. Elections Canada.. the last line of defense for democratic voting before the sanctimonious evangelical dinosaurs of Stephen Harper go after The Charter of Right and Freedoms.. and then go directly after The Supreme Court..
After that its just The First Nations .. who I expect will snap our fatuous prime minister’s hair weaved head around so hard that he finds himself parked on his ass, looking for his hair piece, and wondering who sucker punched him.
‘True North’ .. hello Conservative party.. is anyone out /in there … ?
‘Strong and Free’ .. I aint feeling weak at all
You want to take my family, my friends on ?
You have brought a whole lot of non discriminatory Canadians into the picture that you thought was open season reserved for political assholes
here comes the big hurt ….
Welcome to Canada .. eh
Anon
And where is the non-partisan head of the public service in this mess? Wayne, you should hang your head in shame. And get your ass kicked.
Sandy
Once again, thank you for keeping your eye on this most shameful story. Why every Canadian is not horrified by this inexcusable whitewash is beyond me.
john
The clues in the report lie in their readings of the criminal code rules:
Harassing or misleading phone calls (s. 372(1), (3))
It is an offence to convey, by telephone, information known to be false “with intent to injure or alarm any person” (s. 372(1)). It is unclear whether a court would consider that affecting an opponent’s chances of success in the election (as opposed to injuring the opponent himself or herself) constitutes an injury under this section.
It is also an offence to “mak[e] or caus[e] to be made repeated telephone calls” with “intent to harass” the person receiving the calls (s. 372(3)).
Personation (s. 403)
It is an offence to fraudulently personate another person, living or dead, with intent to achieve any of four specified purposes, including “to cause disadvantage to … another person”. The jurisprudence confirms that the personation must be of a real person. The offence would not be applicable to a call or caller represented as “Elections Canada”, nor to a fictitious character such as Pierre Poutine.Footnote 17
Mischief (s. 430, 430(1.1))
Section 430 lists activities in relation to “property” (as defined) that constitute the offence of “mischief”. Section 430(1.1) creates mischief offences for destroying, altering or interfering with the use of “data” as defined in s. 342.1 (that is, “representations of information … suitable for use in a computer system”). These provisions do not appear to apply to the calls per se.
Reading this its clear they don’t think they can make a case. I’m not a lawyer but it seems that the issue is big enough that they should try. At the very least a test case on the Guelph calls.
Which makes the Council of Canadians case the only legal challenge left to the conservative robocall fraud.
Sixth Estate
The thing about the Guelph calls is that the section you quote is irrelevant to it. The Guelph robocalls are straight vote suppression. I’m at a loss what was going on in that statement, because at no time did “Pierre Poutine” falsely represent himself as Pierre Poutine to anyone other than whoever he bought the cell phone from.
I’m all for tightening the rules, but the circumstances we’re discussing with regard to 2011 appear to be illegal under the existing rules anyways, which makes me question why we’re engaging in this sort of exercise before the investigation has been officially concluded. Unless, of course, they don’t expect it to be officially concluded.
Sam Gunsch
re: “On that cheerful note, Elections Canada moves on to their proposals for legal reforms. These are prefaced by a truly asinine disclaimer that “legal prohibitions… are of little impact on those determined to operate outside the law.” ”
Sounds very much like Presto’s urging for more ethics as the solution, at the time this issue broke in the news:
“OTTAWA – The patriarch of the modern-day conservative movement in Canada is calling for better ethical training for campaign workers in the wake of the robocall scandal.”
ROFLMAO is, I believe, one option among the various appropriate Internet generation responses.
http://www.globalnews.ca/pages/story.aspx?id=6442597820&utm_source=facebook-twitter&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=community
The ‘campaign workers’ is wut dun’ it.
…
So…cure: voluntary educational magical theory of managing the bad-apples of Presto/HarperCons RoboCon Borg machine.
Sixth Estate
Regarding the above, in clarification — the Elections Act outlaws endeavouring to prevent someone from voting in an election or induce them not to vote. Both of these offences are cited as justifications in the warrant paperwork by Elections Canada’s investigator.
Sixth Estate
“Wasn’t following orders” is the 21st century equivalent of “just following orders.”
the salamander horde
The specific hardware used to facilitate the robo calls.. how many were sold in the last 5 years ? To whom ? Certainly the majority were sold/purchased in the US of A.. and can likely be identified and tracked, What about Canada ?
Aside from the unit(s) utilized by Racknine in the Guelph fraud, have we identified the owners/users of any others?
This would be much like a hit and run investigation by a police force which would focus on the paint samples of a specific type of car.. identify the purchasers/owners in the city where the crime occurred.. contact the body shops
I don’t know a single person that would own such hardware.. its very very very specialized. It would be useful to identify EVERY purchaser of that type of hardware and related software.
sinned34
Hardware used to facilitate robocalls? Give me a 2 year old PC and $500 for an FXO phone card, and I’ll download a open-source Asterisk-based telephony software to build a phone system with.
Within a couple of days I could configure a phone system to make hundreds (if not thousands) of automated phone calls per day. And it’s surprisingly easy to program it to mask the caller ID so that nothing comes up on the outgoing calls.
And I’m not a real phone technician, I’m just a computer nerd who has had a little exposure to telephony systems.
If nobody gets prosecuted for the robocalls, maybe I should contact my local Conservative representative. I could make some real cash just prior to the next election.
Sixth Estate
Yeah, I think I’m with sinned34 on this one (other than the proposal to contract out election fraud, of course).
How much specialized equipment you want is basically relative to how large a scale you want to operate on. Racknine’s outfit appears to have been more large-ish, but if you wanted to set up a bargain-level operation specifically to engage in some electoral shenanigans, I can’t imagine it would be that hard using standard off-the-shelf equipment.
On that note, one of Elections Canada’s proposals is that ALL telemarketers and their customers should have to file registration paperwork if they’re active during an election period, even if they aren’t doing anything related to politics.
the salamander horde
Stay tuned, sinned 34 .. Appreciate your input .. I’d like to see an approximation of how many people, how much hardware/software was involved for 234 ridings to be hit by live and robo calls.. how much central command/control/distribution re scripts and electoral database usage. I’m trying to pin down the size of the raiding party that attacked the 2011 federal election.. and the technical workflow required to execute yet leave no obvious trail. At a certain point, x number of highly motivated people got together or were hired.. and discussed this, moved forward, executed, then disappeared..
Sixth Estate
If the “Poutine” affair is any indication, the sort of centralized equipment you’re referring to may not have existed. “Poutine” used an alias to make a specific order from an outside service provider who doesn’t appear to have realized anything was amiss (because he was already making various other calls for the Conservative Party, this order just looked like more of the same).
Multiply that by several ridings, and several outside service providers, and you have nothing required in terms of a centralized “raiding party.” Moreover no other location seems to have been targeted on quite the same scale that Guelph was, for whatever reason. At least we do not have public evidence of it, which is another matter.
What the Conservatives do have is the CIMS database, which is intended to eventually be a voter contact and political preference database for every citizen in the country.
sinned34
Live calls obviously requires a call center, which is a lot more expensive than robocalling. A handful of very dedicated and tech-savvy Conservative supporters could possibly pull off recorded phone calls. However, what I’ve read about the robocalls scheme so far leads me to believe the Cons would rather outsource it and try to cover their tracks rather than completely house such fraud within their organization.
Toss in essentially top-down control over the government agency that’s supposed to investigate such fraud, and we have ourselves a recipe for disaster.
Democracy? They’ve heard of it.
Stand up for Canada!
me-me-me-its-all-about-me
Well I hope you are wrong and Elections Canada does make some attempt at upholding the election laws.
The next election is going to be very annoying for everyone if Elections Canada takes the attitude, “If you are determined to break the law, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
At what level of abuse will Elections Canada decide it has to put its foot down?
And at what level of abuse will Elections Canada be reduced to an administrative extension of the governing party?
And once these things are established, they won’t be going away, no matter who is in power.