Harper's Perps with Perks #17

Dean Del Mastro - Stephen Harper's Parliamentary Secretary, Ethics Committee appointee, and elections fraud pointman for the Cons in the HoC - shown here in cuffs as he went off to the big house today in shackles in a real life perp walk. He was convicted eight months ago on four counts of Elections Canada charges and trying to cover it up. 

"Why, Mr. Speaker, why?" he wailed in the HoC two years ago before resigning the Con caucus to keep his pension intact.

Sentenced today to a month in prison plus four months house arrest and eighteen months probation, he will probably be out again tomorrow on appeal of both his sentence and conviction. 

"I'm prepared to do whatever is necessary to stand for the truth," he explained to reporters today.

Maher : Former Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro passed up chances to avoid disgrace

Kirby Cairo : Del Mastro - Poster Boy of Harper Corruption

By request

Harper's Perps with Perks - Collect 'em all
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Brownbag Jesus - Mulroney, Del Mastro, and Dykstra

Jason Kenney's parliamentary secretary Rick Dykstra and Steve's former parliamentary secretary Dean Del Mastro yuck it up here at a Del Mastro legal fees fundraiser headlined by brownbagging Muldoon and subsidized by you as political contributions.

"These were funds that were raised separately and essentially moved through the EDA. They were put into the EDA and moved straight back out again " 

explained Alan Wilson, head of the Peterborough Conservative electoral district association, without once using the phrase in-and-out scheme to describe the apparently legal tax receipts they issued to the $600-a-plate donors after funneling them through the EDA in May 2013. Del Mastro's brother Doug sits on the board. 

Del Mastro, found guilty on three counts of violating the Canada Elections Act including faking documents to cover it up, will be sentenced along with his accountant to fuck all this Friday. He resigned his seat in the House of Commons two weeks ago in a move that allows him to retain his pension of some $44,000+ per year starting in the year 2025. 

Why, Mr. Speaker. Why?

In 1997, Brian Mulroney, PM of Canada from 1984 to 1993, received a $2.1-million defamation settlement from the taxpayers of Canada for unproven RCMP allegations that Mulroney had accepted bribes in the Airbus affair concerning government contracts. Mulroney testified under oath that he "never had any dealings" with arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber, knew him only "peripherally" and they had a cup of coffee "once or twice." 

Ten years later, Mulroney admitted to having received three secret payments of $1000 dollar bills in brown paper bags from his business partner Schreiber. Totalling $225,000 to $300,000 and beginning when he was still a member of parliament, this represents a much smaller haul than he received from us for not having disclosed this information under oath ten years earlier .

Jason Kenney attended the above funder but not shown in photo.

Update : Peterborough Examiner takes a closer look at the numbers :

"The Examiner reported shortly after the dinner in 2013 that roughly 120 tickets had been sold.
Yet the financial returns for the riding association for 2013 show 53 people bought tickets. Of those, 23 people - including Brian Mulroney - bought two tickets, while the rest were single ticket-buyers.
It all adds up to 75 tickets sold. [Note : 76, actually]
It's unclear why the initial reports of 120 tickets sold do not agree with the riding association's financial return, and Wilson wouldn't comment."

Are 44 tickets missing payment and if so, were tax receipts issued for them?
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ElectRight & Prime Contact Group - from a former candidate

An election candidate who paid $22,000 to a voter contact/robocall firm in 2010 for a "Mayoral Victory Package" has a warning to similar aspirants for 2014 :  Ontario Candidate Watchdog. It's an interesting read.

According to John James' account, following the election he lost to his municipal rival, he and his rival shared notes about their respective voter contact firms - James used Prime Contact Group and his rival used ElectRight -  and found they'd both been sold the exact same polling information and, James contends, both were serviced by the same rep.

"What surprised me at the time was that his numbers were almost exactly the same as the poll numbers I had received from Prime Contact in August 2010. I went back to review my files that night and realized they weren't just close, they were exactly the same, down to the tenth of a percentage point for all candidates.  

The next day, I asked him if he had received a similar house by house report from his ITR as I had received and if he would mind sharing it with me. The response numbers were exactly the same, every single response was exactly the same. These two ITR polls that had supposedly been conducted two weeks apart got responses from the same exact phone numbers and the same exact responses for all the candidates and undecided voters. 

I realized right away that we had both been sold the same poll results. My only consolation was that my friend had paid significantly more for his than I had for mine. Over the next few weeks we also compared our live call results and realized they matched exactly, except for the signs that had been requested for each of us. I also found out that my old friend Derek [his Prime Contact Group contact] had also been the client rep for Electright and had communicated with the other campaign as he had done for me."

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of his account as he has no contact info on his blog which was just set up last Thursday. And he does admit all this is legal.

But if true, it raises some interesting questions. Do ElectRight and Prime Contact work together and share outreach staff and information? Do they both use the same in-house resources or those of some other third party? Is there a parent clone company for both somewhere?

The Windsor Square interviewed Josh Justice, President of Prime Contact, in January 2012:

"A licensed provider of Canadian Data Services, Prime Contact offers such services as virtual town halls, live voter ID calling, automated surveys, market research, data services and polling.

The company, with an office in Hamilton and headquarters in Tampa, Florida, started up 10 years ago consulting focusing on municipal elections. It has since grown to become Canada’s largest firm of its type “specifically on the municipal side,” according to Justice.

Among the company’s successful clients include Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi."

From a York Region interview in 2010 regarding a telephone townhall in Vaughan in October 2010:

"PrimeContact president Josh Justice said the company has done hundreds of these sessions across North America, mainly in the United States."

I wonder if these US and Florida references about Prime Contact Group can be correct, given there's a little "Made in Canada" flag up there on their website?

"PCG Research owns and operates a series integrated in-house research call centres in Ontario, Canada in which 100% of our domestic research is conducted.

Global 
"Our successful international market research brings elements together to deliver research programs which enable our clients to address critical issues both locally and globally. PCG Research International is network flexible and we are not compelled to work with local subsidiaries or franchisees. 

We select local partners based on quality, track record, and compatibility. For qualitative work we will always send a team member to brief the local partner and engage in the local fieldwork process from beginning to end. Wherever possible, we try to meet local stakeholders and gain firsthand experience of local markets. "

 Ok then.

There have been a few glitches, as when they mistakenly mis-identified the NDP candidate as a Green Party candidate in a PCG National Research robocall poll in the London West election in July 2013 and no one could find out who had contracted the poll. 

 I don't know much about ElectRight and its beleaguered director Brett McFarquhar aside from the fact that Jim Ross, formerly of Front Porch Strategies,  apparently got a job there and a whole boatload of Con candidates used them in the 2011 federal election.. 

And Steve's then Parliamentary Secretary Dean Del Mastro used parliamentary resources to have them do a poll in support of a former staffer who was a provincial Con candidate in Del Mastro's riding ...  

which must be what the Cons mean in their Fair Elections Act when they say they want to see politicians push the vote instead of Elections Canada.

So ... questions about two robocall/voter contact companies' alleged collusion from an ex-candidate.

I do have some reservations about Ontario Candidate Watchdog's conclusions though :

"With potentially dozens of resellers all using Prime Contact's call centres and databases, including Electright, is it possible that this is the solution to the robocall mystery? Is the Derek that called me back in 2010 the real Pierre Poutine behind the voter suppression that confused tens of thousands of voters across Canada? Was it just a mistake, did Prime Contact call Liberal supporters by mistake with a suppression message, or did they just give the data to Electright?"

Mixed up the Lib and Con lists by mistake? No. Because what possible benefit would a list of wrong polling place addresses and phone numbers to make offensive phone calls be to anyone but the Cons for the purpose of misleading their opponents'  supporters - the ones who actually got those calls.
So no - no mistake.

Edited for typos, clarity.
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Del Mastro fires a shot across Steve's bow

Former Tory MP Del Mastro turns on government over monetary policy

"The effect of the Prime Minister, the Finance Minister and the Governor of the Bank of Canada coming out and attacking the Canadian dollar was to reduce its value by about 5 per cent over the last two weeks,” Del Mastro told the radio station in an interview.

“That means the price of goods everyone has to buy … these things will, over time, go up in price."

Del Mastro resigned as Harper's parliamentary secretary and election fraud pointman in the H0C after Elections Canada began investigating him for campaign overspending and an alleged ham-fisted cover-up. EC is also investigating Dean's cousin David for allegedly paying his employees $1050 apiece to contribute $1000 of it back to Dean's campaign. 

Dean's seat in the House of Commons was banished as far away from Steve's as possible and I guess he's figured out it isn't going to float back in time for the next election .

So I guess that story on the weekend about a ghost ship full of cannibal rats cut loose by Canada was kind of an allegory, huh?

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RoboCon Pop Quiz : Spot the Difference!

Thwap asks a very good question :

What exactly is the difference between 

1. Elections Canada and federal prosecutors granting immunity to Con deputy campaign manager Andrew Prescott this month in the 2011 Guelph robocall election fraud case, and

2. Elections Canada refusing to grant immunity to a group of donors willing to testify about giving $1,000 each to Dean Del Mastro’s campaign, allegedly in return for receiving $1050 back from Del Mastro's cousin.

July 2012 : Elections Canada refuses immunity request for donors to Dean Del Mastro

"Elections Canada has rebuffed an offer of information about an alleged reimbursement scheme involving Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro’s 2008 election campaign, saying it doesn’t have the authority to give witnesses immunity from prosecution.

Elections Canada spokesman John Enright said Tuesday that the commissioner is not able to grant immunity... it can only investigate allegations of electoral misconduct and that the power to offer immunity rests with federal prosecutors."

although Toronto elections lawyer Jack Siegel says : 

"the commissioner can negotiate compliance agreements with people who have violated the act, which allows the office to effectively offer immunity from prosecution."

Robocalls immunity deal struck with ex-Tory worker Andrew Prescott

"A key player in the 2011 Guelph robocalls scandal is getting immunity from prosecution in the Elections Canada investigation into misleading calls in the last federal election, CBC News has learned.Prescott has a written guarantee "the Crown has no intention" of charging him in connection with the misleading phone calls."

So what's the difference? 

Aside of course from the fact Del Mastro was Steve's parliamentary secretary, election fraud pointman, and key spokesy in the House at the time, while Prescott's Con candidate Marty Burke didn't win his seat anyway and the Guelph case appears to be hermetically sealed off from the election fraud that occurred in over 200 other ridings. 

Admittedly Del Mastro is now being charged by Elections Canada in a separate investigation for overspending his 2008 campaign limit and trying to cover it up, and they are continuing their investigation into the 22 people who were issued cheques for $1,050 from Deltro, owned by Dean's cousin.

But Thwap's question remains : What exactly is Election Canada's criteria for involving Crown prosecutors in securing immunity for witnesses? Especially given it seems highly unlikely Prescott was granted immunity just to roll over on Sona in the case against him provided by Con Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton. 

If Sona goes down, the Cons will draw a line through it and say it's done : One rogue lone gun on the grassy Guelph knoll that didn't change the election results in a single riding in the 2011 election anyway.

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Stephen Maher interviews Del Mastro on his elections violations

Fifteen months ago, Stephen Harper's Parliamentary Secretary and robocalls pointman Dean Del Mastro made an unscheduled surprise visit to CBC's Power and Politics panel to defend himself against a breaking McMaher story that he was being investigated by Elections Canada for allegedly incurring costs that breached the spending limit for his 2008 election campaign. EC laid charges against him yesterday.

Stephen Maher was on that June 2012 panel and this is a rare opportunity to hear DM using his indoor voice.
Excerpted from above : 

Maher: If you look at the campaign statements, the expence statements, there's a record of $1500 going to this company Holinshed but not a record of $21,000 and I don't know if you've had a chance yet to look back and see what that $21,000 was for.

Del Mastro : They undertook a small amount of work during the campaign, during the actual campaign writ, that's reflected in that campaign expenditure. They did also undertake some work at various times both for, well, for my [riding]association, so they would be on separate statements. As you know, expenditures incurred during a writ period are reflected in the election return, and campaign, er, expenses that are incurred outside of a writ period for an association are reflected on the association's files.

Campaign expenses outside of the writ? 

Jennifer Ditchburn : "Was there a total amount of $21,000 that was paid to this particular company over a period of time?

DDM : There was a relationship for services that had been completed by this company for various services that they had done, both for my MP office - at one point I had a very small contract with them for that for the association which is not me, this is the Conservative association - and a small contract that was undertaken for my 2008 campaign.  Those were paid. There is no question as to whether or not they were paid - in fact Mr Hall [Holinshed] indicated that in his filing on a separate matter.

JD : So you're saying that the financial records will ultimately reveal that although you paid out of your pocket, all of that $21,000 was paid back to you at certain points. [clever girl.]

DM : I've always been reimbursed, whether it's by the campaign or by the association for any expenditures I've incurred.

What DM is pushing here is that the $21,000 cheque covers both work done during and outside the writ period for both himself and the riding association, so he's not actually gone over the election spending limit.

However from the McMaher story the same day :

After the election, Hall [of Holinshed] claimed, Del Mastro asked him to do $1,500 of additional work using some of the election data and to backdate the invoice to the election period.
Hall later checked Elections Canada filings and found that the Del Mastro campaign had declared only the $1,500 payment for the extra Holinshed work — a payment Hall said he never received — and not the $21,000 of work he performed during the election.

And as Stephen Maher pointed out on CTV's PowerPlay yesterday : 

 "One of the key documents is a piece of paper which purports to be paperwork from Holinshed to Del Mastro saying 'oh we've received this payment and returned it to you' - which appears to bear the signature not of someone from Holinshed but of someone from Mr. Del Mastro's campaign.  This is what the investigator called a false document and this is what makes it serious." 

A look at the GeoVote and GOTV work Frank Hall at Holinshed possibly did for Del Mastro in 2008 here. 
GeoVote was an interactive voter-tracking system like the Cons CIMS, pinpointing how voters voted in each house in a riding on a map. Despite receiving a six-figure Economic Action Plan grant to develop the project in 2009/10, Holinshed disappeared in 2011.

Three months before his 2012 Power and Politics appearance, Del Mastro stood 16 times over two days in the House of Commons to read the same identical talking points off a script about election fraud allegations against the Cons being "baseless smears". 
The sad thing is he had to read them off the script every single time, only allowing himself very minor variations :



P.S. What a complete prat Norquay is in the P&P segment at top - he's absolutely outraged that an investigative journalist would actually do his job.

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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks #6

Bunch up everyone to make room for Steve's latest Perp with Perks, Saulie Zajdel.

Arrested today and facing five counts of corruption, breach of trust, and fraud from 2006 to 2011 in the anti-corruption sweep that also bagged the mayor of Montreal, Zajdel is better known to us as the guy who was put on the public payroll as a "cultural liaison" by Heritage Min James Moore for an alleged $60G's to act as the Cons' shadow pretend MP in Irving Cotler's riding after he lost to him in the 2011 election.  

Here's Steve campaigning for Zajdel three days before Election Day.

Here's Nick Kouvalis from Campaign Research defending their        "reprehensible" calls made into the riding on Steve and Zajdel's behalf implying Cotler would not run.

After his election loss to Cotler, Zajdel gave speeches in the Mount Royal riding, such as one advertised as : “How the Federal Government Relates to Israel.” 

A 2011 election campaign vid uploaded by Zajdel, along with the tagline :

"Let us thank our prime minister Stephen Harper for how he supports the land of Israel, he is its strongest advocate of any leader in the world."

Steve and Saulie in happier times in a photo op featuring brown paper bags - a prop usually avoided by the Cons after Brian Mulroney.
Mulroney spoke at a $600-a-plate fundraiser for Dean Del Mastro, another Perp with Perks, this past May. [h/t Toe at Bread 'n Roses]

Brown bag photo h/t : Robert Jensen2 via Holly Stick in comments.
And to Canadian Cynic for the nudge.

Previous Perps editions with bios.
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks - Part 5

Updated : h/t Canadian Cynic

Welcome Con MPs Devinder Shory, James Bezan, Shelly Glover, and update! House Speaker Andrew Scheer to the growing family scandal of Steve's Parade of Perps with Perks.  

Devinder Shory, Calgary Northeast, accused of providing legal work that supported allegedly fraudulent mortgages - in his case at least five straw-buyer cases of more than $3.7 million:

Promised a payment of up to $8,000, hundreds of straw buyers, mostly new immigrants, allowed their names to be used to obtain falsely inflated mortgages on over 200 properties. When the straw buyers could not pay up, the bank would foreclose and the "masterminds" would walk away, wiring proceeds from the alleged fraud to Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. 

[T]he Alberta Lawyers Insurance Association (ALIA) has agreed to pay $9.2 million to BMO to settle the case on behalf of all 17 lawyers named in the suit."

April 28 2014 Update : Two Con candidates hoping to challenge Devinder Shory appear to have had their nomination papers quashed by Dimitri Soudas to protect Shory.

Two years after the election, Elections Canada is still waiting for campaign expenses compliance from Manitoba Con MPs James Bezan and law 'n order gal Shelly Glover regarding documents that put them over the top of their allowed amounts ... just like Perp with Perks veteran Peter Penashue in Labrador. Both Glover and Bezan have filed court applications to prevent their being barred from the House by EC's Marc Mayrand while Con Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton wrangles their cases.

ETA : Dear Mr. Hamilton : Clawing back campaign staffers' pay a year later in order to get Glover under the spending limit wire in what you refer to as "an honest mistake of fact" seems a bit mean. I also fail to see how having election campaign signs up in places where the traffic is poor disqualifies their existence as, you know, election campaign signs.

Belated addition of House Speaker Andrew Scheer, MP, for sitting on Mayrand's formal letter of May 24 advising him Bezan and Glover were in violation of election law and therefore ineligible to sit in the House. Scheer did not advise the House and the next day Glover filed a court challenge, followed by Bezan. 
We the public of course would not have known about any of this if the media had not dug into it - hats off to Kady and McMaher.

Very good post from Dr.Dawg on whether rule of law still exists if a sitting government can flout it without repercussion. Whether the court finds any mitigating factors in Bezan and Glover's applications or not and regardless of Scheer's eventual ruling, the Cons will claim it a victory and continue on as they like. 

Running out of perp parade room here and the month is yet young ... I'm going to have to start setting out benches at the back for the next batch to stand on.

Previous editions/perps' bios
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks - Part 4

Please welcome Senators David Tkachuk, Marjory LeBreton and Carolyn Stewart Olsen to the growing family scandal of Steve's Parade of Perps with Perks.  Click to enjoy.

While Steve is still going with the lone topgun chief of staff on the Duffy knoll with the chequebook story from his temporary hideout in South America, his perps at home are busy fucking that up for him. 

We were most relieved to hear from Senator Tkachuk that even though he was soliciting advice from the Prime Minister's Office on how to do his audit of Duffy, and Nigel Wright was calling him up wanting to know "When is this thing over with?", Senator Tkachuk assures us that "no one came to my room and told me what to do."

Well that's good to know but with Steve's former-press-secretary-now-Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen spearheading the Duffy audit whitewash/rewrite in the steering committee for you, your own room was pretty well always safe, wasn't it? 

That whitewashed audit is now winging its way back to the same perps for further review and Steve's buddy, government leader in the senate Marjory LeBreton, has refused to open the hearings, complaining she lives in a town "populated by Liberal elitists and their lickspittle media” and is not getting enough credit for opening up the senate to Steve's scandal.

Excellent piece on this from Mound of Sound

Updated Perps with Perks and their bios.
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks - Part 3

Please welcome Nigel Wright, Steve's chief of staff on loan from Onex Corp and the latest member of Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks, for secretly cutting Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to paper over the senate investigation and Deloitte audit into Mike Duffy's creative housing expense claims and reports he billed the Senate for travel while campaigning for the Cons .

Duffy isn't co-operating with the investigations now he has the cash but that didn't stop House leader Peter Van Loan from praising him for his "leadership" in returning money that didn't belong to him. 
Duffy : 

"It's become a major distraction so my wife and I discussed it and we decided that in order to turn the page and put all this behind us, we are going to voluntarily pay back the living expenses related to the house we have in Ottawa"

Ah yes the Royal Bank loan and the PMO instruction to keep his little head down.
Unfortunately Duffy then blabbed around town about his secret cheque from Wright.

So which is it then? A bank loan or a personal cheque from Steve's chief of staff? 
Both? Given he purportedly has secured the bank loan to cover the senate repayment, what's the cash bonanza from Nigel Wright for exactly?

“The PM was not aware of the specifics,” Andrew MacDougall, Mr. Harper’s director of communications, has said of this transaction when asked.

I think that's called implausible deniability.

Nigel Wright, a founding director of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, has resigned.
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Updated Perps with perks and their bios.

Arrgh update. Typo correction : That should have been "a founding director"; without that "a", it made him sound like the only one.  Apologies.
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Harper's Parade of Perps with Perks

Time to update Harper's Parade of Perps again, says Canadian Cynic.
Ok then ... let's add three more to make it an even ten Parade of Perps with Perks.

New entrant below the still unidentified Mr RoboCon is Saskatchewan Senator Pamela Wallin, seen here in 2000 advertizing her stint as host of  Who Wants to Buy a Millionaire? in New York where she owns an apartment. Senator Wallin is not currently being investigated for clocking $321,027 in "other" senate travel expenses because she does visit her Saskatchewan residence even she holds an Ontario residency health card just like PEI Senator Mike Duffy. However the former investigative journalist does not want to discuss it, explaining it's a "point of privacy". 

Between Duffy and Bruce Carson stands Labrador MP and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue, who resigned from both yesterday following reports of illegal overspending and accepting corporate contributions disguised as individual donations in his 79-vote win over the Liberal incumbent in the last election. The Conservative Party transferred $44,350 to his campaign last November and this month to cover his overspending repayment debts.
Penashue explained that "mistakes were made by an inexperienced volunteer" - Reg Bowers, the campaign's official agent - who was subsequently appointed by Resources Minister Joe Oliver to the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board. The CNLOPB bio describes Bowers as "having extensive business involvement" and "a Bachelor of Commerce" as well as "post secondary work with the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants." Still, you know ... math.
Penashue intends to have a do-over election, presumably before Elections Canada gets around to finishing an investigation which could bar him from running for election again.
Yesterday a Conservative Party spokesman explained : Nice riding you got there, Labrador, be a shame if something happened to it :

He will be the Conservative Party candidate in the by-election and if Newfoundland and Labrador want to continue to have a strong voice within government they need to re-elect him as the Member of Parliament for Labrador.

Under Steve is Dean Del Mastro, Steve's parliamentary secretary and pointman on the robocall election scandal, being investigated over his $21,000 personal cheque to Frank Hall at Holinshed Research Group for voter ID/GOTV services. Ah, I see the Frank Hall vid I reposted a month ago is "no longer available" at Youtube. So how's the rest of the RCMP/Elections Canada investigation into Del Mastro's scandal-ridden 2008 election campaign going, huh?
Fun fact : Del Mastro has now missed 26 consecutive Ethics committee meetings.

Well that's all for now, folks. Stay tuned though - it's only March.

Update : Collect the whole set!
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RoboConstructions: Del Mastro and the GeoVote

Update June 13 : The above vid has been taken down from Youtube so here's CTV's Youtube version of it :



Back to original January post .... Dean Del Mastro and his $21,000 personal cheque to Frank Hall at Holinshed Research Group for voter ID/GOTV services are back in the news tonight as McMaher reports the RCMP are investigating Steve's hapless parliamentary secretary/RoboCon pointman for his various 2008 election campaign financing irregularities and their apparent ham-fisted cover-up.

The  details   were   extensively   covered   back   in   June, including Holinshed's lapsed Feb 2 2010 lawsuit against Del Mastro for non-payment of use of their CIMS-like interactive voter-tracking system called GeoVote, and the six figure Canada Economic Action Plan cheque Holinshed received to develop GeoVote in 2009/10 ... before Holinshed dropped off the map themselves in 2011.


I haven't seen the vid up top of Frank Hall explaining the GeoVote system in 2008 posted anywhere else before so here ya go. In this demonstration, Mr Hall pinpoints locations of how people voted in the Don Valley West riding :

"What we've done is put a face on it and a geographic location on it and a contact that becomes personal or personable all of a sudden because you can take that data and use it - it puts a name and a face and a geographic location on something and that's powerful."

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RoboConduct Unbecoming : To Canada from North Dakota

3 days before polls opened in the last federal election, Elections Canada officials were using the word "scam" to describe election irregularities, making this statement from the EC commish throwing in the towel two weeks after the election even before any investigation is  begun all the more astonishing :

 Commissioner of Canada Elections May 16, 2011

"There was no conduct reported that would bring into question the integrity of the election result overall or the result in a particular riding. Although misconduct was reported in several ridings, there is no complaint that it affected the overall result. There is some speculation in the media that the dirty tricks may have affected the result in some close contests.

The investigation of complaints regarding web based conduct - particularly third party conduct - is difficult, time consuming and may be inconclusive. The same applies to telephone communications that flow through intermediaries and foreign call centres. Consequently, the dirty tricks complaints which definitely occurred may not be resolvable, if the conduct is illegal under the Act."

Foreign call centres.

Back in March, Dean Del Mastro gaffed when he mistakenly accused Liberal MP Joe Volpe's campaign of using a foreign call centre from "North Dakota’s 701 area code". 
Amusingly it turned out to be Del Mastro and 13 other Cons who used Ohio-based Republican call centre Front Porch Strategies to help win their 14 ridings.

So given that the Cons are prone to blaming others for what they themselves get up to, let's have a look at just where North Dakota showed up in our last election.

There's the now famous "Idiot, he can hear us" call from North Dakota directing a Winnipeg Centre voter to the wrong polling station. The voter recalled overhearing "people discussing voters in Ontario, particularly Guelph and Thunder Bay."

Liberal MP Joe Volpe asked Elections Canada to formally investigate reports that residents in his Eglinton-Lawrence riding were being harassed by repeated calls from someone with a North Dakota phone number claiming to represent his campaign. 

Kingston Ontario residents reported being woken up at 2am by callers claiming to be from the Liberal Party, ditto calls on Easter Sunday, and being sent to the wrong polling station. Some of these calls were traced to a North Dakota calling centre.

Joyce Murray, MP for Vancouver Quadra said “several” supporters in her riding got late-night calls from people purporting to be Liberals who were “harassing and rude.” The calls came from a number in North Dakota.

London West candidate Doug Ferguson reported calls from Florida and the Dakotas " repeatedly asking them to take Liberal lawn signs. Also on election day, we had calls from people saying they'd received calls saying the polls had been moved."

The Barrie Liberal campaign office reported complaints about calls at 11:30 at night and 6:30am purporting to come from the Liberal Party. Call*69 showed the call came from South Dakota.

Lib MP Mr. Wilfert’s campaign office in Richmond Hill received an automated message two days before the election, showing a number from North Dakota. 

Voters in Ottawa-Orleans reported live calls and robocalls - rude, late at night,claiming to be from the Liberal Party - from North Dakota and Montana. 

Well you get the idea.

800 notes lists over a thousand complaints about North Dakota phone number 701-509-8703 - mostly to do with credit card scams and phishing. Two thirds down page one is this one dated Mar 27 2011 (h/t commenter Lexy at Sixth Estate) : 

followed up on April 14 by a concerned Andrew Gill campaign person asking for more info.

Liberal candidate Andrew Gill ran against Con MP Rick Dykstra in St Catherines in the last election.

“We had a ton of people call in during the campaign saying they got harassing phone calls all hours of the day and night,” Andrew Gill said, “over-the-top aggressive” calls. “The way we took it is they were trying to make our campaign look bad.”

Mr. Dykstra, now Parliamentary Secretary to Jason Kenney, has been mentioned on Creekside before in connection with rw US Republican robocallers Front Porch Strategies doing doorknocking for him in his riding, as well as his campaign manager joining FPS as the Canada-US liaison. 

Which is I think where we came in.

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