It appears there may be a case in the robo-calls
from Guelph, and a clue as to who “Pierre Poutine” might have been. While the
trail of clues may have been pretty well concealed – a PayPal account fed with
pre-paid Visa cards linked to an anonymous Gmail account, it sounds like there
may have been a telling mistake along the line – an IP address – and the owner
of RackNine has written it up for Elections Canada. The noose just may be
tightening. Meanwhile, it looks like a Conservative campaign worker was warning against voter suppression calls to voters shortly before the election in Guelph – but Elections
Canada has no record of complaints of those calls, unlike the fake Elections
Canada robo-calls on election day.
Here’s a little more about the scope of the
“voter augmentation” issue in the riding of Eglinton-Lawrence, where it looks
like there may have been as many as 2700 dodgy ballots cast. And Joe Oliver,
the victor in that riding (and current cabinet minister)? Calls the Liberals “sore
losers” in the face of possible electoral fraud and de facto ballot stuffing.
The NDP amended their own opposition day
motion yesterday to ensure that the new powers granted to the Chief Electoral
Officer (after eventual legislation passes) will apply to past elections as
well as future ones. The government still looks to be in support of the motion,
but considering that it is non-binding, we’ll have to see if they do put up
legislation within a timely manner. The debate, meanwhile, took some odd twists
as blatherskite Dean Del Mastro veered into the 15 year-old sponsorship
scandal. Because there’s apparently no statute of limitations on beating that
dead horse.
MPs heard from suicide prevention groups yesterday at the Health Committee – including from Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Youth Line,
and the wife of former Conservative MP Dave Batters, who took his own life
after battling depression – as part of the consideration of a private members’
bill to create a national suicide prevention strategy. Here is one of the projects Batters’ widow has been working on.
Oh, look – we’re going to delay replacing
our 50 year-old search & rescue planes by another year.
And the Ethics Committee debate to bring in
the Liberal staffer behind the Vikileaks account gets more bizzare until the
Conservatives moved to take it behind closed doors.
