ThisIsWhatDemocracy
…“I’ve spent my life trying to get people to participate more in the political system and trying to vote more,” he (Preston Manning) told reporters on the sidelines of a conservative conference sponsored by his Manning Centre for Building Democracy.
“And the fact that there would be people out trying to work in the opposite direction is deplorable.”…
Congratulations to the 2010 Pyramid Award Winners….
2010 Winner is the C2C Journal for their success in building an excellent online journal. Editorial Board members Joseph Quesnel and Chris Schafer accepted the award on behalf of the C2C Journal.
2008: Stephen Taylor and Craig Smith for founding BloggingTories.ca.
2009: Michael Davis from RMG for his achievements with phone and online GOTV, fundraising, and voter ID….
…Three former RMG employees told The Toronto Star that they worked on Conservative Party voter identification (Voter ID) and get-out-the-vote (GOTV)calls (on the 2011 election campaign). They said they made live calls to numbers in ridings across Canada about changes in voting locations, locations that the employees said “made no sense.”
On CBC Radio’s As it Happens, a former RMG employee at its Thunder Bay call centre said that it was her gut instinct that she and her colleagues were “swaying people to not be able to make their correct vote.”
Jeff Harriettha, a former supervisor with RMG in Thunder Bay, told CBC News that the call centre was hired by the Conservatives during the election, but that inadequate training could be blamed for the misinformation. The party said they hired RMG to help identify Conservative supporters but has denied any knowledge of those misleading phone calls.
On its website, RMG describes itself as the “largest direct-contact firm working in the political sector,” and says it works “exclusively with right-of-centre campaigns.”
“For the past 15 years, RMG has helped Canadian conservatives win,” the website says.
RMG’s relationship with Stephen Harper dates back to 2003, when he was the new leader of the Canadian Alliance. The party hired RMG to look after its voter contact work. RMG was already working for the Progressive Conservative party in Ontario.
RMG was also involved in Harper’s leadership campaign in 2004, following the Alliance-PC merger.
The information RMG gathered from its massive telephone campaigns went into the Alliance’s and then the Conservative’s highly-regarded Constituency Information Management System.
Writing in his book Harper’s Team, Tom Flanagan, Harper’s former campaign manager, called direct voter contact the party’s “most valuable player” in the 2004 federal election, in which the party gained 21 seats.
CEO Michael Davis and Andrew Langhorne are two of the key people at RMG.
RMG worked on 95 Conservative campaigns during the 2011 election…
