Orwell had never been Robocalled Emma Pullman, Director of Research at Leadnow.ca, has published an article in the Vancouver Observer that promises to blow the deflections of the Conservative Party of Canada (RE Robocalls) completely out of the water. In her article she writes about John Fryer, Professor of Labour Economics at
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Impolitical: Harper reverses on new audit powers for Elections Canada
“Tories agree to new audit powers for Elections Canada.” The Conservative government has reversed course and now says it will support an NDP motion to give Elections Canada increased audit powers. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has battled the federal elections watchdog for much of his political career, told the
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: RoboCon: Fading
What are you kidding? RoboCon isn’t fading. This scandal started before May 2, 2011 with harassing phone calls to Liberals in Volpe’s riding (see CBC story if curious), and caught Elections Canada (EC) off guard on election day so they ordered warnings sent out in the media of fake phone
Continue readingManning Centre’s voter suppression school
Must read article from the Vancouver Observer on the creepy Manning Centre’s 2010 ‘campaign school’. Here’s a little of what one attendee, John Fryer, discovered. (emphasis mine). The conversation that followed was deeply disturbing to Fryer. In a question and answer session, attendees discussed voter suppression tactics. They talked about
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Robocon: Were our laws broken?
Misinformation is in the air, from the Tory front and back benches to journalists. Some is deliberate, designed to distract the public’s attention from misdeeds; others are perhaps simply mistakes. Take this opinion in the Montreal Gazette: Many of the complaints are about calls that were simply annoying and deceitful,
Continue readingThe Wingnuterer: RoboCon – Lets Examine Some Of The Facts
Elections Canada distributes voters lists to all parties that are running at the start of the election and a send update list three days before the official election date. Elections Canada’s voter list consist of the voters name and address, no phone numbers, no polling station information. The Political Parties
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Roboscam: Bob Rae has 13 days to protect Canada’s democracy by stopping the clock
The clock is ticking and there are less than three weeks to go (around 13 days as of today) before voters lose their right to appeal to the courts under the Canada Elections Act to upset the results of the May 2 election in at least 27 ridings. And Bob
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Mostly competent campaigning?
A number of my colleagues in the blogosphere are pointing to this interview with Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott this morning. As the Saskatchewan MP describes it, the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) manages voting lists for all federal ridings in a central database in Ottawa. Data supplied by Elections Canada
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Robocon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor dig deeper into the story behind Robocon alias Pierre Poutine. – Maurice Vellacott admits that the voter lists needed to carry out multi-riding voter suppression were controlled strictly by the Cons’ central command – meaning there’s no prospect
Continue readingThe Wingnuterer: RoboCon – It Doesn’t Matter One Rotting Dingo’s Kidney,…
Let’s be perfectly clear here, it Doesn’t Matter One Rotting Dingo’s Kidney whether the people who perpetrated the voter suppression crime in last years election are linked to the CPC, or the Liberals, or the NDP or to the Church of Scientology. They need to caught and punished to the
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: If CPoC Central Contols Local Voters Lists
…as Tory MP Vellacott indicates, then this makes it more likely that Robocon was planned by someone close to the center of the party rather than via fringe players. It also contradicts the gov’s last couple of days worth of talking points. Another interesting day in the HOC, I suspect.
Continue readingWord to Peggy Wente And Comic Relief: A Cheesy Cartoon And Latest From Montreal Icons, Bowser and Blue
Keep thinking you live in a democracy, dear. What’s happened to my country? I went away for a couple of weeks and all hell broke loose. I came back to find that someone named Poutine stole the last election. At first I thought this was a typo, that they meant
Continue readingThe Wingnuterer: I was out, finished! and I took an arrow to the knee
I had given up on blogging and then I dabbled with it for a bit, off an on. The reasons for leaving are complicated,… various events in the blogosphere sour my taste for it,… certain events in my life just made me loose interest in the task,… And then, when
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – In the latest on Robocon, John Ivison rightly notes that the scandal figures to give many Canadians a long-overdue first look at the Cons’ computerized voter information. Meanwhile, Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher note that the Cons’ spending in last year’s election
Continue readingThe Wingnuterer: RoboCon – If The CPC Have Nothing To Hide, Why Are They Hiding?
The one thing that always amazes me about Politics, when you are accused of doing something wrong, and if you didn’t do it (ADScam, In and Out, RoboCon whatever) why not just lay your cards on the table and serve up the opposition parties a huge, heaping pile of SHUT
Continue readingCalgaryGrit: Dean Del Mastro: Knower of Everything
On previous episodes of Dean Del Mastro: Knower of Everything, Dean didn’t trust the survey results in a Peterborough newspaper poll, so he commissioned his own robo-push poll, in an effort to “protect democracy”. Then, last week Dean argued the Liberals used a US call centre and the Tories never
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Robocon: Crushing poll results for Tories on the voter suppression in the last election
Hat tip to Kinsella for pointing the way to this March 6, Angus Reid poll. Almost two out of three Canadians believe there were many voter suppression telephone calls during the May 2011 election (despite Tory MPs desperate attempts in Parliament to limit the criminality to one riding only –
Continue readingCuriosityCat: Robocon: Bob Rae has 14 days to protect Canada’s democracy by stopping the clock
The clock is ticking and there are less than three weeks to go (around 14 days as of today) before voters lose their right to appeal to the courts under the Canada Elections Act to upset the results of the May 2 election in at least 27 ridings. And Bob
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: RoboCon and VikiLeaks
Surprisingly, the Canadian government is dealing with other scandals it’s instigated. Vikileaks was the subject again today, where the Speaker ruled that Anonymous (an unrepresented collective of hackers and political activists) was found to have breached the privledge of Minister Toews who’s created the monster of a bill, C-30 (to
Continue reading"Robo-calls? Get a grip. We’re Canadian"
So says Globe & Mail scold Margaret Wente. We expect our elections to be squeaky clean, and that’s a good thing. Obviously, there were election irregularities in Guelph, and maybe elsewhere, and Elections Canada needs to find out what happened and who did it. But it’s ridiculous to think there
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