Harper v Trudeau 28 Nov 2012 - Lawrence Martin

Harper’s attacks on Trudeau will be vicious

Special to The Globe and Mail
Last updated Wednesday, Nov. 28 2012, 5:14 AM EST


For Stephen Harper, losing to a Trudeau would be the ultimate humiliation. It was his visceral hostility to Pierre Trudeau’s attitude to the West, exemplified by the national energy program, that propelled him into the Reform Party in the first place.



So you can imagine how Mr. Harper felt when a poll came out last week showing that the Liberals under the leadership of Justin Trudeau would defeat him handily. And you can imagine his relief when, right on the heels of that poll, the storm emerged over an interview Mr. Trudeau gave some time ago in which he spoke of how the country would suffer with Albertans at the helm. This was almost in a league with Mr. Harper once saying that Albertans, owing to their treatment from Central Canada, should build a firewall around the province.



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The two men are polar opposites. Their deep differences mark a time of unusually deep divisions in our politics – a time of contrasting ideologies, regions and visions, making the stakes extraordinarily high. Mr. Harper wants to further his dismantling of the house Trudeau built and cement a conservative ethic. Progressives are of the hope that if George W. Bush could make a Barack Obama possible in the United States, Stephen Harper is making a new force for liberalism possible here.



Mr. Trudeau’s reckless remarks will link him more closely with his father. Given the lingering animosity toward Pierre Trudeau on the Prairies, his son had been trying to distance himself by disowning the despised NEP.



The challenge for Justin, who lacks the diamond-hard intellect of the père, will be to show his mettle in other ways. He has the charisma and the potential for appeal to a new generation. But does he have the ice in the veins that his father showed in standing up to terrorists, separatists and haters of all stripes? In Mr. Harper, he is facing an opponent who has that ice-cold glare and the smarts behind it.



Mr. Harper is not spoken of in such terms too often, but for my money he ranks with Pierre Trudeau as having the sharpest mind among our prime ministers of the last century. It’s a brain that is penetrating, razor-sharp, cold, calculating. Mr. Trudeau’s was more rounded and better-schooled, subject to broader experiences before his political ascendancy. Mr. Harper is essentially a career politician, and his mind, not long on imagination, is more predisposed to political priorities than was the philosopher king’s. But there is no shortage of storage space in that cranium. It is like a warehouse, one in which every issue is fitted, slotted, understood in considerable detail and strategically weighed.



Combine that with his appetite for going for the jugular with every tactic imaginable – he is still running a campaign of lies against NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair on the carbon-tax issue – and you see what the young Trudeau is up against. Mr. Harper will come at him more viciously than other opponents because of the name.



The Liberals were serious in their bid to recruit Mark Carney to run for the leadership, and he actually gave them the go-ahead to put out some feelers. As we learned Monday, there is currently no hope of that: Mr. Carney will be off to the Bank of England for a five-year term as governor. After that, who knows?



Former astronaut Mark Garneau is to enter the Liberal race Wednesday. U.S. Democrats thought they had a promising astronaut candidate in Senator John Glenn in the 1980s, but he disappeared fast. He had a solid but stolid reputation. Too stolid, which is the knock on Mr. Garneau.



The challenge to Mr. Harper will likely be left to Mr. Trudeau. Now that his armour has been dinted, there will be thorough searches by the Conservative hit squad through every inch of his record. It’s likely more ammunition will be found. We’ll see whether he has the steel to withstand.

McGregor & Maher 16 Nov 2012 - Robocall Plot Thickens

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Elections Canada email trail points to growing suspicions over voter suppression ‘mischief’ during 2011 election

Robbie the Friendly Robot.



Photo: David Kawai / Ottawa Citizencomment Email

Stephen Maher



Glen McGregor

Published: November 16, 2012, 7:16 pm

Updated: 5 days ago OTTAWA — Three days before the last federal election, Elections Canada confronted the Conservatives about suspicious calls directing voters to the wrong polling stations but were met with denials of any wrongdoing from the party’s lawyer, internal emails show.



In one email, an official with the agency reported a growing number of misleading calls as voting day approached and said some were worried that a “scam” to mislead voters was under way.



The emails, released under the Access to Information Act, show that voters in ridings across Canada believed they had been misled by Conservative callers.



They also cast doubt on the theory, advanced by some Conservatives, that reports of so-called “poll-moving calls” were invented by voters who flooded Elections Canada with nearly 1400 complaints after news of the robocalls scandal first broke in February.



The message from Elections Canada staff trace a timeline that began with the first reports of the calls on April 29, three days before the vote, when the agency began to field inquiries from concerned voters.



At 8:16 p.m., Sylvie Jacmain, the director of field programs and services, sent an email to agency lawyer Ageliki Apostolakos, reporting problems in the ridings of Saint Boniface, Manitoba, and Kitchener-Conestaga, Ontario.



“In the course of the last half-hour, it has come to my attention (in two ridings) that is seems representatives of Mr. Harper’s campaign communicated with voters to inform them that their polling station had changed, and the indications offered to one would lead her more than an hour and a half from her real voting place, which is found a few minutes from her home,” she wrote in French.



Half an hour later, procedures officer Sylvain Lortie wrote to Jacmain to say that the Conservative campaign in Saint Boniface “has communicated with (party) headquarters, who were doing the calls.”



Apostolakos quickly followed up with an email to the Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton.



“In the course of the last half-hour, Elections Canada has heard that two representatives of the Conservative campaign office are communicating with electors in two electoral districts to inform them that their polling station has changed to another location,” Apostolakos wrote.



Hamilton responded just after midnight the following night — 27 hours later, according to time stamps on the emails — writing that because some polling locations had been changed, some Conservative candidates were contacting voters to ensure they were going to the right places.



“The calls being made by our candidates request the voter to confirm her or his polling location,” Hamilton wrote, saying he had looked into Elections Canada’s concerns.



“There is no indication by the caller that the location may have changed or words to that effect. And no voter is being directed to a polling location one and a half hours away from the correct polling location.”



By Sunday afternoon, Elections Canada had received reports of the calls from 13 different ridings. Legal counsel Karen McNeil sent another email to Hamilton:



“These calls are continuing and the frequency of calls seems to be increasing,” she wrote, providing a list of the originating phone numbers that some voters had recorded. Voters who called the numbers back heard only recorded messages identifying them as Conservative Party lines, she said.



McNeil told Hamilton the poll-moving calls had been reported by voters in the ridings of Avalon (Newfoundland and Labrador); West Nova (Nova Scotia); Ajax-Pickering, Halton, Kingston and the Islands, Kitchener-Conestoga and Vaughan (Ontario); Kildonan-St. Paul, Saint Boniface and Winnipeg Centre (Manitoba); and Cardigan (Prince Edward Island).



There were also later reports of poll-moving calls in two Quebec ridings: Outremont and Lac-Saint-Louis and Prince George-Peace River in British Columbia.



Hamilton replied at 10:45 a.m. the following morning — election day — saying only that he would forward the same response he had sent Apostolakos.



As Hamilton sent the email, hundreds of voters in Guelph were heading to vote at the Quebec Street Mall, victims of an as-yet-unsolved mystery call from “Pierre Poutine.”



In spite of the two emails to Hamilton, the calls continued.



Email traffic shows the officials were becoming increasingly suspicious about the nature of the calls.



On Sunday afternoon, Elections Canada lawyer Michele Rene de Cotret wrote to Jane Dunlop, manager of external relations, giving her a heads up on “some mischief purportedly done by representatives of the Conservative party calling people to tell them that the location of their polling site has been moved.”



The same day, elections officer Anita Hawdur wrote to Apostolakos: “The polling station numbers given out by the Conservative Party…are all wrong. Most of them are quite far away from the elector’s home and from the initial polling place that showed on their VIC (voter information card.)”



Later that afternoon, Hawdur sent Apostolakos a message warning that, in one riding, officials received four calls from voters saying they had been misdirected. “This is getting pretty suspicious,” she wrote. “The workers in the returning office think these people are running a scam.”



Hawdur reported at 3:32 p.m. Sunday that “we are starting to get more calls now.”



At 5:10 p.m., Natalie Babin Dufresne emailed a number of officials lining up advertising to warn voters in Prince George-Peace River, where no polling stations had been changed, as a result of “alleged Conservative and Elections Canada calls.”



The next morning, election day, the number of calls seemed to intensify.



At 11:27 a.m., as the agency struggled with chaos at a polling station in Guelph, Hawdur sent an email to a number of colleagues: “It’s right across the country except Saskatchewan; a lot of the calls are from electoral districts in Ontario. it appears it’s getting worse. Some returning officers reported that the calls are allegedly identifying Elections Canada.”



Asked about the allegations in the emails, Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey denied the party tried to mislead anyone.



“To ensure our supporters knew where to vote, our script read that ‘Elections Canada has changed some voting locations at the last moment. To be sure could you tell me the address of where you’re voting?’” DeLorey said in an email.



“In the days leading up to and including Election Day we were only calling our identified supporters to get out our vote, and in every call we identified ourselves as calling on behalf of the Conservative Party, so any accusation that we were misleading voters doesn’t hold up to those simple facts.”



DeLorey said Elections Canada changed over 1,000 polls locations and the country.



When Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand appeared before a parliamentary committee in March, he said only 473 polls of more than 20,000 locations were changed, and only 61 moved in the last week, when it would have been too late to send out revised voter cards.



In his report on the election tabled in August 2011, Mayrand made brief mention of the “crank calls” that incorrectly advised voters of changed polling locations but there was no indication that these were a widespread or coordinated effort. Mayrand said only the Commissioner of Canada Elections was investigating.



Hamilton’s emailed response to Elections Canada is consistent with evidence in a robocalls-related court challenge given by Andrew Langhorne, an executive with the Conservative’s main phone bank company, Responsive Marketing Group.



Langhorne swore an affidavit earlier this year saying that RMG agents called identified Conservatives to ensure they had the right polling location printed on their voter identifications cards.



“If the address provided by the voter for their polling station did not match the address in front of the RMG agent, the RMG agent was directed to provide the voter with the polling station address displayed from the (get-out-the-vote) data,” Langhorne said.

But Langhorne allowed that voters and callers may have different addresses because of errors in the database the callers used, or errors in the voters list provided by Elections Canada.

In its postelection report, Elections Canada said that it had “indicated to political parties that the list (of polling stations) supplied should only be used for internal purposes and that parties should not direct electors to polling sites.”