The front-page of the Ottawa Citizen reports, “Elections Canada investigators on the trail of the ‘Pierre Poutine’ suspect in the robocalls case have been asking questions about the actions of staff at Conservative party headquarters in Ottawa.”
“The agency is trying to determine why database records provided by the party appear to be missing entries that could help identify who downloaded the phone numbers used to make fraudulent robocalls, according to a source familiar with the probe. Investigators also are inquiring about a phone call from Conservative headquarters, made the day before the election, to RackNine, the Edmonton voice-broadcasting company whose servers were used to send out the robocalls.”
“The party has repeatedly and firmly denied that anybody in its Ottawa offices had anything to do with the Poutine drama… But investigators are now combing over access logs for the Conservatives’ Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) to determine who downloaded a list of phone numbers for non-Conservative supporters in Guelph. They are now certain the list of numbers in Guelph that received the robocalls came directly from CIMS, according to the source. The CIMS data were compared to listings of the outgoing robocalls provided under court order by RackNine and matched perfectly, the source said. …Non-supporter data are entered into CIMS by volunteers collecting information during neighbourhood canvasses and by phone bank workers contracted by the party.”
“The investigators have inquired about CIMS logs for one particular user in the party’s headquarters. The logs show blanks between this person’s CIMS logon and logoff on the day the Guelph data was accessed, according to the source.”
“Also of interest is a call to RackNine made on May 1, the day before the vote, from a number in the Conservative party war room in Ottawa. The number is listed as belonging to Chris Rougier, who was identified as the party’s manager of voter relation programs. …Rougier was a key member of the target seat team, working directly under campaign manager Jenni Byrne, acting as a liaison with vendors providing telephone services to the campaign. There is no indication Rougier was involved in the Poutine scheme, only that (Elections Canada investigator Al) Mathews was inquiring why his phone line would be used by someone to place a call to RackNine. …The call from Rougier’s phone to RackNine is the only one the party has failed to explain in detail to reporters, in spite of repeated requests.”
“The fact that Elections Canada is making inquiries about activities in the Conservative war room appears to conflict with the conclusion of an internal probe, led by Conservative party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, who was asked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get to the bottom of the matter.”
On March 27, the Council of Canadians announced that it is supporting applications under the Canada Elections Act by individual Canadians seeking to overturn federal election results in seven ridings. The ridings are Don Valley East, Elmwood-Transcona, Nipissing-Tamiskaming, Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, Vancouver Island North, Winnipeg South Centre and Yukon. The legal actions to annul results are based on evidence of irregularities, fraud and other activities which affected the outcome of the elections. For more on this legal challenge, go to http://canadians.org/democracy247. For ongoing blogs on this issue, please see http://canadians.org/blog/?s=%22elections+canada%22.
The full Ottawa Citizen article is at http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Robocalls+probe+extends+Tory+headquarters/6468552/story.html.
