Ottawa – After the Conservatives orchestrated widespread electoral fraud against voters in the 2011 election their legal bills from the court challenge supported by the Council of Canadians are being paid by taxpayers, according to the Ottawa Citizen.
According to sources, the Internal Board of Economy of the House of Commons will be paying the majority of the $355,907 bill from the Conservative’s lawyer, Arthur Hamilton. Only $13,206 will be paid by Conservative MPs themselves.
The Federal Court found in no uncertain terms that widespread election fraud took place during the 2011 federal election.
”The Federal Court found that non-Conservative voters were targeted by fraudulent calls and the most likely source of the data was the Conservative party’s CIMS database,” said Garry Neil, Executive Director of the Council of Canadians, “In convicting Michael Sona, the judge said that he did not act alone. So, all roads lead to the national Conservative party database. The Conservatives need to answer for what they did in 2011.”
On the other side, not only were innocent victims required to pay their own legal fees, the Conservatives tried to get robocall victims to pay their court fees too.
“The location of your tax dollars has been moved… to pay for Conservative party legal bills,” says Dylan Penner, Democracy Campaigner with the Council of Canadians, “First, they tried to send their bill to the innocent victims of the robocalls. Now, taxpayers are on the hook for their dirty bill. They should pay the money back.”
During the Federal Court case in 2013, the Tory MPs filed a reimbursement request asking that the nine robocall victims from the 2011 election pay the Conservatives’ lawyers legal fees. They were asked to pay even though it was the Conservatives who needlessly drove up the cost by tabling multiple procedural motions to prevent the case being heard. In the ruling the judge called these delaying tactics “trench warfare.” The judge ruled against this reimbursement request.
“Why isn’t the Conservative party, which was behind the campaign to use robocalls to mislead voters, not responsible for their own costs? It was their database and tactics that were in question,” concludes Neil.
-30-
