The Council of Canadians urges Conservative donors to withhold donations until scandals cleared up
The Conservative Party of Canada has launched an ambitious new fundraising campaign to add $2 million to party coffers before the end of 2013, but the Council of Canadians is encouraging Conservative donors to withhold donations until the party leadership comes clean on this year’s unresolved election fraud and Senate expense scandals.
In an e-mail message sent yesterday afternoon, Conservative Party president John Walsh asked supporters to contribute to a campaign called Seize the Moment.
“Conservative Party members should ‘seize the moment’ – to compel their party to live up to the accountability it promised to get elected,” says Council of Canadians executive director Garry Neil. “I ask them to temporarily withhold their donations until the Conservative Party cooperates with investigators and releases all the relevant information to resolve these scandals.”
The Council of Canadians supported the legal challenges of eight individuals who received fraudulent phone calls directing them to non-existent polling stations during the last election. In his ruling on the cases, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley concluded that there was a coordinated, widespread campaign of fraudulent telephone calls that suppressed voter turnout, and that “the most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database maintained and controlled by the CPC [Conservative Party of Canada].”
To date, the Conservatives have refused to release the records of who accessed their database.
Similarly, despite conflicting statements by Prime Minister Harper in the House of Commons, it is clear that a number of officials in his office and the Conservative Party attempted to influence the Senate expense audit, and some are now under investigation by the RCMP for fraud in relation to the repayment of Senator Mike Duffy’s travel and legal expenses. The evidence shows that donations to the Conservative Party were used to pay Senator Duffy’s legal fees.
“Conservative Party supporters can encourage accountable and transparent behavior by withholding further donations to the Conservative Party,” says Neil. “I know there are many grassroots Conservative supporters who are extremely concerned about these scandals and want to get to the bottom of this. Now is the time for them to ‘seize the moment’ and compel full disclosure by the Prime Minister and party officials.”
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www.canadians.org/fracking | Twitter: @CouncilOfCDNs
