Showing posts with label Saanich-Gulf Islands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saanich-Gulf Islands. Show all posts

Friday, December 11, 2015

Line up, you lying, cheating Harperistas ... here comes the bus

Remember this?

How about this or this?

So, from the mouth of a Harper conservative we get this:
“Basically what happened was that they used robocalls to misdirect NDP voters, to split the vote and allow Gary Lunn to win,” Duffy said.
“He knew nothing about it, except that they phoned him afterward and said ‘You’re welcome Gary.’ He said ‘What?’ (They said) ‘We got you in’.”
Lunn told The Canadian Press on Thursday that he has no recollection of the June 2009 lunch, never knew who made the misleading phone calls and never told Duffy that it was Conservative headquarters.
Somebody is lying. 

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Not so fast Giorno

Mystified, he is.
“It looks like there is something worth investigating there and that's a concern to me, to you, to all Canadians because the right to vote is sacrosanct and anyone who wants to mess around with that right, interfere with that right is doing not just the Conservative Party, not just the people of Guelph, but all Canadians a disservice,” Mr. Giorno said on CTV’s Question Period.
Not just Guelph. This is nationwide and denying it doesn't make it go away. Then ...
“When you're running a good campaign, you don't have time for any shenanigans outside those three core activities of identification, persuasion and mobilization [of voters],” he said. 
Who said it was a core activity? A browse through of the the Conservative Constituent Information Management System shows that it can easily be used for purposes other than those described by Giorno.

So was there a "Campaign Ethics" unit? Given the Harperites propensity for a wide range of nasty political behaviour both off-writ and during a campaign, it doesn't look like it, does it?

And The Gazetteer has a question we've been asking in Saanich-Gulf Islands since 2008.

Friday, March 02, 2012

Target Seat Management Unit sounds so ... special forces, doesn't it?

In effect, that's what it is. It is an election campaign action squad of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Their job?

Concentrate efforts to win swing ridings for the Conservatives.

From the Hill Times in Dec 2008
Crestview Public Affairs Co-founder Mark Spiro
Mr. Spiro is a "brilliant mind" who was a key adviser and top organizer on the federal Conservatives' recent electoral successes. He focused on helping the Conservative Party win several of the swing ridings in the last election to increase their seat count in the House of Commons by 20 seats.
In charge of the Target Seat Management Unit. (I absolutely love that name!)

From the Hill Times Sept 2009
Mark Spiro, a senior Conservative who in the past campaigns was in charge of target seat management, is returning to the same role.
From the Hill Times April 2011
One Tory said Mark Spiro, founder of Crestview Public Affairs who was a federally-registered lobbyist in 2006 and 2007, is once again helping the Conservative war room's target seat management unit, as he was in the 2006 and 2008 campaigns.
So, when RossK and I noticed a line in Lawrence Martin's column on the Conservative shenanigans in Saanich-Gulf Islands during the 2008 federal election ...
Mr. Giraud, the Lunn campaign manager, was categorical: “Nobody has ever asked me to do dirty tricks.” But it’s conceivable they were done without his knowledge. The party had a separate team, he said, that worked on swing ridings.
It forced us all to look a little deeper. Is Mr. Giraud pointing a finger? Certainly he wasn't pointing at himself and we can easily marry up his description with the Conservative Target Seat Management Unit.

(You just can't know how much I actually love that name. They should all have little unit patches on their left shoulder. Something like a cell phone with a thunderbolt through it. And a motto! They should have a motto. I'd suggest an informal one from my old unit but I'm pretty certain we're still using it. You fight dirty; We fight dirty).

Over to The Gazeteer!


Hat tip to Beijing York in comments.

Thursday, March 01, 2012

No matter what the Harpers or the Del Mastros say ...

It is bovine coprology. (Yes, yes. Look it up).

Via Greg we are reminded that the denials of Harper and any of his goons is fiction based on fiction. The facts were there on election day.
Voters in ridings across Canada are being warned not to trust calls telling them to go to different polling stations, according to Elections Canada.

Elections Canada has had reports from several ridings from voters in Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia who claim to have been given false information that directed them to the wrong place to vote.
Written not this past week but on 2 May, 2011 - The date of the last federal election.

Do you think there wasn't a strategy debrief in the Harper campaign structure which looked at this within a few days after the election?

They've known about this all along, and at the highest levels. This would have been highlighted on the daily news budget which makes its way through government offices.

Complaints were coming in from three provinces, then.

The thing is, it was hardly the first time and it wasn't just that election.What happened in the 2008 election was very close to home.

Briony Penn, who was the Liberal candidate for Saanich-Gulf Islands in that election, could have comfortably run under any party banner, except the Harper Conservatives. As an adjunct professor at UVic she had an impressive environmental track record which attracted positive attention from voters who leaned Liberal, Green or NDP. The long and short of it is that she was a serious threat to the Harper incumbent, Gary Lunn.

If you sounded out the riding at the time you would have found that Lunn was largely viewed as a non-entity who people were happy to toss-out if somebody better came along. Lunn had embarrassed himself as Minister of Natural Resources when he fired Linda Keen, then head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, just nine months prior to the election.

Briony Penn was looking good to a lot of people. Solid environmental credentials, provincial Green Party member, running for a centrist party.

Then the NDP candidate imploded. Here we'll take a look at what Lawrence Martin has to say: (Emphasis mine)
Midway through that campaign, Julian West, the NDP candidate, dropped out owing to revelations of a public nudity scandal from years earlier. But his withdrawal didn’t come in time to get his name off the ballot.

The federal election was on Oct. 14. At dinnertime on Oct. 13, an automated phone message went out urging constituents, strangely enough, to vote for Mr. West. And it appeared to have some effect: He received 3,667 votes, almost 6 per cent of the total. A poll a few days earlier had showed him at 1 per cent. This was good news for Mr. Lunn. The bulk of those votes might otherwise have gone to the Liberal candidate, who lost to Mr. Lunn by 2,625 votes.
Yup. I know about that Oct. 13th robocall personally. Around here nobody believes for a minute that it was anybody but the Conservative who initiated that call. Given the cost, they were the only ones who stood to gain by having people vote for a non-existent NDP candidate. The NDP had shut down their campaign office in the riding.

What it did show though, is that it worked. Elizabeth May, now the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands believes it may have been a pilot project of the Harper Conservatives. Worse, however, is that Elections Canada, when faced with evidence of voter suppression, dropped the investigation. That would encourage anybody intent on violating election law to do it again. Not only did it produce the desired result but it proved that complaints would be dropped as fast as they were made.

And again from Martin:
Mr. (Byng) Giraud, the Lunn campaign manager, was categorical: “Nobody has ever asked me to do dirty tricks.” But it’s conceivable they were done without his knowledge. The party had a separate team, he said, that worked on swing ridings. It’s also possible the Conservatives weren’t the source at all.
Hold it a minute. At the time, anybody who was watching the Lunn campaign knew that there was another person involved. Bruce Hallsor. Neither he nor Giraud can claim election process cleanliness. Hallsor organized some pretty thready 3rd party funding groups for Lunn's campaign. These two can, in keeping with the Harperite standard practice, deny, deny, deny all they want and there is no substantive reason to believe them.


Thursday, October 16, 2008

The secret friends of Gary Lunn

Minister of Natural Oil Resources and While We're At It Let's Fire Linda Keen and Nuke the Tarsands Gary Lunn had some interesting third party advertising help in keeping his seat in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

Of the 52 third parties registered with Elections Canada to advertise for special interest groups, Andrew MacLeod at The Hook reports that four of them share the same address and phone number as the law office of former Alliance Party candidate Bruce Hallsor who, along with the four, was working to re-elect Lunn. The law offices receptionist had never heard of them.

Ah but we have. Patricia Trottier, contact person for one of the four, the "Economic Advisory Council of Saanich", is an oil and gas consultant married to Gwyn Morgan, former CEO of EnCana Corp. where he is still a director.

Hallsor, a former member of the B.C. Chief Electoral Officer's Advisory Committee, is named in Election Canada documents in the alleged Con in-an-out scheme, in which moneys were transferred to local candidates, who then transferred the funds back to the federal party to spend on more advertising for the national campaign. Elections Canada maintains that in this way the Cons exceeded their spending limit by more than $1 million in the previous election.

More Saanich-Gulf Islands shenanigans...
Mike Watkins writes about the automated phone calls allegedly impersonating the NDP and urging voters to vote for an NDP candidate who had already dropped out, thus further splitting the vote. The removed NDP candidate received 3,667 votes, many of which would presumably have gone to second place Liberal Briony Penn, who lost to Lunn by 2,621 votes.

Fun fact : Steve's mom also campaigns for Gary Lunn

Cross-posted at Creekside