The Laurier-Sainte-Marie mystery solved?

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, November 24, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Cheques are produced and memories are refreshed in connection with donations to the Conservative party in Laurier-Sainte-Marie.

Italo Barone, who owns a banquet hall in Montreal’s Little Italy, earlier had stated that he had never donated to the Conservatives, and had emailed the financial agent for the riding association in Laurier-Sainte-Marie asking for a copy of his cheque from 2009. On Friday, after the story appeared in print, he learned that he was mistaken. “This morning I was informed that we did make cheques to the Conservatives,” he said. “I have a friend who was volunteer fundraiser for them, and he asked me for a favour and I said yes.”

… Montreal construction entrepreneur Rocco Carbone confirmed Friday night he had in fact made the donation.  

… Many of the donors are registered as having donated $666.66 on the Elections Canada web site but the cheques produced are in the amount of $1,000. A party spokesman said that the party is required to deduct the cost of fundraising events from donations, which could explain the discrepancy between the amounts.

NDP asks Elections Canada to look at alleged donor fraud involving Tories

By The Canadian Press - Friday, November 23, 2012 at 3:03 PM - 0 Comments

OTTAWA – The NDP is asking Elections Canada to investigate alleged fraud involving donations to the Conservatives in Montreal.

The allegations relate to a report by Postmedia News citing several Montrealers who say they did not donate to the Conservatives even though party financial filings say they did.

Despite not having a hope of winning the riding, the Tories collected $288,823 in donations in Laurier Ste-Marie in 2009.

The Conservatives shrug off questions about the alleged phoney donors, saying Elections Canada reviews all their paperwork.

It is illegal to make a political donation on behalf of someone else and circumvent the contribution limits under the Elections Act.

Neither Elections Canada nor the RCMP would confirm or deny they are investigating.

What’s going on in Laurier-Sainte-Marie?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 23, 2012 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

Postmedia raises questions about Conservative fundraising efforts in the Quebec riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie.

The unexplained donations – Postmedia News uncovered 11 – fall mostly into three groups: a group of donations of $666.66, totalling $99,999; a group of donations of $733.33, totalling $32,999.85; and a group of donations of $333.33, totalling $14,333.19. Postmedia tried to contact all the donors on the riding’s donor list from 2007 to 2009, almost 550 people. Many failed to return calls; others could not be located. Some said they couldn’t recall making donations, and others declined to discuss the issue. But 11 said they definitely did not make donations, and would like to know how their names ended up on the list.

Rocco Carbone, who owns an asbestos removal business, was surprised to hear he was listed as a donor to the Tory riding association. “I gave money to the party?” he said. “I never gave no money to no party.” Italio Barone, who owns a banquet hall in Montreal’s Little Italy, said he is not a Conservative and doesn’t know where Laurier-Sainte-Marie is. “I have nothing to do with the Conservatives,” he said. “I want to find out who the guy was doing the fundraising because I have a few words to say to him.”

Staff for Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue unaware of planned update on campaign spending

By The Canadian Press - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 10:47 AM - 0 Comments

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – If embattled federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue planned to update constituents Tuesday about his campaign overspending, it’s news to his Labrador staff.

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Agatha Ryland, an assistant in Penashue’s constituency office in L’Anse au Loup, N.L.

Reached by phone, Ryland said Penashue is travelling the remote Labrador coast handing out several Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medals for community service and achievement.

Penashue’s spokesman Cory Hann could not be reached by email or cellphone, and there was no answer at the minister’s Ottawa office.

The Conservative MP for Labrador has blamed rookie mistakes for spending thousands of dollars over his legal limit during the 2011 election. He has been attacked for weeks in the House of Commons, accused of accepting free flights around his large riding along with a questionable donation from executives of a St. John’s construction company.

Last week in Ottawa, Penashue said he would update his constituents on Tuesday before offering any further explanation.

Hann has provided no details of that promised update, but said the minister is not planning to speak with reporters Tuesday.

Penashue’s surprise victory by just 79 votes over Liberal incumbent Todd Russell was the only Conservative win in the province.

Penashue has said he has no plans to step down despite calls from the opposition for a byelection and accusations that he “bought” the election.

The minister has also been under siege for travel expenses and the extent to which he has visited other parts of Canada in his cabinet role.

Public records show 79 per cent of Penashue’s ministerial travel has been in his home province of Newfoundland and Labrador, even though he’s the intergovernmental affairs minister responsible for managing federal relations with all provinces and territories.

Tories deny splits in their ranks—over Nexen and abortion

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 24, 2012 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

Despite the rising prevalence of rogue backbenchers, the federal Conservatives deny that there are growing divisions in the Tory caucus, the Hill Times reports.

Harper has been known for his singular leadership, but his rigid control of the government’s message is beginning to slip as members of his own party are speaking out against certain controversial social and economic decisions.

Some of Harper’s Alberta MPs, including Calgary veteran Rob Anders, have publicly expressed their opposition to the Chinese bid to take-over oil sands developer Nexen, which Harper’s cabinet is reviewing. Party officials claim that the Conservatives are as united as ever and still debating the “net economic benefit” of the takeover.

The resurfacing of the abortion discussion is a foggier issue. While Harper has said he would not support a motion to debate the beginning of life, Ontario MP Stephen Woodworth continues to submit the matter for debate in the House.

Despite this splintering of opinion on prevalent social and economic matters, the official word from the Conservatives is that the party is united, and focused on the economy.

Going negative

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 3, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

The Globe editorial board, while allowing that that Conservatives take “some liberties by accusing Mr. Mulcair of wanting a carbon tax,” deems the latest Conservative attack ad “mostly fair.” Indeed, the editors seem to fret that viewers won’t pay it enough attention.

Earlier this year, Sadie Dingfelder reviewed the latest research on political advertising in April and NPR weighed the evidence that attack ads work.

Most people, of course, can recall nasty ad campaigns that shaped an election’s outcome. Campaigns such as the Willie Horton ad in 1988, the swift boat ads in 2004 or the intense negativity in the early GOP primaries this year all suggest that negative ads are powerful.

But empirical studies, which seek to measure the effectiveness of ads across campaigns, suggest that these campaigns may be most effective when voters are unfamiliar with a candidate — which won’t happen this fall. When voters know a candidate fairly well, the ads don’t usually do much.

Of course, however effective, negative advertising will always be subject to criticism.

Great moments in Conservative history

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 3:46 PM - 0 Comments

The Conservative party has redesigned its website and added a section on the history of “Canada’s Founding Party.” In addition to claiming Confederation (achieved when the province of  Canada was governed by the Great Coalition) and women’s suffrage as “conservative achievements,” the official party story generally covers more recent events, such as the following.

On January 23rd, 2006, Canadians voted for change.  Two weeks later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet were sworn in to lead the new Government of Canada.  When the global economic recession threatened, the Harper Government took timely and prudent action to ensure Canada remained on track for long-term stability.  And when faced with another general election in October 2008, Canadians trusted a Conservative Government to continue leading Canada on a path for economic success.

The sequencing of these last two sentences is interesting because it was actually during the September and October 2008 campaign that Mr. Harper said it was his belief that “if we were going to have some sort of big crash or recession, we probably would have had it by now” and that “the only way there is going to be a recession” is if the Liberal party were elected to form government.

A second package

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 at 10:36 PM - 0 Comments

Ottawa police have apparently discovered a second suspicious package at the Canada Post sorting facility in Ottawa. The Ottawa Citizen’s Meghan Hurley is reporting that package contained a hand.

“Who’s calling?” “The Conservatives.”

By Jason Lietaer - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 3:23 PM - 0 Comments

Last spring, just days before the federal election, I filed into the Conservative party war room and took my seat. Everyone who’s had this experience knows the drill: an empty desk, a forlorn looking computer, some sort of phone and five weeks of exhilaration and hell staring you in the face.

Now, we’ve had some highly publicized disagreements with Elections Canada in the past, so the campaign leadership made it clear to everyone before they stepped into the building that accountability standards were to be incredibly high. We added new language to our volunteer and employee agreements, and even had an in-house independent accountability officer available to us at all times.

Have we been accused of being aggressive and rough-and-tumble in the past? Of course. Did we go after Liberal leaders with everything we had? You bet. But did the campaign organize a widespread voter suppression exercise in the 2011 campaign? No way. Continue…

Robocall fallout haunts Tories

By Richard Warnica - Friday, February 24, 2012 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

Allegations of electoral hijinks and possible fraud dogged Conservatives Thursday even as the party tried to distance itself from an explosive report on the party’s use of robocalls in the last election.

Sun Media, citing party sources, says a Conservative staffer is being investigated in the case, which saw calls claiming to originate from Elections Canada go out to voters in several swing ridings.

Speaking in Iqaliut, Prime Minister Stephen Harper denied his party had any knowledge of the tactics. But writing in the Globe, John Ibbitson wondered if the Conservatives’ permanent warfare approach was at least indirectly to blame:

(T)hey may have instilled such an intensely partisan anything-you-can-get-away-with mentality among their campaign workers that one or more of them concluded it would be okay to cross the line of legality.

Political parties can’t be held responsible for the actions of rogue supporters. But they can he held accountable for creating environments that produce those rogues.

This is a mirror into which Stephen Harper and everyone who works for him should be looking.

Deceptive election day robocalls tied to Tory-linked firm

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Robocalls that aimed to sow chaos in the swing riding of Guelph in last spring’s federal election have been traced back to an Edmonton firm with ties to the Conservative Party, according to a joint Postmedia/Ottawa Citizen investigation. (Really Edmonton? ‘Headquarters of the oil sands’ wasn’t enough for you? You had to add ‘robocall hub’ to your industries-outsiders-will-slag-you-for list?)

Elections Canada was blanketed with complaints from 18 ridings about the calls after election day. From the story:

In Guelph, a riding the Conservatives hoped to take from the Liberals, voters received recorded calls pretending to be from Elections Canada, telling them their polling stations had been moved. The calls led to a chaotic scene at one polling station, and likely led some voters to give up on voting.

Postmedia News and the Ottawa Citizen have found that Elections Canada traced the calls to Racknine Inc., a small Edmonton call centre that worked for the party’s national campaign and those of at least nine Conservative candidates, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s own campaign in Calgary Southwest. There is no evidence that Harper’s campaign or any of the other candidates were involved in the calls.

Racknine says it was unaware its servers were being used for the fake calls.

The RCMP are helping with the Elections Canada investigation, while the Conservatives say they are conducting their own internal probe. “Oh, you’re doing your own investigation, that’s cool then, don’t worry about it,” is what I’m sure opposition critics will say to the Tories when the matter is raised in the House.

50 yards from Parliament Hill

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, February 4, 2012 at 6:53 AM - 0 Comments

I almost never disagree with Chris Selley. Indeed, I am almost willing to make it a rule not to disagree with Chris Selley. But his analysis yesterday of Brad Trost’s groping for more backbencher power in Parliament is uncharacteristically superficial. Selley celebrates Trost’s public ruminating over his inability to spurn the party whip on polarizing issues; wouldn’t it be nice, he asks, if we had a Conservative Party more like the eclectic, dissent-tolerating one in old Westminster? Perhaps it would be. But there is an awkward plain fact staring us in the face. Continue…

‘Just wrong on every level’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 3 Comments

Bruce Anderson rips the Conservative campaign against Irwin Cotler and Peter Van Loan’s attempt to justify it.

This truly isn’t complicated. If our children tell lies about schoolmates, we punish them not shrug it off. When it happens on the Internet, we call it cyber bullying and bemoan how young people seem to have grown up without decent values. Conservative Christian groups presumably recognize this as something hard to square with the “Golden Rule” … It’s insulting, it’s beneath this government, and I’m sure it is an embarrassment to many good people in the Conservative Party.

It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be plausible

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 1:32 PM - 33 Comments

A Conservative official confirms that the party has been calling Irwin Cotler’s constituents and suggesting he might quit.

A Conservative official confirmed to The Globe and Mail that the party is trying to identify the vote in Mr. Cotler’s riding, which it does on a continuing basis across the country. In this case, a company called Campaign Research that has been linked to Ontario and federal Conservatives is behind the calls … He said the “script” does not mention a by-election. However, if people ask why the party is phoning, callers say “there are rumours that Irwin Cotler may resign causing a by-election,” the Conservative official said. “It’s an honest answer to the question. There have been rumours for a long time that Cotler is going to step down,” he said.

In and out and settled?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 1:17 PM - 70 Comments

(This post last updated at 8:24pm.)

Both the Ottawa Citizen and CTV are reporting word of a settlement in the in-and-out case, possibly in relation to the charges against four Conservative party officials. Full history of the in-and-out controversy here.

Update 1:18pm. Canadian Press has details.

The party is set to agree to what a caucus source called “administrative imperfection” for the way it handled advertising spending during the 2006 federal election. As a result, sources say charges against four senior Conservative officials – including two senators – for breaking the Elections Act are being dropped.

Update 1:24pm. Glen McGregor’s FAQ is probably the easiest way to get up to speed. Last March, the House passed a motion deeming the financing scheme to be “an act of electoral fraud.” Three years ago, chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand explained his view in detail before a parliamentary committee.

Update 2:46pm. The Globe confirms.

In return, the Conservative Party of Canada and its fundraising arm are pleading guilty to lesser charges that characterize what took place as a mere error instead of intentional misconduct. At the same time, the charges against four Conservative officials – two sitting senators – are being dropped.

CTV reports the party has been fined $50,000. The Supreme Court will still apparently hear the separate dispute between the Conservative party and Elections Canada.

Update 3:24pm. A statement from Elections Canada. Continue…

Britain to the EU: I told you so

By Leah Mclaren - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 12 Comments

Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

In his speech to a joint session of Parliament in Ottawa last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron lavished praise on our economic system. After commending Canada for getting “every major decision right” in the past few years of global market turmoil, he lauded the strength of both the Canadian banking system and our economic leaders, who, he said, “got to grips with its deficit” and were “running surpluses and paying down debt before the recession, fixing the roof while the sun was shining.”

Cameron’s admiration for Canada’s relatively peachy fiscal position stands in stark contrast to his dim view of his eurozone neighbours.

The British PM used his northern stopover to trumpet the message both he and his finance minister, George Osborne, have taken up even more loudly than usual as of late: Europe, and the U.S., must get their fiscal houses in order, or face disastrous consequences. “This is not a traditional, cyclical recession, it’s a debt crisis,” Cameron said of the world’s faltering economies. “When the fundamental problem is the level of debt and the fear of those levels, then the usual economic prescriptions cannot be applied.” It’s a statement that begs the obvious question: what now?

Continue…

Stephen Harper’s majority rules

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 22 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP

In the early morning hours of May 3, with the ballots almost all counted, he basked in a Conservative majority. The Liberal Party of Canada, his nemesis, was in shambles. The Bloc Québécois was decimated. If the world seemed then to have tilted in Stephen Harper’s direction, his political situation has become only more advantageous since.

The NDP, though now the official Opposition, has lost its uniquely popular leader, removing Harper’s primary challenger from the House of Commons. What’s more, with Progressive Conservatives mounting serious challenges in Ontario and Manitoba, Harper might awake one day next month to find that every single province west of Quebec is led by a right-of-centre government—a resounding endorsement of the Prime Minister’s twin assertions that “Conservative values are Canadian values” and that “the Conservative party is Canada’s party.”

But if it is to be Stephen Harper’s world, what will Stephen Harper do with it? Perhaps only as much as he said he would do. “The challenge will be getting the balance right and not overreaching,” says Jim Armour, who once served as Harper’s director of communications. “If the Prime Minister goes too big or tries to go too fast, then he risks unifying the opposition and attracting the media’s attention. If, on the other hand, he continues with the ‘stick-to-the script,’ ‘no-surprises’ approach to governing that he’s taken for the past five years, then he’ll be fine. As with all things—even once-in-a-lifetime political opportunities—the key is moderation.”

Continue…

Tories stifle widow through IP laws, twirl moustaches, cackle

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 5:19 PM - 29 Comments

Robert Keyserlingk was a lifelong Tory who died horribly in 2009 from mesothelioma, a cancer typically caused by asbestos exposure. Keyserlingk had regular contact with asbestos in his youth while working summer jobs on Canadian naval ships.

Before his death, he crusaded against Canada’s government-supported asbestos industry, and his wife Michaela has carried on the cause since. Every month, she pays $300 to run this banner ad on websites, which links to her own anti-asbestos website:

The Conservative Party is now threatening to sue her for trademark infringement. Continue…

Towards lasting power

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 4:33 PM - 53 Comments

The Prime Minister talks to our editor-in-chief.

What I want to do, of course, is really entrench, over time, a Conservative-majority coalition in the country. I probably—the more I’ve thought about it—I should probably stay away from the natural governing party terminology, because I think as soon as a party believes it’s the natural governing party it’s in a great deal of trouble. Since coming to office, we’ve grown steadily. We’ve grown from our base out. We haven’t tried to re-engineer the Conservative movement, we’ve built on it by bringing more people into it. We still have more work to do to be as representative of people as we’d like to be, but all the elements are there in terms of the coalition. I think, obviously, it has to be backed up with an agenda, and the agenda has to be successfully implemented, and the country has to buy into it and be happy with the results. So that’s the big thing we have to do, but I think in the end—given the outcomes of the election—we’re greatly helped not just by our own result but by the relative incoherence of the opposition as an alternative for government.

In conversation: Stephen Harper

By Kenneth Whyte - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Blair Gable

Q: Let’s start with election night. Was it fun?

A: It’s always fun when you win.

Q: Did you take a moment to enjoy it?

A: Yeah. Look, as I think you know, we were pretty confident we were going to win, frankly, from the outset—the question was the margin—and we were feeling pretty good in the days leading up to it. I suppose, yeah, it was exciting that night. But you’re also coming off the end of a long, gruelling campaign, so there’s also a sense of relief and a sense of exhaustion all wrapped up together.

Q: If you’re not going to stop and enjoy that one, what are you going to stop for?

A: I did enjoy it. We have to enjoy things. These guys—my staff—probably enjoyed it more than I did. I’m always thinking. The next task is almost immediately on my mind.

Q: I saw you give an interview after the election in which you alluded to the next task: you want to establish the Conservatives as the natural governing party of Canada. What does that entail? Continue…

Socialist or merely social

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 2:22 PM - 10 Comments

Joanna Smith previews this weekend’s existential crisis.

New Democrats are preparing to cast off the shackles of the socialist label by eliminating the word from the federal party constitution at a policy convention this weekend. “The New Democratic Party is dedicated to the application of social democratic principles to government,” reads part of a proposed new preamble to the party constitution, which will be voted on at the 50th anniversary convention in downtown Vancouver. “These principles include an unwavering commitment to economic and social equality, individual freedom and responsibility, and democratic rights of citizens to shape the future of their communities.”

That language is much different from what exists in the current version of the constitution, where the principles of “democratic socialism” are described as being against making profits and for social ownership.

In full, the new preamble would read as follows. Continue…

Kill the subsidy, but kill them all

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, June 3, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 247 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

With the impending heat death of the Liberal party—er, rather, with the approaching end of the $2-per-vote party subsidy—the commentariat is consumed with what this will mean for the various political parties, and what Stephen Harper’s motives might be for introducing it.

Well, that last bit’s obvious, isn’t it? He wants to destroy the Liberal party. Everybody knows that. But wait: maybe by obliging the opposition parties to rely more heavily on their own supporters for funds, rather than the taxpayer, he will only create a more motivated cadre of foes, while his own troops grow fat and complacent in office. Or maybe by starving the opposition of funds, he will force them to realize there is only room for one left-wing party, hastening the very unite-the-left movement that could one day be his undoing. But how could such a master strategist not see that? Maybe he wants a united left, the better to…

People. Isn’t it possible, just possible, that he’s doing this because…it’s the right thing to do?

Continue…

From the magazine

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 15 Comments

From the pages of last week’s issue, a short profile of Jenni Byrne, the Conservative campaign director.

Jenni Byrne, one of Ottawa’s highest-ranking tacticians, does not speak to reporters. But 14 years ago, she was both less powerful and less reticent. And so when an Ottawa Citizen reporter sought out young people to comment on the growing number of conservatives under the age of 30 in Canada, Byrne was willing to explain herself. Described as “a believer in debt reduction and tax cuts” who joined the Reform party at 16, she was then the 21-year-old president of the campus Reform club at the University of Ottawa. “It’s great for them to say don’t cut here or there, but they won’t be the ones affected by [the debt],” she said then of her parents. “They’re in their late 40s and they will probably still benefit from government programs. But Canada looks like a bleak place for me by the time I’m their age.”

Jenni Byrne: the (other) woman behind Harper

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 9:36 AM - 14 Comments

Jill Propp/PMO

Jenni Byrne, one of Ottawa’s highest-ranking tacticians, does not speak to reporters. But 14 years ago, she was both less powerful and less reticent. And so when an Ottawa Citizen reporter sought out young people to comment on the growing number of conservatives under the age of 30 in Canada, Byrne was willing to explain herself. Described as “a believer in debt reduction and tax cuts” who joined the Reform party at 16, she was then the 21-year-old president of the campus Reform club at the University of Ottawa. “It’s great for them to say don’t cut here or there, but they won’t be the ones affected by [the debt],” she said then of her parents. “They’re in their late 40s and they will probably still benefit from government programs. But Canada looks like a bleak place for me by the time I’m their age.”

That sentiment sounds similar to the doom Stephen Harper presently foretells if he is defeated by one or all of his political opponents. A doom that Byrne, as director of the Conservative campaign, is now charged with ensuring never comes to pass.

“I think she’s long since established herself as Harper’s single best political organizer,” says Ian Brodie, Harper’s former chief of staff. That is no small compliment given the vaunted nature of both Harper as a political operator and the Conservative party as a partisan machine. And it is part of a reputation for both political skill and strident partisanship that precedes the low-profile Byrne.

Continue…