Meanwhile, still no convictions in the robocalls scandal

By John Klein (aka Saskboy)

Chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand has come out to say finally that the Conservatives are not cooperating with the investigation into the robocall election fraud of 2011. I do not find this surprising, and if you’ve been reading my blog the past year, you’d know that’s because the evidence points to the Conservative Party as being involved in the fraud, as Elections Canada suspected even prior to the May 2, 2011 vote.

The most damning evidence implicating the Conservatives is that their secure, access controlled database CIMS was most likely the system used to create the illegal robocall phone lists.

Some of the lackluster pro media are even a tiny bit pissed-off at the Conservatives. It’s hard to keep the scandals straight.

Michael Den Tandt, Postmedia: “First of course is robocalls, a pattern of gerrymandering [sic] first unearthed by my Postmedia colleagues Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher in February of last year. Last Thursday Federal Court judge Richard Mosley ruled that in the May 2, 2011 election, electoral fraud occurred in ridings nationwide.”

Read more: http://www.canada.com/sports/Conservative+scandals+multiplying/8445816/story.html (Yes, bizarrely, the story was carried in canada.com’s Sports section.)

Den Tandt didn’t manage to keep the robocall scandals straight, as he seems to have confused the RackNine-related gerrymandering robocalls of this past winter with the May 2, 2011 (and previous) misdirection and harassing robocalls that superstar journalists Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor wrote extensively about after uncovering details from court documents filed by Elections Canada’s glacial investigation.

Blogger Brandon Laraby had more questions for Elections Canada and the media to uncover answers to:

Yes, you read that right – the tightly controlled CIMS logs have blank spaces in their records.

I think that gets to go down firmly in the “WTF” category.

But, more importantly, it begs the question: “Who had the clearance necessary to delete information from secure CIMS logs?”

Certainly not some low-level grunt, that’s for sure.

Yet the only Conservative charged thus far is the low-level grunt from Guelph, Michael Sona, who didn’t have access to CIMS phone lists for ridings outside of Guelph, or database access to delete logs. The Federal Court ruled that election fraud calls (not “gerrymandering” calls as Den Tandt has them) were made in ridings outside of Guelph. Logically, Sona could not have been the person to have ordered these calls, not without authorization from CPC campaign HQ.

Mayrand in Maclean’s: “Basically, in some cases appointments are cancelled at the last minute. People who have agreed suddenly decide they don’t want to meet with the investigator. That adds time, delays, and makes the investigation a little bit more complex than it needed be.”

[…]

Mayrand agreed with [MP Tom] Lukiwski that the delays in getting to the bottom of the fraudulent robocalls is problematic, but said the lack of co-operation is where it starts.

“Again if we go back to this issue of justice delayed, just[ice] denied, well, that’s where it starts, among other things.”

Mayrand is saying that the Conservatives’ delaying tactics are denying Canadians their justice. Do you want leaders who deny you justice? What do the Conservatives have to hide? You already know. Just watch the Conservative Prime Minister dodge straight, simple “yes” or “no” questions in Question Period.

I told everyone over a year ago that justice was being delayed. It’s worse today, of course, with still no convictions for the crime.

March 13, 2012, Poutine Delayed is Justice Denied:

I don’t use the accusation of a conspiracy lightly. There is ample evidence to demonstrate more than one person is involved, and Poutine had to have exploited the resources of a national political party, and/or a phone calling/polling centre. The waiting game is rigged in the favour of those who carried this out, and they already have had since last May to cover their tracks.

A year later, a Federal Court Judge agreed with my assessment:

[184] … there was an orchestrated effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election campaign by a person with access to the CIMS database.

[245] … I am satisfied … that the most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database maintained and controlled by the CPC, accessed for that purpose by a person or persons currently unknown to this Court. … the evidence points to elaborate efforts to conceal the identity of those accessing the database and arranging for the calls to be made.

[262] Despite the obvious public interest in getting to the bottom of the allegations, the CPC made little effort to assist with the investigation at the outset despite early requests.

That’s some damn bitter-sweet vindication for my efforts, because we have no byelections or prosecuted bad-guys yet from any of it.