Party of One (11 page)

Sona bought his membership in the Conservative Party of Canada in 2007. Over the next few years, he earned his spurs on a variety of campaigns, including a provincial leadership race in Ontario. He also gained experience in nomination races and party-executive elections. “Pretty much since the day I joined, it
[was] one campaign after another in some capacity or other,” he told me.

Then came Ottawa. In Stephen Harper’s shop, Sona’s biggest task was to master the unique way this government wanted to “communicate.” Although Sona was never a staffer in either the PMO or party headquarters (HQ), he worked for cabinet minister James Moore. He also helped cabinet ministers and MPs on numerous campaigns to carry out the Harper government’s media strategy. It came down to three words: less is more. “No comment” was often a winning strategy. The cardinal rule was not to turn one bad story into two by advancing it with a comment or reaction. Without the oxygen of fresh information, the theory went, the story would usually die.

Communications in the Harper government was not about passing along facts but often about advancing politically useful narratives while withholding real information. The government tried that tactic during the Afghanistan and F-35 Lightning II fighter jet debates, and would try it again during the robocalls and Senate scandals. On one occasion, Harper even earned a citation for contempt of Parliament for withholding details of proposed bills and cost estimates from Parliament.
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Public apathy was the government’s greatest ally in this dubious policy, and it didn’t take Michael Sona long to figure that out. “In my experience, most voters are apathetic to the goings-on in Ottawa unless it involves one of two things: their wallets or their rights,” said Sona. “Mess with either of those things, and the voters will care and the story will not die.”

The second pillar of the Harper communications strategy was refraining from committing to anything, an approach that allowed the government to mould its message on the fly as new facts emerged. Sona noted that this method was often employed in Question Period, where opposition queries are virtually never answered, and in some cases, not even acknowledged. It left the
opposition shadow-boxing most days, and reduced the government’s front bench to a platitude-with-attitude brigade.

Sona soon discovered that the Harper government was not a place for creative or independent thinkers. It was a party of one— Harper’s way or the highway. “We couldn’t even sneeze without calling HQ first,” Sona told me. “It wasn’t about the content, as I found out many times throughout that 2011 campaign: it was about control. HQ simply wanted everything to be run through them.”

The final training project HQ assigned to interns like Sona in the summer of 2009 was a presentation explaining how they would win the federal riding of St. John’s South–Mount Pearl in Newfoundland and Labrador then held by Liberal Siobhan Coady. Sona remembered his fellow interns being petrified at the prospect of presenting in front of HQ staff, including Jenni Byrne, Patrick Muttart, and Fred DeLorey. After the presentations, the director of political operations and her colleagues critiqued the presentations, often harshly according to Sona.

Observing how wooden some of the other interns looked who spoke from notes, Sona was glad that he had memorized his speech. The goal was now to look as though he were speaking extempore about his plan to win the riding. The talk went smoothly and he felt confident he had passed muster.

Prior to the election, the local Guelph campaign team had a “fairly vibrant website which was constantly being updated,” Sona recalled. But after the writ dropped, HQ micro-managed everything. All posts and photos had to go through Ottawa, and workers in the field could not upload content to the local site directly. Sona heard the same complaints from other ridings, but it didn’t pay to buck head office. People grumbled but crumbled when HQ cracked the whip.

According to Sona, the most remarkable thing he learned during his internship was that the Harper government didn’t care
about the veracity of its pronouncements, just their effect. “It’s not the facts of situations that are important to this government; it is the perception of the facts. That is why this government spends so much time driving a simple narrative as opposed to actually fixing problems,” says Sona. “When they make mistakes at the top, they try to cover themselves by withholding the facts. . . . When you rode into town on that white horse of transparency and openness, that’s a very dangerous electoral position to be in.”

Sona, the “son of a preacher man,” had been well grounded since childhood in religious morality; his father ministered to his flock at the North River Road Gospel Hall in Guelph, where the family moved when Sona was five. His education in political morality was delivered during the 2011 campaign. “We were told that they weren’t telling us to go out and destroy the other guys’ signs,” Sona recounted, “but if we did, the best thing to use was oven cleaner. The guy said acetone would work just as well and we could get plenty of that from the printing company we were using. Then one of the top guys [deceased senator Doug Finley, allegedly] told us how to get around spending limits, which I thought was funny, since they were still tangled up in the in-and-out thing.”

So why, I asked Sona, did he get mixed up in unethical things, assuming it were true he was not “Pierre Poutine”? There were two parts to his answer. The first had to do with a rationalization he and some of his colleagues on the campaign had made: the Conservatives might be bad, but the alternative was so much worse that it justified their tactics. And then there were those dirty tricks the opposition was resorting to in Guelph. “We were getting hit by unidentified robocalls, very, very negative stuff. We wanted to mount a robocall campaign against Frank Valeriote that couldn’t be traced back to us—Frank the Flip-Flopper. But none of us knew how to do it. So I asked John White and he told me to contact Matt McBain [at Conservative headquarters] to find
out. McBain emailed White to see if I was okay. White said I was on the team and a good guy and to go ahead and talk to me. We talked. I later texted McBain but never heard back.” The anonymous robocall campaign Sona was prepared to launch was to have referred to Valeriote’s history of alleged political hypocrisy on a range of issues, including his attendance at both Catholic and evangelical churches in Guelph. Sona explained that this robocall campaign never went forward because no one ever showed him how to make the required untraceable call.

Training their political operatives is a priority of the “modernized” Conservative Party of Canada and one of the secrets to the party’s success. Sona knew of operatives who were sent to the United States in election years to see how the Republican machine operated. The Conservatives also use the resources of the International Democrat Union (IDU), a global organization of centre-right political parties. Founded in 1983 by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and US vice-president George H.W. Bush, the IDU’s membership includes the US Republican Party, Conservative parties in the UK and Canada, and the centre-right Liberals in Australia. Other founding members included Margaret Thatcher, Jacques Chirac, and Helmut Kohl.

Today the IDU has seventy member parties from fifty-six countries. Based in Norway, the organization’s current chair is former Australian prime minister John Howard. An IDU Future Leaders Forum met in Washington in October 2013. The meeting was organized by the Young Republicans and aimed at drawing young representatives from IDU parties and their associated networks around the world. The program included senior speakers from the Republican Party, campaign experts, members of think-tanks, and representatives from the right-wing media. The gathering promised “high-level training and policy discussions.” The IDU executive has met in Canada, including a February 2009
gathering in Toronto. In 2012, the campaign directors from member parties in eleven different countries took part in the meeting of the IDU’s Standing Committee on Elections and Campaigns. The meeting was hosted by the Conservative Party of Canada in Ottawa on March 29 and 30, 2012. The IDU also regularly holds election technology seminars. The elected officers of the IDU for 2011–2014 included Tony Clement as a vice-chair, and Senator Doug Finley was an assistant chair until his death.

Former Harper chief of staff Patrick Muttart adopted his voter identification techniques from John Howard. Muttart, who was brought back from the United States to work for Harper as a key strategist in the 2011 campaign, was described by Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute as “the world’s leading expert on working-class voters in English-speaking countries.”
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Former NDP leadership candidate Brian Topp described work like Muttart’s as trying “to manipulate” blue-collar voters into “voting against their own interests.”

The idea of organized voter suppression to win an election is new in Canada, but the Republicans have used it effectively in the United States for several years. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) was founded in 2003 by billionaires Charles and David Koch. AFP president Tim Phillips said the group was focused on voter turnout—and, some would say, on suppressing it.
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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), funded in part by the Koch brothers, has put up the money for a drive to require photo ID to vote in the United States. Under the guise of preventing voter fraud, which is largely non-existent, the campaign actually disenfranchises the poor, students who move away to school, young voters, African Americans, and seniors who may not have a driver’s licence. That list is primarily made up of people likely not to vote Republican. ALEC was founded by Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell.
(It was Weyrich who actually coined the term “moral majority.”) Weyrich was also a co-founder of the Council for National Policy (CNP), headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, the secretive, ultraconservative organization Stephen Harper spoke to in Montreal in 1997 about the shortcomings of Canadian governance. Weyrich famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of the country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Not everyone thinks training people how to manipulate elections is an improvement over winning them the old fashioned way—by information, persuasion, and debate. On September 5, 2012, Preston Manning gave an interview to the CBC in which he condemned the idea of using robocalls to harass voters or divert them to the wrong polls. Manning said that workers needed better ethical training and that it was a mistake to link political dirty tricks to a single party. He believed that part of the problem is that all parties now send young Canadians to political training schools in the United States, where politics is practised with far fewer scruples. The founder of the Reform Party declared that Canadian politics had to be insulated from US-style tactics. Part of the answer was stricter oversight by campaign managers and Elections Canada, but Manning proposed a more fundamental solution: “I actually think the more effective thing is preventing it in the first place and that involves ethical training.”

The robocalls scandal dominated federal politics in 2012, and its ripple effect spread from the House of Commons and the daily Question Period straight across the country. Reports were heard of harassing and misleading calls to Liberal and NDP supporters in several ridings, including Eglinton-Lawrence in Toronto, a seat won for the Conservatives by Joe Oliver, now finance minister.
Oliver beat incumbent Liberal Joe Volpe by more than four thousand votes. As reported by Postmedia, Jewish voters were called repeatedly on the Sabbath. Early-morning and late-night calls were also made, supposedly by Volpe’s campaign. This was a tactic remarkably similar to the dead-of-night calls that were planned but not carried out in Guelph with the second CIMS list. There were also allegations of a late influx into polling stations of unregistered voters without addresses, or who provided fake addresses.

In Thunder Bay, Ontario, a worker at the Conservative Party’s main call company swore in an affidavit
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she had been told to direct voters to the wrong polling stations in the final days of the campaign. Annette Desgagné said she and her co-workers had been instructed to identify themselves as calling from the “Voter Outreach Centre.” Desgagné swore that at least one of her colleagues had identified himself as calling from Elections Canada when misdirecting voters: “I became very concerned that I was participating in something that involved giving voters wrong information. My internal radar went off. I wrote down what I could recall from the script I was asked to read about Change of Address calls and I arranged for the information to go to the RCMP.” Desgagné also reported her concerns to Elections Canada.

Predictably, both Responsive Marketing Group (RMG) and the Conservative Party rejected Desgagné’s sworn affidavit as unreliable. And in his robocall report, elections commissioner Yves Côté said he had found no evidence to corroborate reports that callers posed as Elections Canada employees. However, some electors were told to vote at a specific poll, and the poll location indicated was incorrect.
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According to Elections Canada records, RMG worked on ninety-seven Conservative campaigns across the country, as well as the national campaign, billing them $1.4 million. The company had worked with CIMS as it was developed in 2003, and it was “the best in the business” according to Senator
Doug Finley. The Conservatives won Nipissing-Timiskaming, one of the ridings called by RMG, by eighteen votes.

In its investigation of robocalls outside of Guelph, Elections Canada requested phone records from Shaw, Vidéotron, and Rogers. Elections Canada investigator John Dickson, who was conducting the national investigation, received records of incoming and outgoing calls of forty-five Rogers customers complaining of calls about poll location changes in the week before the 2011 election. NDP MP Pat Martin claimed that thirty-four federal ridings received fraudulent calls telling people that their voting station had changed. Prime Minister Harper responded by challenging the Opposition to “prove” that the Conservatives had made the calls.