Party of One (10 page)

Beginning with Byrne’s damage control on the CBC, the air was suddenly full of suggestions about robocalls from a normally ultra-secretive, media-averse party. Reaching out to select reporters, the Conservatives quietly put out the story that a “rogue operator” was behind the electoral fraud being investigated by Elections Canada and that the party knew who that person was. Brian Lilley at Sun News Network named Michael Sona as the key suspect on February 23, 2012—a remarkable turn of events since the allegation was criminal and it was made without interviewing the subject of the story.

With the government under pressure, senior Conservatives began piling on the outed party worker. Peter MacKay became the first Harper cabinet minister to publicly suggest that Sona was responsible for the false calls. (Now justice minister, MacKay’s words may come back to haunt him. Michael Sona had not been charged with anything, let alone convicted, when MacKay prejudged the matter.) In Question Period on Monday, March 5, 2012, the Conservatives rolled out their diversion-and-deflection strategy, repeatedly demanding that the Liberals release their automated call records. Conservative campaign chair Guy Giorno told CTV, “I wish Godspeed to Elections Canada and the RCMP investigators.” Where Giorno’s wishes fit on the sincerity scale was hard to know. It appeared that the Tories had offered up their rogue operator, to the surprise of everyone, including Elections
Canada investigator Al Mathews. Sona had not been interviewed by Elections Canada, and had not even appeared to be a person of interest to investigators before his name suddenly appeared in the press.
⁹

But the most surprised person was the one who had been named as the villain of the piece in the Guelph robocall caper, Michael Sona. He believed that he had been thrown under the bus by someone very senior in the Conservative Party. One thing that should not have come as a surprise to him was the news agency that broke the story. The vice-president of Sun News Network was Kory Teneycke, Stephen Harper’s former director of communications, and an associate of Jenni Byrne. Sona tried calling people at party headquarters. No one would take his calls. Finally, lawyer Arthur Hamilton contacted him, bluntly asking Sona, “Did you do it? Do you know who did?”

Sona told me that although he was still reeling from the shock of being described as the bad apple “without even receiving a phone call from the reporter,” his answer to Hamilton was unequivocal. “I told him flat out that I was not responsible or involved in what I’d been accused of and also said that I didn’t know who had done it. He asked me several questions about my thoughts on other members of the campaign team, as well as several voter contact firms the party uses, but I wasn’t able to tell him one way or the other if they were guilty because I frankly don’t know.” For whatever reason, and despite his denials, Michael Sona received very different treatment from Conservative headquarters than his co-worker in the Guelph election, Andrew Prescott. When Prescott had called HQ to say Elections Canada investigators wanted to talk to him, Jenni Byrne had sent him an email saying, “Please hold off doing anything until I consult with a lawyer.”

Byrne had also copied Ken Morgan, Marty Burke’s campaign manager, and Chris Rougier, the director of voter contact for the
Conservatives at party headquarters. Rougier was responsible for CIMS, the party’s voter tracking database that investigators believed was the source of phone numbers used in the fake robocalls. As the party’s central voter contact manager, Rougier was the key coordinator of mail and phone services during the 2011 campaign. He was responsible to the director of political operations, Jenni Byrne, and also liaised with the PMO and various ministers and staff. According to his résumé, Rougier “developed and oversaw mission critical projects from genesis to completion.” Where Prescott got assistance from the Conservative Party’s director of political operations and party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, Michael Sona got the cold shoulder. Maher and McGregor reported that Byrne also ordered the young man’s employer, Conservative MP Eve Adams, to get rid of him. Reluctantly, the member from Mississauga–Brampton South complied. Michael Sona “resigned.”

The fingering of Michael Sona by Sun News triggered a flurry of activity in the investigation into the fraudulent robocalls in Guelph. According to a sworn statement released by investigator Mathews on May 4, 2012, Chris Rougier was twice interviewed by Elections Canada in the presence of Arthur Hamilton. Rougier told investigators that Andrew Prescott, among several others, had access to elector data for Guelph from CIMS. The investigators had asked Hamilton to obtain CIMS records for them on March 5, 2012, and Rougier had subsequently reviewed them. They indicated that on April 30, 2011, Andrew Prescott had apparently downloaded three “Daemon Dialer” reports for Guelph—lists of phone numbers with voters identified as supporters and non-supporters. It was two days before the fake calls went out. Mathews later learned that the third Daemon Dialer download was “cancelled by Prescott and so was never ‘exported.’” Rougier provided the “targeting information,” which described the criteria “Prescott” used to request the material from CIMS.
(This information would later change in a very important way. On April 3, 2014, Maher and McGregor published an article with information based on what Andrew Prescott had told investigators in March 2014: that Guelph campaign manager Ken Morgan had asked him to log on to a robocall account on his computer, a computer he later destroyed.)

The CIMS data was compared to listings of the outgoing robocalls provided by RackNine under a court order. The lists matched. Investigators were now certain that the list used to make the fraudulent robocalls came from the data bank of the Conservative Party of Canada. Mathews also asked Rougier for the IP addresses that five Marty Burke volunteers had used to access CIMS between April 23 and May 2, 2011. Access is limited by the party, and each person is given a unique password. Rougier told Mathews that thirty-two of the forty-one “access events” were through the Burke campaign IP address. Investigators found puzzling blanks
¹⁰
between one person’s logon and logoff of CIMS at headquarters on the day the Guelph data was accessed. On May 1, 2011, the day before the vote, a call was made from the Conservative Party war room in Ottawa to RackNine. The number was listed as belonging to Chris Rougier.
¹¹

On February 28, 2012, and again on April 19, 2012, Elections Canada investigators Ron Lamothe and Al Mathews met with another important player in the puzzle of robocalls, Matthew McBain—and once again the ubiquitous Arthur Hamilton. Lamothe, a seasoned veteran, was the assistant chief investigator in the office of the Commissioner of Elections Canada. In 2008, the former Ottawa police officer’s affidavit had laid out the elaborate scheme to move Conservative Party money from national coffers into and then out of the accounts of local Conservative campaigns to skirt national spending limits for the 2006 election. It was brilliant and brave police work. Conservative Party
of Canada headquarters was raided as part of the investigation’s effort to acquire evidence in the in-and-out scandal.

One of the big unanswered questions of the robocall investigation was why investigators allowed the party to provide the information from CIMS, rather than seizing the computers with a warrant and investigating the downloads themselves. Lamothe was interested in talking to Matthew McBain, a party worker who was in the central war room during the 2011 election. Sona had left voice messages for him during the campaign, but McBain didn’t know him. So instead of answering, he sent an email to John White, whom he did know, to see if he should talk to his unknown caller. White was one of five workers on the Guelph campaign who had access to the CIMS list.
¹²
When Andrew Prescott lost his computer job at a Guelph hospital, John White had helped find the young man a job in Calgary.
¹³
He vouched for Sona in a return email, explaining to McBain that his colleague on the Burke campaign needed some advice: “His name is Mike Sona . . . and he’s good. He has [
sic
] some advice that you may be well qualified to give.” (Later, at Sona’s trial, White would testify he meant to say that McBain had advice for Sona.)

Through Arthur Hamilton, a copy of the email exchanges of April 26 and 27 between the two Conservative workers was given to investigators. According to McBain, Sona wanted to know how to make untraceable phone calls. Mathews initially recorded in his account of this interview that McBain claimed that Sona asked about “a campaign of disinformation such as making misleading poll moving calls.” But that astonishing assertion was amended in a subsequent affidavit from Mathews dated May 25, 2012. Now McBain “did not recall Sona as relating the call to ‘misinformation’ or a misleading poll moving call. . . . Sona spoke to McBain about wanting to set up an auto-dial call so that the payment for the calls would not track back to the campaign.” After featuring
the incorrect information prominently in a brief ITO, Mathews buried the correction deep in a lengthy affidavit and printed it as a tiny footnote.
¹⁴
McBain claimed that he warned Sona off any misconduct as the party would not stand for it—a story Sona disputed. According to him, McBain said he would look into it but never called back.

Before talking to the person who had put Michael Sona and Matt McBain together, Mathews called Chris Crawford for an interview. Crawford was a junior staffer who worked as a voter contact person on the Guelph campaign, entering data in CIMS. He was responsible for organizing the door-to-door campaign for Burke. Each morning, he would download “walk sheets” from CIMS grouped by individual polls, using the campaign computer. The names, addresses, and phone numbers of voters were recorded, as well as whether the voter was a Conservative Party supporter or contributor. Canvassers would record the response they received at the door, whether supporter or non-supporter, and note the presence of lawn signs. Crawford would scan the new material into CIMS using a barcode reader, and CIMS was updated nightly with the latest data from the ridings.

The investigators had a good reason for wanting to talk to Chris Crawford. He and Sona had been friends at the University of Guelph, where they had both been members of the campus Conservative club. Crawford and Sona had also been roommates when they were interns for the Conservative Party in 2009. Crawford told investigators that one evening while he was inputting CIMS data during the Guelph campaign, he overheard Sona talking to campaign manager Ken Morgan about “how the Americans do politics.” The conversation included fake calls about polling station changes, and the strategy of calling non-supporters late at night pretending to be your opponent. Crawford told investigators he “did not think Sona was serious,”
but claimed he warned his co-worker that such talk was inappropriate. Interestingly, Crawford, like Matt McBain, did not come forward with his information about Sona and alleged dirty tricks in Guelph until he was contacted by investigators. And even then he didn’t go to Elections Canada, but rather to Conservative Party headquarters. From Fred DeLorey, he quickly followed the familiar path to Arthur Hamilton.

Shortly after the interview with Mathews on March 6, 2012, Crawford was promoted from special assistant to director of parliamentary affairs in the office of intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue. Crawford received a $15,000 pay raise. (Penashue himself was forced to resign March 14, 2013, when it became public that he had accepted improper donations to his 2011 campaign. He ran in the subsequent by-election but lost.) Jenni Byrne denied a connection between Crawford’s statement and his promotion. She sent an email to Maher and McGregor, who were doing a one-year review of the robocalls story: “Mr. Crawford relayed to Elections Canada information he thought they should know and he is comfortable with the accuracy of what he conveyed. No promotion or raise for Mr. Crawford was in any way related to the assistance he provided to Elections Canada. The Conservative Party has always assisted Elections Canada in this matter, and has always called upon anyone with anything that might be relevant to convey it to Elections Canada.”

Next on the investigators’ list was John White, who was the Get Out the Vote chair for the Burke campaign in Guelph, and the person who vouched for Michael Sona with Matt McBain. On April 3, 2012, Mathews interviewed White, who claimed that Sona had approached him during the election “about doing some stuff that might not be okay and I told him, go talk to Matt.” According to White, Sona wanted to put out a call to electors that couldn’t be traced back to the campaign. White claimed he
referred Sona to McBain because Sona would not take no from him “and . . . assumed McBain would shoot the idea down.” That, he claimed, was the extent of his knowledge about the embryonic dirty tricks of the Guelph campaign.

Oddly, White told investigators that he did not check back with McBain in the war room to ensure that Sona got the right message; nor did he tell campaign manager Ken Morgan about the incident. Even after it was known that misleading calls to electors had in fact been made in Guelph on election day, White told investigators that he never raised the matter of Sona’s allegedly shady plans with anyone.

The way the Conservative Party of Canada told it, it all came down to Michael Sona, party loyalist, indefatigable foot soldier, and devout Christian—the most unlikely person to join the crowd under the CPC’s bus.

four

UNDER THE BUS

I
t’s a long way from Hackensack, New Jersey, where he was born on October 6, 1988, to the media spotlight in a Canadian political scandal, and it wasn’t supposed to end this way for Michael Sona, who went from being a legislative assistant for a Conservative MP to being the only person charged in the robocall scandal.

When the tall, gangly, young man who likes to bake his own bread decided to enter the world of federal politics, it had never been anything more than a short-term plan. He would immerse himself in government for a few years, and then use the experience to enter the private sector, either as a lobbyist or a communications specialist—a common goal of many young interns who staff the offices of Conservative cabinet ministers and MPs in Ottawa.