Party of One (15 page)

The Honourable Louise Charron, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, reviewed the Elections Canada investigation. She agreed with the findings, but noted that the conclusions might surprise some, given the forty thousand people who had written to Elections Canada to express their concern about the misleading calls during an election. She wrote,

There is no question that some inappropriate calls were made to electors in electoral districts other than Guelph during the 41st general election. The evidence revealed that some electors were indeed misdirected to a poll other than the one indicated on their voter information card. However, giving incorrect or false information does not constitute an offence. Without evidence of an intention to prevent an elector from voting, or to induce the elector by some pretence or contrivance to vote or not to vote, there are no grounds to believe that an offence has been committed.

The report by Elections Canada came down to a lack of evidence and a lack of the power to obtain it. Like Judge Richard Mosley
in the Council of Canadians case, Elections Canada investigators found ample evidence of misleading calls to voters—just not the identity of the perpetrator behind the calls. The puzzle of robocalls had not been solved. If investigators had obtained lists of non– Conservative Party supporters in targeted ridings that were downloaded from CIMS in the final days of the election campaign, and had known by whom they were downloaded, perhaps they would have found the answer.
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Who had ordered calls to non-supporters across the country about poll changes, even in ridings where no poll changes had occurred?

Michael Sona’s trial began on June 2, 2014, in Guelph. On the opening day, Chris Crawford, a ministerial staffer for the minister of state for science and technology in the Harper government, was the first Crown witness. He testified that only campaign manager Ken Morgan and Michael Sona were in the office when Crawford overheard Sona discuss voter suppression tactics with Morgan: “He was talking about how he might be able to win an election based on something like that.” Crawford said the conversation took place a couple of weeks before the election. He agreed with Sona’s lawyer, Norm Boxall, that it would not be unusual for campaign staff to discuss the tactics of US campaigns. “People have these conversations. At the time I didn’t think anything of it.” Crawford further agreed that many Canadian Conservatives look to the United States for strategies. He himself had attended the Conservative Political Action Conference, which had featured speakers such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter.
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John White, another member of the Burke campaign team, was asked if he had downloaded the list of non-supporters. “I don’t recall specifically doing that,” he told the court, “but it’s quite possible I could have.” (Evidence was submitted that White
generated two constituent reports on April 30, 2011, at 12:39 p.m. and 9:17 p.m. No other member of the Burke team generated constituent reports from April 1 to May 2, 2011.)

Shielded by his immunity deal with the Crown, Prescott told the Court a different story than he had told Elections Canada investigators. Prescott admitted that on election day he had accessed two RackNine accounts: his own, and the one used to send out the misleading robocalls. According to his testimony, shortly after 4 a.m. a number of workers were in the office talking about the day ahead of them. The subject of robocalls came up. Prescott stated that Sona paid attention when it was mentioned that it was possible to manipulate caller ID details: “Sona expressed a little bit of surprise and said, ‘Let me understand this: you can make it appear to be coming from anywhere?’” Prescott claimed that, hours later, he saw Sona emerge from his cubicle “almost euphoric” as he said, “It’s working.” Strangely, Prescott did not ask Sona to elaborate on his comment. He also testified that he saw a cheap red cellphone on Sona’s desk, and discarded Future Shop cellphone packaging in the trash. These were details Prescott had not mentioned in his first interview with the Crown, even after he had been granted immunity. Apparently his memory continued to improve.

Prescott testified that on election day, after the “Pierre Poutine” call had gone out, campaign manager Ken Morgan grabbed him and sat him down in front of his laptop computer and said, “I need you to stop the dialling.” Morgan gave him a piece of paper with a scrawled name and password. Prescott stated that he did what he was asked to do without looking to see what the scheduled call was, “. . . knowing what was going on was something I didn’t want to get involved in.” For the first time in the trial, it had been alleged that someone other than Sona was involved as RackNine client “Pierre Jones.”

On election day, following Morgan’s instructions, Prescott opened his browser and went to RackNine, where his client account opened automatically. He then logged in to the other account with the information given to him by Morgan. Knowing the system, he knew where to go, and immediately cancelled the pending calls before logging out. “I was extremely hesitant because obviously I caught wind there was stuff going on that day; we started receiving media reports of fake calls that were going around.” Prescott further testified that at the celebration on election night, Michael Sona had toasted Stephen Harper’s majority win with the words “Thanks to Pierre,” while smoking a cigar. (This seemed odd to many in the courtroom because neither “Pierre” nor the Conservatives had won in Guelph.) Boxall was able to point out several inconsistencies in Prescott’s testimony, including the fact that Sona’s supposed toast to “Pierre” wasn’t reported by Prescott until April 2014. Notes from Prescott’s first interview with Elections Canada in 2012 had him saying that he did not recognize the name Pierre Jones.

If Prescott’s new testimony was supposed to be the smoking gun to unravel the robocalls affair, the judge, for one, didn’t seem to be impressed. According to a tweet from the trial by Laura Stone of Global News, the judge asked the Crown about Sona’s toast to “Pierre”: “How would that make sense to anyone? Do you think that’s damning evidence?” Norm Boxall had the feeling that the Crown’s star witness had in fact been a dud on the stand. To highlight the issue of Prescott’s dubious credibility, Boxall asked Prescott to read a stunning statement into the record at the trial, a Facebook message he had written to Sona in July 2013:

It’s now crystal clear to all but the most rabid partisans that something amiss occurred during the 2011 election. It’s also patently obvious that what went on across the country was definitely not the work of a ‘lone staffer’ on a single campaign
as we have heard repeatedly from Conservative spokespersons. . . . This scheme was clearly widespread, national and well organized. It required access, and ultimately complicity from someone higher up in the campaign in order to accomplish. While I don’t for a moment believe such actions were condoned by the national campaign, it’s painfully clear to all now that the Party is seeking to misdirect Canadians by accusing ‘local staffers’ of what was a national crime.

Sitting on the stand, and forced to read his own words into the record, all Prescott could do was declare that he didn’t really believe what he had written. So why had he written it? Prescott explained that at the time he had posted that message on Facebook, he had been upset because he was having a problem getting accreditation from the Conservative Party to attend the national convention in Calgary in November 2013. It was a damaging admission. During his closing arguments, even Crown attorney Croft Michaelson said Prescott’s testimony “should probably be approached with caution.” Michaelson also admitted the evidence “points to more than one person” being involved.

As the trial progressed, the Crown’s theory about Michael Sona changed in a way the judge could not have missed. At the outset, prosecutor Croft Michaelson painted Michael Sona as the mastermind behind the Guelph robocalls caper. By trial’s end, the Crown’s theory was that Sona was a person who was in some way involved. The Crown also made the decision not to call Elections Canada’s lead investigator, Al Mathews, to the stand—preventing Norm Boxall from raising potentially damaging details about how reliant Mathews had been on getting his facts from the Conservative Party of Canada, by effectively partnering with their lawyer, Arthur Hamilton.

After watching the Crown call a dozen witnesses and rest its case without producing any physical evidence linking Sona to the
cellphone, computers, or RackNine, or any evidence of how Sona learned to do the nefarious deed he was accused of masterminding, Boxall huddled with his client. “We had a witness list of our own,” Michael Sona told me. “But Norm took me into a backroom at the courthouse and told me that they hadn’t proven their case. That’s when he decided not to call our witnesses or put me on the stand. He’s a pessimistic guy by nature, but he thought we’d won.” There was one big advantage to not calling witnesses: Michael Sona’s lawyer got to have the last word in court. In his summation, Norm Boxall homed in on the central weakness of the Crown’s case. “I think there’s more unanswered questions than answered questions,” he told the Court.

With Judge Gary Hearn reserving his judgment until mid-August 2014,
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Michael Sona would have to wait a little longer for justice. On August 14, 2014, Michael Sona became the only person in Canada to be convicted in the robocalls affair. The court and the Crown clearly believed Sona did not act alone in arranging the calls, but the judge concluded that Sona was “actively involved.” Judge Hearn dismissed the evidence from star witness Andrew Prescott implicating Sona as “self-serving.” Despite inconsistencies, Hearn found the testimony of the young Conservative staffers assembled by Arthur Hamilton reliable. The Crown never explained who purchased the burner cellphone and registered it in the name of Pierre Poutine or how the list of non-supporters from the CIMS database was transferred to Poutine. A second judge had now pointed to CIMS as the source for misleading calls during the 2011 election and referenced the involvement of others. The robocalls case has not been solved. As for electoral fraud in Canada, the only certain thing is that the Fair Elections Act has made it even harder to prosecute. As long as the only evidence it is empowered to gather remains voluntary, Elections Canada will never catch up to the greyhounds of technology in pursuit of political power.
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six

THE BIG LIE

O
n April 3, 2012, after nearly six years of the Harper government misleading Parliament and the public, the much-vaunted F-35 program crash-landed at centre stage in Canadian politics. The engine-trouble had begun nearly a year earlier, just before the general election that gave Stephen Harper his majority government.
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The Liberals had tried to make the record-breaking acquisition a major election issue, but the smooth-talking prime minister allayed all fears about the government’s choice of fighter jet. The strong, stable government had everything under control. Canadians agreed.

Opposition leader Michael Ignatieff ’s concerns centred on how much it would cost to acquire Lockheed Martin’s high-tech aircraft, known as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Lightning II, or F-35, to replace Canada’s aging fleet of F-18s. The government set the price at $15 billion for sixty-five of the experimental aircraft. That figure included the acquisition and supporting infrastructure of the jets, or so the government claimed. The Opposition wasn’t buying it.

After decimating the Liberals and driving Michael Ignatieff from the field of Canadian politics in May 2011, the Conservatives defended their costing by releasing next to nothing about the aircraft procurement to the political opposition, and merely repeating the talking points to support their disputed figure. Ironically, their accounting for the F-35 acquisition began to crumble when a man the Harper government had hired, Kevin Page, challenged the government’s costing. Page was appointed as the parliamentary budget officer under the Accountability Act in 2008. He was to be an independent watchdog, paid for by citizens to provide non-partisan analysis of the nation’s finances and government spending.

Page claimed that the real price tag of the program was $29 billion, nearly double the figure cited by the prime minister and the minister of defence. He also accused the Department of National Defence (DND) of keeping two sets of books for the F-35 program: one for departmental and cabinet use, the other for public and parliamentary consumption. The DND’s defence was that there was only one set of books—with two columns.

The extent to which the Harper government badmouthed Page as an incompetent busybody was malicious and disingenuous. The denunciations had nothing to do with the elite civil servant’s competence. The reason Page had been appointed by the Conservatives as the inaugural head of the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) in the first place was his sterling record in the public service—including a stint with two prime ministers, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, “as the sort of chief economist for the Privy Council.”
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During the transition between the Martin and Harper governments—a process smoothly facilitated by seasoned professionals such as Derek Burney and Ian Brodie—Page worked from a third-floor office in the Langevin Block under the then clerk of the Privy Council, Alex Himelfarb. Page attended some cabinet
meetings as a key official involved in getting the prime minister and finance minister to sign off on the budget. On a personal level, the Harpers had sent Page and his family a condolence note in 2006, after they lost a child in a tragic accident.

Page was impressed with the way Stephen Harper conducted cabinet, telling me, “PM Harper ran the meetings efficiently. He was a fan of Chrétien that way and followed his cabinet style. The difference between the two governments was that while Chrétien had a lot of experience around his cabinet table—including many people who had been on the planning and priorities committee and had run departments—Harper did not have a lot of experience to draw on. When they appointed me, they saw me as a fiscal conservative. What am I really? A nerdy guy who doesn’t like wasting money.”