Party of One (9 page)

When investigator Mathews had initially served the production order on RackNine on November 23, 2011, Meier had told him that because of upgrades to his computer system, he probably couldn’t locate the IP address attached to the “Pierre Jones” account as requested. Mathews met briefly with Meier on March 4, 2012, and he had still not been able to locate the information. But on March 6, 2012, Meier emailed Mathews to say he had just found
the IP address related to “Pierre Jones” by reviewing session logs generated by the client’s contact with RackNine. Meier emailed the investigators three session log spreadsheets that detailed contact with RackNine by client #45 and client #93.

Mathews spoke with Meier on March 6 and 8, and again on May 9, 2012. Meier told him that Andrew Prescott was client #45 and had arranged the legitimate voice message broadcasts for the Burke campaign. He was the only person Meier dealt with from the campaign—and the person whom Morgan and Sona had asked for Meier’s personal contact information. Prescott had logged into his account using a number of different IP addresses during the writ period, including five times from the Cayman Islands, where he had gone on a pre-planned vacation. Work was obviously on his mind. On April 19, he logged in from Toronto’s Pearson airport. On April 20 and 21, he logged in to RackNine from Herndon, Virginia, and then again on his way home from the Caymans, in Virginia on April 27. On April 30, Prescott was back in the Guelph office, and as Michael Sona observed, things began to happen.

Mathews learned a complex but fascinating detail about how RackNine’s service worked. During a single session, once the client logs in, individual clients can log out as a particular client number, and other clients can log in with their unique user name and password. In the Guelph case, since there was only one uninterrupted session, the original IP address remained the same. A session will only close if it times out, or if the browser window is closed by the end user. This raised an interesting possibility. Could someone other than client #93 log in during a session without the Guelph IP address changing?

Meier told Mathews that he had given no training to the person who identified himself as “Pierre Jones. “He [Pierre Jones] used the RackNine database completely on his own,” once the account had been established—a not unimportant detail since it suggested
that client #93 was either familiar with the system or working with someone who was.
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“Pierre Jones” accessed RackNine on May 1, 2011 at 11:19 p.m. via the proxy server. But then a minute later, he accessed RackNine in a new session through the Guelph campaign account. The investigator wanted to know what that meant. On May 9, 2012, Meier told Mathews that the most likely explanation was that client #93 inadvertently closed the first session and then immediately returned to the site, either forgetting to use the proxy server, or thinking he was still logged in to RackNine.

If it had been a careless mistake on the part of client #93, he repeated it. On election day, in two separate sessions, both clients #45 and #93 communicated with RackNine using the Burke campaign IP, just minutes apart. At 4:12 a.m. “Pierre Jones” logged in from the Burke campaign address, and at 4:15 a.m. the account assigned to Andrew Prescott logged in from the same IP address. This coincidence raised a tantalizing question: were client #45 and client #93 together in the early hours of election day? Meanwhile, a piece of unsurprising news was obtained by the RCMP. No student named “Pierre Jones” was registered at the University of Ottawa. When an RCMP constable checked out the address, like “Pierre Jones” himself, it didn’t exist. The closest the officer could come was 56 Lajoie Nord, the site of the local Royal Canadian Legion in Joliette, Quebec.

On November 29, 2011, after receiving documentation for the ten official campaigns the Burke team ran through RackNine, Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews decided it was time to talk to Andrew Prescott. He left a voice message for the person who was known to RackNine as client #45, asking to talk. Instead of replying to Mathews, Prescott sought advice from a local Conservative in Guelph. Elections Canada’s request to Prescott was then forwarded to Jenni Byrne, director of political operations at Conservative headquarters. Byrne’s advice to Prescott was
to remain silent while she sought legal counsel.
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When reporters later questioned Andrew Prescott about the robocall scandal during their investigation, he replied via email, “I was not involved in the illegal phone calls. I am a legitimate user of RackNine’s services, and have been for several years. I am a devoted believer in free and fair elections. I would never partake in ANY illegal activities, and openly advocate for everyone to play by the rules.”

Meanwhile, the connection between Jenni Byrne and Andrew Prescott seemed odd. If Prescott had nothing to do with illicit robocalls, why would he refer an investigator’s request to Conservative Party headquarters? And since HQ professed that the party was involved only in legitimate robocalls, and that it was assisting the Elections Canada investigation, why would the party need months to arrange the Elections Canada interview? How does telling someone not to talk to an investigator qualify as cooperating?

Although Prescott spoke in December 2011 with Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton about Elections Canada’s request for an interview, it took Hamilton three months to arrange a date. The timing was noteworthy: the day after the robocalls story became public. A week after Valentine’s Day, a scandal that had been quietly developing behind the scenes exploded in the media. The story was written by the formidable odd couple of Canadian journalism, Postmedia’s Stephen Maher and the
Ottawa Citizen
’s Glen McGregor. Through their work, the country learned that Elections Canada, with the help of the RCMP’s commercial crime unit, had traced fraudulent robocalls made during the 2011 election to RackNine Inc., a small voice-broadcast company in Edmonton that worked exclusively for the Conservative Party of Canada’s national campaign and several Conservative candidates, including Stephen Harper.
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The robocall story soon dominated the news. Stephen Maher’s first big story in Ottawa was a combination of serendipity and steely
nerves, a trait that served him well as the robocall scandal developed. An aide to cabinet minister Lisa Raitt, Jasmine MacDonnell, had left her tape recorder in a washroom on Parliament Hill. The first interview on it was with Stephen Maher, so the female colleague who found the tape recorder gave it to him. Maher offered to return the tape recorder to its rightful owner, but MacDonnell never came by to pick it up. Six months later, Jasmine MacDonnell left a sheaf of secret files at CTV’s studio. Maher remembered the tape recorder and succumbed to a reporter’s best friend—curiosity. “I decided to listen to the files on the tape recorder,” Maher told me. “There was an inadvertently recorded conversation between Raitt and her aide, in which she [the minister] said that cancer was a ‘sexy’ story.” It was a reference to the impact of a medical isotope shortage that was affecting cancer treatments in Canada and around the world after the Chalk River reactor was shut down.

When Maher contacted the aide to advise her that he planned to run the story, she sought an injunction to block publication. (Some speculated that the Conservative Party was behind the lawsuit.) After listening to five hours of material on the tape recorder, a Halifax judge denied the injunction. In the wake of publication of the tape’s contents, Raitt, choking back tears, apologized for her insensitive remarks. She offered her resignation to the prime minister, but Stephen Harper refused it.

Maher showed the same determination not to back down as the robocall story unfolded. His first inkling of the robocalls story came before the election on April 16, 2011. He had been in Halifax covering the federal election, and noticed a story from CBC’s Dave Seglins reporting on mysterious, fake Liberal phone calls in Eglinton-Lawrence, the Ontario riding represented by Liberal MP Joe Volpe. The calls were not coming from Toronto but from an area code in North Dakota. The scent of a scoop was in the air. “It seemed clear to me that some unknown person had hired a
call bank to suppress the Liberal vote through deception,” recalled Maher. “This struck me as criminal behaviour and I started asking questions, turning it over in my mind.”

As with all speculative stories, the usual hot tips and cold trails ensued. Someone even told Maher that a Liberal campaign worker had actually given the Tories the lists of Grit supporters that were used to suppress the vote. After hitting a dead end or two, but still convinced he had something, the reporter made a crucially important move. He convinced Glen McGregor of the
Ottawa Citizen
to work with him on a spreadsheet of the instances of misleading automated calls in the 2011 election. It was a brilliant combination. As McGregor put it, “We’re sort of an Oscar and Felix Odd Couple. Steve is more likely to theorize and chase down tips that seem like long shots. I’m more about figuring out how to prove things with documentation.”
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It was McGregor’s work with Hill legend Tim Naumetz that broke the in-and-out scandal, a story that uncovered the dishonesty of the Conservative Party of Canada during the federal election of 2006. “With in-and-out, we had a confession of wrongdoing by the Conservative Party in a deliberate attempt to stealthily violate the election rules to their advantage,” McGregor told me. “This scheme involved some of the highest officials in the party—Finley, Gerstein, and Donison. I believe it changed the course of the [2006] election.”

At first, McGregor was a reluctant partner in Stephen Maher’s big robocalls story, which he thought was, at best, a “pattern” story. In fact, soon after McGregor joined the project in January 2012, he was “looking for ways to gracefully withdraw.” He just couldn’t see how the two journalists could ever prove what Maher believed had happened. But then came two eureka moments in their investigation. Maher connected with a source who had intimate knowledge of misleading calls in Guelph, and McGregor dug
up a cellphone bill that connected the Conservative campaign in Guelph to RackNine. The stars were now aligned for publication. “We broke the story during Question Period,” Maher told me. “I was sitting in the [Press] Gallery. I saw Peter Van Loan pass his BlackBerry to Prime Minister Harper so he could read it. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thrill for a journalist to see a big story break like that.”

According to the reporters, illicit robocalls were widespread in the 2011 election. Though the estimates varied, at least eighteen ridings had been targeted and had experienced harassing or deceptive calls. Conservative spokesperson Fred DeLorey would not say how much business the party did with RackNine, and insisted they did not know who was behind the fake calls.

After stonewalling investigators for three months, Andrew Prescott granted an interview to Al Mathews—the day after Maher and McGregor broke their story. With Arthur Hamilton listening in on the conference call, Prescott told the investigator that he knew nothing about any wrongdoing in the campaign, the same thing he had told Matt Meier. However, Prescott mentioned that he had passed on the personal contact information for RackNine’s Matt Meier to fellow campaign workers Ken Morgan and Michael Sona, later providing a copy of the emails to Mathews. After initially agreeing to a second, formal interview set for March 8, 2012, Andrew Prescott hired Guelph lawyer Mathew Stanley. His change of heart occurred after March 6, 2012, when Matt Meier of RackNine found the session logs linking client #45, Prescott, with the still unknown client #93, “Pierre Jones.” With only a day’s notice, Prescott’s lawyer cancelled the March 8 interview and recommended to his client that he remain silent.

A few days after their original story was published, Maher and McGregor widened the lens. They filed a piece about systematic voter suppression beyond Guelph, in which misleading calls
had gone out to Liberal voters in many tightly contested ridings. Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae said that he believed those calls helped defeat his party in the 2011 election. It was a theory not without evidence. The margin of victory in fourteen of the tightest ridings that went to the Conservatives was just 6,201 votes. Rae asked for an emergency debate in the House of Commons on February 27, 2012.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper found himself in the increasingly familiar position of having to deny that the Conservatives were involved in sleazy electoral tactics. At a photo op in Iqaluit on February 23, 2012, Harper said, “I have absolutely no knowledge on anything about these calls, but obviously if there’s anyone who has done anything wrong, we will expect they will face the full consequences of the law.” It was the standard boilerplate statement used by the prime minister to respond to anything that looked remotely like a scandal for the party or government. Harper left the more practical damage control to the director of political operations for the party, Jenni Byrne.

The day after the story broke, Byrne entered the full “not guilty” plea with the CBC: “The party was not involved with these calls and if anyone on a local campaign was involved they will not play a role in a future campaign.” Byrne said voter suppression was “extremely serious.” She explained, “We spent the entire campaign identifying supporters and we worked hard to get them out to vote. Our job is to get votes out; we do not engage in voter suppression.”

Byrne joined the Reform Party at the age of sixteen and was president of the campus Reform Club at the University of Ottawa, coincidentally the school “Pierre Jones” pretended to be attending. Byrne was a sound political organizer, and famously partisan. Through hard work, she moved her way up in the Conservative hierarchy. As Doug Finley’s deputy, Byrne learned the ropes assisting in the party’s early campaigns. She went on to manage
day-to-day crises in the PMO when Ian Brodie was Harper’s chief of staff. Later, after Prime Minister Harper appointed Finley to the Senate while he was under investigation by Elections Canada during the in-and-out scandal, Byrne filled the void. She took over as the Conservative Party’s director of political operations in 2009. In a rare profile of her published in
Maclean’s
on April 4, 2011, one Conservative anonymously described her as a “hard-ass with a temper.”