[LINK] Two links on the emerging Conservative Party robocalling scandal

[rfmcdonald]

First, from the left comes Tonda McCharles' report in the Toronto Star featuring interviews with call centre employees who report that they were ordered to make phone calls with content that--to say the least--confused everyone.

Callers on behalf of the federal Conservative Party were instructed in the days before last year’s election to read scripts telling voters that Elections Canada had changed their voting locations, say telephone operators who worked for a Thunder Bay-based call centre.

These weren’t “robo-calls,” as automated pre-recorded voice messages as commonly known. They were live real-time calls made into ridings across Canada, the callers say.

In a new twist on new growing allegations of political “dirty tricks,” three former employees of RMG — Responsive Marketing Group Inc.’s call centre in Thunder Bay — told the Star about the scripts.

A fourth remembered directing people to voting stations but did not remember passing on any message that a voting station had changed.

However, one employee was so concerned that something was amiss she says she reported it to her supervisor at the RMG site, to the RCMP office in Thunder Bay and to a toll-free Elections Canada number at the time.

Annette Desgagné, 46, said it became clear to her — after so many people complained that the “new” voting locations made no sense or were “way the hell across town” — that the live operators were, in fact, misdirecting voters.

[. . .]

She said she has no way of knowing whether in fact the poll station locations she gave listeners were wrong addresses or phony locations. But she said the “feedback” elicited by the script was so negative, “we started getting antsy.”

She said she and a few other workers at the call centre were perplexed enough that they began telling the voters they should double-check their poll location with their local Elections Canada office, which was not part of the script.

Desgagné, alone, said some workers shortened their script — although they weren’t supposed to — and said “... I’m calling from Elections Canada ...”

Desgagné’s recollection of the job was largely corroborated by two other women contacted Sunday by the Star. Neither wanted to be named. All worked at RMG throughout the 2011 campaign on Conservative Party voter identification and on get-out-the-vote calls.

And from the right, Chris Selley at the National Post assembles links from journalists--many writing for the generally right-leaning Postmedia News organization--who think that rhetoric comparing the robocalling to something Richard Nixon might have done is justified.

“We do not know for a fact that the [robo-calls] came from anyone acting on the authority of the Conservative party,” Postmedia’s Andrew Coyne muses. “But, well, let’s say it fits a pattern — if not of outright lawbreaking then certainly of close-to-the-wind tactics and ends-justify-the-means ethics.” Exactly. What happened was disgusting; as Coyne says, people ought to go to jail and hopefully will. But the Conservatives need not just to get to the bottom of this. They need to realize, as Coyne says, that even if this was one rogue campaign worker, this brand of crap is very likely to be the party’s eventual undoing.

[. . .]

Postmedia’s Michael Den Tandt doesn’t mince a single word in laying out just how serious this situation is for Canadian democracy, and could end up being for the Conservatives. “Based on the facts now known, this was electoral fraud — focused, organized and widespread. [Interim Liberal leader Bob] Rae did not exaggerate when he called it Nixonian,” says Den Tandt. (True, but we do wish we were grown up enough to deplore political sleaze without mentioning theUnited States.) “To Gomery, or not to Gomery? That is the question,” he says, and he has already made up his mind: “There needs to be a public, arm’s-length judicial investigation.”

We’re not actually convinced of that yet. Adscam was bloody complicated; this is potentially much less so. It seems at least conceivable that Elections Canada and the RCMP, with RackNine’s and the phone companies’ co-operation, could compile a complete record of the dodgy phone calls made, and in the case of the robocalls maybe even their content and the credit card number of the person who paid for them. (Mind you, that looks like the sort of paragraph we’ll revisit in a year and be disappointed.)