Another Waste of 22 Minutes

well, one is a silly thing that's talking about public information ... and the other is illegal. Duh.

There is no comparison. One, a staffer released information already available to the public. In the other, a party apparently engaged in active voter suppression, an actual crime.

this vikileaks nonsense just offers a distraction to the dirty illegal trick that happened in this robocall story

i don't know why rae even brought it up. i guess he had to cause it becam known?

What is needed for a voter who received a misleading call, is angry about it, and wants to strike back and see justice done?

If you are such a voter, and you live in a riding where the margin of victory was, say, less than 1,000, then you should immediately call the Council of Canadians and ask them to help fund your appeal to the court to have the result upset and a new election called.

What level of proof will be needed to stop the clock eliminating your right to seek recourse in the court (WARNING: YOU MIGHT HAVE LESS THAN 19 DAYS TO ISSUE A STATEMENT OF CLAIM IN COURT OR LOSE YOUR RIGHT TO DO SO!)?

Not that much, it seems, from this article:

Former Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley told radio host Evan Solomon, on Saturday, that any Canadian can ask a judge to overturn election results if there's been any "irregularities, fraud, corrupt or illegal practices."

"If a judge is satisfied [the dirty tricks] could have affected the results then the judge can overturn the election and the government must call a by-election," said Kingsley, who held Elections Canada's top post for 17 year before resigning in 2007.

http://puzzledcat.blogspot.com/2012/03/robocalls-council-of-canadians-takes.html

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/robocall-scandal-could-lead-elections-202108363.html

"In 1999, the company was phoning people across the province using the permanent electoral register that the Tories also introduced," wrote Robert MacDermid of York University in a paper called Changing Electoral Politics in Ontario: The 1999 Provincial Election.

...While some of this must remain speculation, since a Tory spokesperson has denied it, the evidence in the party campaign filings strongly supports the argument that the money was used for phone canvassing... Any reputable pollster would be embarrassed to call this activity polling, since it does not begin from a random sample, nor does it guarantee respondents' anonymity or confidentiality."

RMG did membership work for the Tom Long campaign for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance party, which was later discredited for selling phony memberships.

http://www.russellreynolds.com/tom-long

http://www.manningcentre.ca/content/tom-long-director

Leslie Noble, who co-chaired last year's Tory election campaign with Mr. Watt; Paul Rhodes, the campaign's communications director; and Michael Gourley, a close Eves advisor, were among those who were paid $5.6-million by Hydro One in recent years for everything from communications advice to training programs.

Also a beneficiary was Tom Long, a senior Conservative strategist. The headhunting firm at which he is a senior official at one point was paid $88,000 to recruit Ms. Hutton - who was working in the premier's office with Mr. Harris - for her job as vice-president.

http://www.ontariotenants.ca/electricity/articles/2004/np-04b26.phtml

"Former Conservative-turned-Liberal MP Garth Turner revealed that the Conservatives require MPs to input constituency office information into a consolidated political database system called Constituent Information Management System or CIMS. This led to controversy over whether the Conservatives breach privacy laws with this practice. Since they are not a business, however, they probably do not.

Political work is based on list-building. All political parties work with consultants and invest heavily in database technology. Turner's charges, however, raise questions about how that work is done by the Conservatives.

The Conservatives have used their money and their connections with US Republicans to develop a wide lead over their competitors in the field of "data mining" and voter identification. They are unwilling to discuss whether they have crossed any ethical or legal lines in terms of privacy rights or data sources and totally guarded about their data systems, and the people behind them.

One of their main leaders, according to a Toronto fund-raising consultant who asked not be identified, is probably Michael Davis, CEO of the Responsive Marketing Group (RMG), a telemarketing corporation that raises money for many of Canada's biggest charities. The company has become dominant in its field by guaranteeing client charities that it will raise funds for them, even though what the charity actually receives may represent a small fraction of total revenues raised in the charity's name. "

read more..

http://www.harperindex.ca/ViewArticle.cfm?Ref=00113

To me there is a big difference. Vikileaks is much like HuffPo, it put together information that was already out there and made it available in one place. I believe the info was all public record that was not reported by the major media outlets. I also don't believe any privacy laws were violated. The robocall scandal may actually break laws or at the vary least make our brand of democracy look corrupt.

how in the world can anyone think they are equally ugly. vikileaks was a lame attempt at humor. robocalls is circumventing democracy. put partisan bickering aside people.