Canada’s chief electoral officer seeks crackdown on ‘robocalls’

The Federal Court of Canada handed down a ruling Thursday that pointed to serious abuse of these new campaign tools in Canadian elections.

As well, the Wildrose party was fined $90,000 by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Communication for its misuse of robocalls in the 2012 Alberta election.

Mayrand has already warned that if Canada doesn’t tighten up the laws and codes of conduct over this campaign machinery, abuses will happen again in 2015 and Canadians’ faith in their democratic system will be further shaken.

On Tuesday, at the Commons committee on procedure and House affairs, Mayrand is due to make that case again.

Last Thursday’s ruling by Federal Court judge Richard Mosley, in a Council of Canadians’ challenge to 2011 election results, gave Mayrand significant ammunition for that argument.

While Mosley didn’t agree with the Council that election results should be scrapped, he did declare that something went seriously wrong with misleading calls to voters and the use of the Conservatives’ voter-information database called CIMS (short for the Constituent Information Management System).

Robocalls and CIMS are also at the heart of a far-reaching investigation by Elections Canada into the 2011 election — an investigation that started in Guelph but has now spread to 247 ridings across the country.

“Misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country,” Mosley wrote in his ruling, and “the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their voting preference in response to earlier voter-identification calls.”

Moreover, he wrote: “The most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database maintained and controlled by the CPC, accessed for that purpose by a person or persons currently unknown to this Court.”

Conservatives were hailing this decision as a victory — because election results were allowed to stand, and because Mosley also said that he had no evidence to suggest that the party condoned the abuse.

However, it is true that CIMS has become a powerful tool for the Conservatives’ campaign efforts since it started to be built a decade ago. Like the other party databases, Liberalist and NDPVote, CIMS has been built in what Mayrand calls a “black hole” when it comes to privacy laws.

The federal privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, has also been paying closer attention to whether it’s time to tighten the laws around party databases. A study Stoddart commissioned last year found that these party databases exist in a legal limbo, not covered by government privacy laws, nor covered by the privacy rules governing the private sector.

The question now is whether the political parties will go along with efforts to tighten the rules.

Richard Ciano is president of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, which was a trailblazer in voter databases, and Ciano also runs a firm called Campaign Research, which helps gather a lot of the material that goes into the Conservative machine. A year or so ago, Ciano warned that the robocalls controversy had the potential to shut down a business that had proven crucial to Conservatives’ electoral success.

But in an interview last week, Ciano said he had no problem with tighter rules on privacy and robocalls, since his firm is already accustomed to working within the more aggressive rules of the private sector. Ciano says he would be worried only if the new laws were selective or arbitrary.

“Whatever rules they want to make, that’s great, go ahead and make them, make it clear what they are, and we’ll follow them,” Ciano said.

Nathan Rotman, executive director of the NDP, says his party is in favour of more controls over robocalls and databases. New Democrat MP Craig Scott introduced his own private member’s bill last fall, in fact, to toughen penalties for misuse of voter-call campaigns and for Elections Canada to have more information about who’s behind those calls.

“We support tougher rules, certainly around robocalls,” Rotman said. The NDP is also supporting any efforts to strengthen personal-privacy rules around the databases, he added, especially after looking at Mosley’s ruling from last week.

New Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, whose party has been lagging behind its competitors in building its database, also saw last week’s ruling as a blow to how they’re being used now in this legal vacuum.

“The fact that there was a systematic approach to doing that is extremely, extremely worrisome,” Trudeau said on Friday while talking to reporters in Halifax. “The fact that it was tied in to the Conservative database as well is an indication of tremendous concern.”

One person, former Conservative staffer Michael Sona, has been charged in the ongoing investigation into robocalls in the 2011 election, but Sona is protesting his innocence and saying he is being made a scapegoat for a scheme that he believes was “massive.”