Our new finance minister, Joe Oliver, still has a hurdle to clear.
Oliver’s riding of Eglington-Lawrence is among those being probed by Elections Canada in an investigation of automated robocalls and other alleged illicit activities in the 2011 election campaign. That investigation is scheduled to wind up shortly, with a report to follow soon after.
Oliver defeated Liberal incumbent Joe Volpe in that campaign by more than 4,000 votes. So convinced of wrongdoing was Volpe that he took the unusual step of filing a grievance with Elections Canada even before voting day. He said his supporters were being harassed by calls coming from North Dakota and elsewhere. Two years after the campaign he went to Elections Canada again with more allegations, which included a claim that large numbers of electors were wrongly registered.
That last charge did not hold up. As Oliver spokesperson Melissa Lantsman pointed out Wednesday, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand subsequently revealed that he could find only three cases of improper voter registration in the riding.
Published Mar 19, 2014 at 8:59pm
More from Lawrence Martin available here.Our new finance minister, Joe Oliver, still has a hurdle to clear.
Oliver’s riding of Eglington-Lawrence is among those being probed by Elections Canada in an investigation of automated robocalls and other alleged illicit activities in the 2011 election campaign. That investigation is scheduled to wind up shortly, with a report to follow soon after.
