Robocall scandal: Sona hung out to dry?

abbreviations used in this article:

FOI - Freedom of Information (Act)

            Years ago, when the Harper Conservatives were running against the scandal smirched Liberals they promised a bouquet of "responsible government", "transparency" and "law and order". A Great Conservative grab bag. Actually, if you ignore the vagueness it sounds pretty good! Who - aside from the Black Block anarchists - really does oppose "responsible government, transparency and law 'n order??

            Once in power though, Canada experienced government that hardly meets these criteria, no matter how "liberal" one tries to be in judging.

            One problem that seems to keep cropping up sporadically is obtaining information from the government under the freedom of information law. Delays are often in excess of those required in the legislation, sometimes egregiously so, which suggests that political interference is taking place hot button issues. Too much of what is finally received by the requestee is "heavily redacted" (blacked out). All of which makes a farce of the law. "Justice delayed is justice denied." True, but information delayed is also information denied: a delay may effectively kill a journalist's or a lawyer's hunt for facts.

            Freedom of information (FOI) legislation is laudable of course. One can even make an argument that information is the lifeblood of a living democracy. How are citizens - or the representatives they elect - to judge wisely if they do not have the facts set before them in an objective unbiased way? (Such an argument represents an idealization, of course, but it should be seen as a target to aim for in order to improve our daily performance, to provide a standard against which real-world behaviors are to be judged.) There is increasing evidence, for example, that political interference is taking place in the application of FOI due, in part, to fearful atmosphere cultivated in the civil service. Job cuts, top-down micro-management from the prime minister's office and internal censorship have created a poisoned atmosphere in federal service ranks.

          Recently Federal Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault

".. made a pointed reference to the responsibility of ministers and top bureaucrats to make sure the access to information system is protected. She said that a culture of "pleasing the minister's office" had been fostered among public servants."

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/04/10/suzanne-legault-information-watchdog-tories_n_5125723.html

          As journalists covering the house of commons have observed, the Harper Conservatives have inculcated an authoritarian, top-down mode of governance: Harper himself is derided as a "control freak" especially with respect to media access to controversial files (climate change, for example). Witness the pathetic attempts to muzzle climate scientists who produce results unfavorable to the fossil fuel industry.

internal blog links:

 http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-imperial-prime-minister-wither.html

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/03/decline-and-fall-of-canadian-science.html 

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2011/12/laffin-fiddlin-while-rome-burns.html 

 http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2013/03/experimental-lakes-areas-curious-episode.html

             The desire to control - suppress, modify, interpret - information flows seems omnipresent in this Conservative government. Thus while FOI legislation does not require background information from requestees, the Harper government has been doing so. Why? Moreover, they have continued to do so, despite having promised to stop the offending practice. Is this what the Harperites mean by "transparency"?

"The access law does not authorize the collection of background information from individual requesters, and a government-wide directive from 2010 requires institutions to process requests without regard to the identity of the person seeking records."

              While, strictly speaking, not illegal, federal information commissioner Legault, signaled another problematic practice: the monitoring / surveillance of FOI requests in sensitive areas (especially requests emanating from opposition parties or the press).

"The Conservative government has been criticized in the past for flagging some sensitive requests — typically from the news media or opposition MPs — for special scrutiny in ministers' offices, delaying release or even improperly censoring material."

              "Flagging" potentially explosive FOI requests for pre-scrutiny by federal ministers amounts, effectively, to the censorship one expects in those "Communist states", like China, that the Harperites so love to excoriate! Shades of Orwell' "1984". 

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/05/31/access-to-information-canada_n_5422765.html

                 Another classical way of killing embarrassing information and questions is simply to cut off funding. This, too, is an established practice of the "transparency-loving" Harper government.

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/12/12/the-harper-government-is-killing-access-to-information-slowly/


The Michael Sona saga

 

                Other forms of authoritarian behaviors are evident on the part of the Harper government. One particularly egregious tactic: telephoning voters who are supporters of other political parties on election day, telling them that their voting station has been changed and they must go elsewhere to vote. When the voter gets to the alternative polling station they find they are not registered to vote there and, if they do not have the time or inclination to go to their legal voting station, they lose their vote. Dirty political tricks, of course, are older than the ancient Athenians. Liberals, for example, have not been above stooping to the tactic of voter diversion on occasion in recent elections. Traditional Québec elections, in particular, were noted for multiple voting, fraudulent voting (the dead voted..), ballot box stuffing, ballot box theft and destruction, goon squads to enforce politically correct voting and marked ballots (so if you were someone important, the pols would know who you voted for).. But those were the "good old days" and we were supposed to be beyond all that..

               In the last federal election, the Harperites apparently employed an updated form of voter diversion using robo-calls from automated call centers. This came to a head in the notorious Sona affair in which a young Conservative party worker, Michael Sona, was indicted, then convicted, of voter interference. Sona, the first person to be actually convicted of voter interference, was sentenced to 9 months prison and a year of probation. The judge felt Sona did not act alone in the diversion of 6,700 voters although Sona himself still proclaims innocence. Given that Sona did not act alone, why were others not indicted? Was it a simple lack of evidence? (And, if so, why the lack?) Was there political influence in the police investigation? Was Sona - who was in his early 20s during the robo-calls escapade and rather naive - hung out to dry, a convenient and powerless scapegoat who could be sacrificed at little cost? (The above photo gives an indication of Sona's age and maturity at the time of the infractions, May, 2011.)



http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/11/19/michael-sona-sentence_n_6183510.html?utm_hp_ref=michael-sona

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/08/13/michael-sona-robocalls-trial-verdict-guelph_n_5674098.html 

breaking news: robots inculpated in Federal election scam

               Remember the robots who called Liberal party members during the last Federal election and misdirected them to non-existent voting stations? Well, we were beginning to think it had dropped off the radar screen and into a black hole. But if the wheels of Canadian justice turn (too) slowly, they at least still turn..

               Conservative party staffer, Michael Sona, shown above with PM Steven Harper, was, as they say, hung out to dry by the party. A mere whelp of 22, he was  obviously the man to throw under the bus, letting the true instigators run free. My hope: that justice will be done and the court begins tracing back the chain of command to, if not the instigators - that WOULD be asking too much! - at least to their first lieutenants. Ah but we dream, we dream..

              Mr Sona, now aged 25 and looking definitely more mature, faces charges of interfering with the right to vote and a maximum of 5 years in prison (rather unlikely).
 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/robocalls-what-we-learned-from-michael-sona-s-trial-1.2667372

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/michael-sona-robocalls-trial-hears-of-possible-2nd-culprit-1.2665792 

internal blog links:

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/02/so-this-is-governmental-transparency-eh.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jim-harris/robocalls-scandal_b_1305397.html?ref=canada

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/11/have-we-become-so-inured.html

Justin T elected chief of Liberals - and the negative ad campaign begins

              Justin Trudeau, son of former PM Pierre Trudeau won the leadership of the federal Liberal party, yesterday, sunday, 14 april. Trudeau has a big job ahead of him! Potential liberal voters are splayed across a large part of the political spectrum from moderate left social activists to center right entrepreneurs. He has to avoid splitting the left of center and center vote with the New Democratic Party (NDP). Splitting on the left allowed Steven Harper and his team to win a majority in the last election.

               More challenging, is the negative momentum of the Liberal party in recent decades. The federal Liberals have become a party whose modes and models, whose language and analytical tools appeal to fewer and fewer people. Moderation, tolerance, individual liberty are ideas which move fewer people in these extremely conservative / reactionary times. One need only think of the rise of religiously oriented political parties and groupings around the world, from (?post?-)Arab spring Egypt to "conservative christian" America. Trudeau must somehow reach past the polarization to either recover the soul of the once great "natural ruling party of Canada" or, at the very least, succeed in "rebranding" it for a younger generation so it can compete as a political "brand" against the increasingly strident and activist Right.

               If Trudeau fails in either of these missions, the great old party may very well die as a political force on the federal scene. A more polarized Canada might emerge within a two party system: Conservatives versus the NDP (or whatever their successor - merging the remnants of the Left - choses to call itself). Such a Canada might be unrecognizable to us today. A large segment of the Liberals' right wing - the entrepreneurial sector - would swing over to the Conservatives. The "New Left Party", rallying the center-left forces, would probably radicalize, leaving a narrow, sparsely populated political center, a sort of political no-man's land where few dare to venture. The current climate of emnity and dirty tricks could intensify with unknown consequences. Today, one is justified in asking does a party of the center, like the Liberals traditionally were, have a place in the contemporary political scene?

                    As a person and candidate, Tudeau is engaging, sincere (one of his more endearing qualities), mediagenic and relatively youthful. He is of moderate intelligence and, apparently, a caring father. He makes the right noises on environmental issues. But does he have a vision? A vision of a better Canada in a better world? The reality is: the world is in terrible need of such men and women today. Down deep everyone knows this. 

               Our civilization is hurtling over the edge of an ecological / demographic abyss and we blindly follow madmen who urge us that naysayers are evil (or inspired by Satan himself). They foolishly preach that all we need to do is think of the economy (stupid!) and consume our way out of whatever crisis we happen to be in at the moment. (And we are stupid enough to listen..)

Denis Meadows: the apocalypse draws near

                One can obviously pick bones with Meadows and the Club of Rome regarding their timetable but the principle should be clear enough: you can't consume non-renewable resources at an exponentially increasing rate for very long. You will in short order suffer shortages. As a planet, a world, a species we need to get our population under control: first halt its growth then shrink it (and we must soon - very soon! - wake up to the fact that either we will shrink our global population voluntarily or Mother Nature will impose her harsher birth regulaltion measures: famine, plague and war). We urgently need to place our economic activities (our extraction, transformation, production and consumption of goods and services) on a renewable basis. We must develop and employ renewable energy sources with an emphasis on employing biological processes to do things we now use non-renewable resources for (biological systems are self replicating provided enough food and a conducive environment).

                Yes, so far Justin Trudeau makes the right noises on environmental issues but he has yet to formulate a coherent and mobilizing vision. In terms of Statesmanship, Justin Trudeau is called to put forth a Great Vision, an enobling vision to inspire Canadians to act in concert, as a society, to realize that vision of a Common Good. We might ask for example, what sacrifices would Canadian society be required to make to achieve a viable future for unborn generations? 

                A major role of any leader is to inspire people to make those sacrifices which need to be made for the collective good. Traditionally, these sacrifices have related to times of war, sometimes to economic or other emergencies. Does Mr Trudeau have the royal jelly to inspire people to the degree necessary to effect real change? Or is he merely giving us more yuppie greenwashing to make us feel good, so we can go back to consuming and (increasingly) chasing scapegoats..

                "Time will tell" as the old adage says. Mr Trudeau has, perhaps, several years to prove his worth as party chief for this challenging time.

                 An interesting side note: dirty tricks are starting early in the Conservative Camp.

dirty tricks start early!

                  Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!  These guys have no shame. Consider. Mr Harper has installed a minister of science who, ostensibly, is a creationist. For those of us who think that, generally, creationism is bad science this is not good, not good.. 

Is this a creationist speaking??

                  And then there is the question of Mr Harper's intellectual honesty (or sanity!) which he himself managed to call into question with the following farcical position:

"Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations,"

too weird for me to invent (do people BELIEVE this??)

                 And, of course, there is the long standing robocall scandal: during the last federal election, on voting day, non-conservative voters in several parts of the country received fraudulent calls, purporting to come from Elections Canada workers, telling them to change their voting station. This made for inconvenience and some people did not vote as a result (seniors with limited mobility, for example). While the robocalls scandal has not received the coverage - and angry action! - it deserves, some charges have been laid at the feet of a scapegoated underling.

Sona doesn't like being hung out to dry..

                                       Maybe - when you stop to think about it - it DOES make sense that these people would resort to dirty tricks so readily..

Have we become so inured?..

From the Dirty Tricks file:

          Pollsters have a professional watchdog called the "Market Research and Intelligence Association". It is an in-house attempt to auto-regulate the industry. Even so, even they found a conservative pollster guilty of conducting a misinformation campaign against a Liberal MP from the Montréal, Québec region and thereby sullying the reputation and good name of the profession.
 
           In a voter identification poll conducted for the Federal Conservative Party last fall, Campaign Research, Inc. is alleged to have suggested to interviewees that Irwin Cotler had or was about to quit politics. The apparent goal of such a manoeuver is to dissuade voters from voting for a Liberal favorite in upcoming elections.

           Following the condemnation by the Market Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA), interim Liberal leader Bob Rae and MP Cotler denounced the disinformation campaign, demanded and apology and a dissociation of the Federal Conservative Party from the offending pollster. While the MRIA has the power to expel members, it stopped short of expulsion, only "censuring" - publically rebuking - Campaign Research, Inc. for violating professional codes of conduct. While many of us might feel that such a finding and action don't go far enough, MRIA did find the violations of public trust compelling enough to redraft it own professional code of ethics:

"The controversy prompted the MRIA earlier this year to update its code of conduct to spell out that voter identification or partisan promotion can not be conducted under the guise of market research." And this dirty tricks campaign was, let us not forget, carried out on the watch of a party that was elected on a platform of "transparency, responsible government and law and order".

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/11/28/conservative-polling-firm-censured-for-misinformation-campaign-against-liberal-mp-irwin-cotler/

                  What I find so troubling about this affair and the possibly related "Robocalls" misinformation campaign is the relative indifference of the public to these repeated abuses against the public trust and goodwill on the part of Steven Harper's federal conservatives. Have we become so inured to this abuse we no longer react?

internal blog links: (Keyword: populism)

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2011/06/tacky-tacky-tacky-face-of-populism-in.html

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2010/10/lies-lies-lies-and-more-damned-lies.html

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/06/populism-101-basics.html

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2011/07/do-we-live-in-sick-society-are.html

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2011/10/fascism-and-optimism.html

Harper remaking Canada in his image..

"Harper remaking Canada in his own image" - scary stuff when you stop to think about it..

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jim-harris/robocalls-scandal_b_1305397.html?ref=canada

Fumento: A voice of reason from the Right

          Michael Fumento is a self-avowed man of the right. Given his beliefs on global warming - he believes it exists but spending money to deal with it is hopeless and prohibitively expensive - I would even consider him a reactionary. When people like that begin to get cold feet over the way the Right is heading it is undoubtedly time to start worrying (unless you have already given up trying to reason with them..)

            Fumento words are interesting because he is not an armchair theoretician. He served in the US military, was wounded in action several times and worked for right wing think tanks and other neoconservative organizations. He is one of a small, but growing number, of Right wing turncoats who are scared by what they see emerging on the Right end of the political spectrum. The words of these people carry a lot of weight with me: a Lefty might, after all, be expected to engage in pro forma Right bashing but not a dyed in the wool conservative.

             Mr. Fumento is afraid of a new Right which, in his words, has "co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger". Democrats are accused of being members of the Communist Party (?? do Communist Parties still exist??). Mitt Romney lets pass without comment tirades from the public demanding President Obama's indictment for treason. Whatever happened to the notion of the "loyal opposition", of respect for one's opponent's good faith and the parliamentary tradition of transparent, open debates on IDEAS?


http://fumento.com/media/extreme_right.html

              As the following video of tea party theoretician, Andrew Breitbart, demonstrates Fumento does have reason to worry. Our democracies in the West are dying; such rhetoric is the symptom of the internal cancer as Fumento justly oberves. Breitbart is seen here engaged in hatefilled provocation of peaceful Occupy demonstrators in Washington, DC: “You're freaks and animals! Stop raping people! Stop raping people! You freaks! You filthy freaks! You filthy, filthy, filthy raping, murdering freaks!”

http://www.animalnewyork.com/2012/andrew-you-are-freaks-and-animals-breitbart-dead-at-43/

              While I may disagree with many of Fumento's opinions and analyses of fact, I can't do better than cite his wise words:

"As a conservative, I disagree with the political opinions of liberals. But to me, a verbal assault indicates insecurity and weakness on the part of the assaulter... - the name-calling, the screaming, the horrible accusations - all are intended to stifle debate, the very lifeblood of a democracy."

               Amen! Mr Fumento - Amen! Our democracy in North America is in deep trouble indeed.

               As indicated earlier, there is something of a nano-trend going on. Fumento is not the only "traitor" to the "extreme right" (Fumento's term). Before him, there was the curious case of David Brock, Right wing hatchet man / spin-meister turned media watchdog, catching out the "extreme Right" in its dirty tricks campaign against political opponents.
 
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/republican-noise-machine

                As both Fumento and Brock argue, the objectives of the "New" or "extreme" Right are not transparency, truth or morality in government but power. It is the machiavelean drive for power: the end justifies the means. If lies, character assassination and - ultimately - self-deception are needed to obtain power or negate threatening change, so be it. I personally suspect that the rise of what has been called the Authoritarian Personality is symptom / cause of a deep seated pathology in Western Industrial societies. We cannot adapt - not easily - to the breakdown of our dominant paradigm of Infinite Growth (for example: Peak Oil and other non-renewable resource depletion). Becaue we can't - or refuse - to confront our real problems head on, we retreat into a fantasy world where Magical Thinking still works: God has made a pact with man as recorded in the book of Genesis. In return for man's obedience, God will give man "dominion over the earth". 

 http://www.minnpost.com/environment/2011/02/picking-science-fits-politics-rep-mike-beard-climate-change

                 This is ultimately a suicidal path. Not only do our real problems not go away (they fester and worsen) but the unresolved inner fear promotes mad acts. Scapegoats are sought in an attempt to reduce internal stress by finding a sacrificial victim whose death or humiliation provides some temporary relief from our fear and guilt. Thus, in Russia when crops failed, pogroms were organized. The "sacrificed" Jews diverted the misery of the peasants onto "expendable" targets, sparing the elites (landed gentry, clergy). As said earlier, we are on a dangerous path. Witness the hunt for "terrorists" and "islamofascists".

                  As an example of what populist politics looks like in a Canadian context, we can do no better than to draw the reader's attention to the Robocalls Scandal during the last federal election. Typically, voters with preferences towards parties other than the Conservatives were called on election day and given misleading information. The caller might identify themself as an employee of Elections Canada. The voter would then be told that their poll had been moved. They would waste their time going to the wrong address, perhaps losing their vote in the process. We are on a dangerous path..

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jim-harris/robocalls-scandal_b_1305397.html?ref=canada





 

no smoking gun but we see where the smoke rises

            Check this out! Peter Mansfield on CBC news, March 15

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6CT-I2Nw-o

           This is interesting. The noose tightens. The wiggle room contracts..

So this is governmental Transparency, eh?

            Lest we forget, Steven Harper was elected on promises of "responsible government, Law 'n Order, and transparency". And what do we get? An unenviable record of electoral dirty tricks that would even neo-conservative tactician Karl Rove would be proud of.

             During the last election, people in contested ridings received automated phone messages ("robocalls") purporting to originate with Elections Canada. Victims were told that their voting stations had been changed and were directed to new (non-existant) locales. Impersonating officials of Elections Canada to prevent voters from exercising their right is, of course, illegal.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/least+ridings+affected+robocalls+opposition/6212336/story.html 

            We suspect that neocons stoop to the level of negative ad bashing because they have nothing to put on the table: no program, no ideas, no vision. Just maintaining the dying, suicidal status quo on life support for a few more years at which time the boomers will all be dead in our graves. A sad commentary on a generation - who were given so much! - and our times..

             To conceal the intellectual vacuity of their positions on pressing issues like climate change, alternative energy, environment, rising disparity in income.. reactionaries turn - instinctively it seems - to the ad hominen / personal attack, to the victimization of scapegoats or to delusional national projects (historically, imperial wars were often used to this end). 

            Given that no less than 34 counties and some 79 individuals have come forward to date with complaints, one suspects that this issue is not going to go away very soon. We may be dealing with a breaking Watergate type scandal.
 

 internal blog link: 14 dec, 2011, Dirty Tricks, the New World Order
  
http://transparencycanada.blogspot.com/2011/12/dirty-tricks-new-world-order.html