The difference between Voter Suppression and other Robo Calls

There appears to be a lack of clarity about what defines an act that violates our basic right to participate in an election under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and what is a dirty political trick. This is a VERY important distinction, as the latter is a type of politics that people should be ashamed of (as practiced by the last campaign for Frank Valeriotte) and the former is illegal.

The Mercury does a good job of explaining something MP Valeriotte's campaign did that was legal but something I would say is wrong in our system in this article. Essentially, his campaign sent out a voice message to thousands of people in Guelph informing them that Marty Burke (the Conservative candidate) opposed abortions. Nowhere in this message did his campaign choose to identify that the message was coming from the Liberal candidate. This type of negative attack designed to prey on emotions of voters with personal statements turns many people off of politics and acts as a barrier to participation from community members who would make strong community leaders, but is only a minor violation of the Elections Act (the Elections Act requires all campaign advertisements to have a statement saying who paid for it).

I can't find an article from the local paper outlining the severity of what the Conservative Party (allegedly) has done, so I'll refer back to previous blog posts: The voice messages (robocalls) sent out to thousands of people on election day sending them to the wrong polling station, purporting to be from Elections Canada, were a blatant attempt to keep people from voting. This is one of the few things in life we can count on as being blatantly illegal.

Elections Canada is investigating, aided by the RCMP. The Government of Canada needs to be urged to set up their own independent investigative body, much like the Gomery commission. This should not be done because it is easy, but because it is right.

Full disclosure: As the manager for the Green Party campaign for John Lawson in this election, we used a telecommunications company for polling, a telephone townhall and robocalls. Our robocalls were used to invite people to events, remind them to vote and then one was sent in response to the suppression call to let our supporters know that the voting locations had not changed. The company we used was Solusone, I believe they are based out of Vaughan, Ontario.