Free Party of One by Michael Harris Page A

2011 federal election—and in the last week of the campaign, when it was too late to send out a revised voter information card by mail, just 61. (The percentage of voting stations across Canada that changed location in the final week of the federal election was just 0.003.) In the forty-first general election “a party” asked Elections Canada for polling site information, which Elections Canada then provided to all registered political parties. In the restrictions accompanying the data, Elections Canada told campaigns not to provide poll site information to voters, specifying that “the database was for internal purposes only, and was not to be ‘used to inform voters of their voting locations via mail-outs or other forms of communication.’” Despite the “warning,” in 2011, the Conservative national campaign did place calls with poll information. Had someone cleverly realized that those last-minute location changes provided the perfect cover to use calls to suppress the vote?
    The investigation into the 2011 election scandal started quietly, just two days after Stephen Harper’s victory. The implications were momentous. Had the Conservatives stolen the election, the way many Liberals believed they had in 2006, by illegally spending a million dollars more on advertising than campaign spending limits allowed? Al Mathews, a seasoned investigator and former RCMP officer, began by filing a series of court orders for telephone records. The Conservative Party’s main phone bank company was RMG. The Marty Burke campaign in Guelph listed both RMG ($15,000) and another firm, Campaign Research, ($6,215) as campaign expenses. On its website, RMG said it worked exclusively with right-of-centre campaigns to develop fundraising and voter contact strategies. In 2011, RMG provided live calling services for the Conservative Party’s national campaign as well as eighty local campaigns using data from the Conservative Constituent Information Management System (CIMS), provided by the partyor local candidates. 1 CIMS was the party’s voter-tracking database, and kept track of all voters nationwide. Live calls for political campaigns cost about $30 per hour.
    But Elections Canada investigators also traced calls from Burke’s campaign office to RackNine, the Conservative voter contact firm in Edmonton, Alberta. Inexplicably, the Burke campaign did not include any payment to the Alberta company in its election expenses. That mystery was solved when Andrew Prescott later explained that he had paid for the robocalls himself and been reimbursed through his $1,100 honorarium. His invoice had apparently not been forwarded to Marty Burke’s official agent by campaign manager Ken Morgan, nor did it appear on Burke’s declaration of election expenses. On June 8, 2011, investigator Al Mathews filed a request seeking Bell Canada records for the “burner” cellphone he believed had been used to make the deceitful calls.
    On November 23, 2011, Mathews served a court order on RackNine seeking records related to the Conservative campaign in Guelph, including calls from the burner phone used by “Pierre.” RackNine had thirty days to produce the data and documents. The production order specified that RackNine itself was not under investigation for the offences outlined in the official request for information. According to Mathews and Conservative Party records, the Guelph campaign IP address was used by five of Marty Burke’s campaign volunteers to access the party database. Mathews alleged that “RackNine client #45, whom RackNine believed to be Andrew Prescott . . . logged into RackNine as client #45 in a single web session along with client #93 using the same IP address.” Client #93 was “Pierre Jones.”
    The call logs showed that the burner phone used by “Pierre Poutine” was contacted multiple times from locations in the United States, including six text messages from numbers in Anaheim and Pasadena, California. There was also