As you read this - you may wonder if any Newfoundland and Labrador Conservative candidates used this company during the last federal election?
The following is taken from the list as supplied by Kady's post.
Avalon - Fabian Manning 3/28/2011 RMG $15,000
| Bonavista - Gander - Grand Falls-Windsor - Aaron Hynes 4/25/2011 RMG $11,469 |
| St. John's East - Jerry Byrne | RMG $15,000 |
- February 27, 2012 1:10 PM
- By Kady O'Malley
Breaking as we speak (or, in this case, type): What could very well turn out to be a major development -- or, at the very least, an intriguing new angle -- on the robocalls controversy, courtesy of the Toronto Star:
Callers on behalf of the federal Conservative Party were instructed in the days before last year's election to read scripts telling voters that Elections Canada had changed their voting locations, say telephone operators who worked for a Thunder Bay-based call centre.
These weren't "robo-calls," as automated pre-recorded voice messages as commonly known. They were live real-time calls made into ridings across Canada, the callers say.In a new twist on new growing allegations of political "dirty tricks," three former employees of RMG -- Responsive Marketing Group Inc.'s call centre in Thunder Bay -- told the Star about the scripts.A fourth remembered directing people to voting stations but did not remember passing on any message that a voting station had changed. However, one employee was so concerned that something was amiss she says she reported it to her supervisor at the RMG site, to the RCMP office in Thunder Bay and to a toll-free Elections Canada number at the time.
Read the full story here.
A
caveat, though: Unlike the calls in Guelph -- and, allegedly, in other
ridings as well -- in which the caller (or, in some cases, the recorded
message) stated that it was from Elections Canada, these staffers were
apparently working off a script that had them explicitly identify
themselves as calling from the Conservative Party, which would seem a
somewhat risky practice if the intent was to misdirect supporters of
other parties to the wrong polling station.
Not
only would non-Conservative voters be sceptical of any information
coming from the party, they would also be far more likely to remember
the source if that information turned out to be false.
Interestingly, RMG -- which is a major supplier of phone-related
services to the Conservative Party, and has been credited with doing
much of the data harvesting that went into the creation and maintenance
of CIMS, the party's much-envied voter ID database -- also surfaced as a
possible source of potentially, if inadvertently, misleading phone
calls purportedly made "on behalf of the prime minister" last year,
which asked whether the respondent believed it was important to "support
the state of Israel" as I reported at the time here.
(For
the record, a Conservative spokesperson eventually confirmed that the
calls were authorized by the party, but did not provide the name of the
firm that conducted the outreach campaign.)
