Prime Minister Stephen Harper counterattacked Thursday, accusing the Liberals of being behind the calls the party says harassed its own supporters.
After a week of denials over the role the Conservative Party and a campaign team played in phone calls directing voters to the wrong polling station, and opposition party allegations over harassing calls in other ridings, Harper pushed back in question period.
The Liberals, Harper said in the House, have said people got misleading phone calls from numbers in the United States.
“We’ve done some checking, Mr. Speaker. We’ve only found that in fact it was the Liberal Party that did source its phone calls from the United States. So I wonder if the reason the honourable leader of the Liberal Party will not in fact show us his evidence is it will point in fact that it was the Liberal Party that made these calls,” he said.
Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae said Harper was smearing thousands of Canadians complaining about the calls.
“The prime minister and his colleagues have remarkable ability to turn themselves into victims,” Rae said.
“The prime minister cannot deny the fact that two of the companies that are involved with respect to [campaign] activities are now under serious investigation. Nor can he deny the fact that there is an RCMP investigation ongoing with respect to what happened in Guelph.”
The accusations led to confusion, however, centred on three call companies with similar names, including Prime Contact Group, based in Canada, and Prime Contact Inc., based in North Dakota.
Harper said a third company, First Contact, routed its calls through the U.S.
But, as CBC News reported during the election, First Contact owner Mike O’Neill said someone was “spoofing” First Contact’s numbers — projecting a fake caller ID — to impersonate his company.
CBC News conducted its own experiment and found dozens of online companies and services that allow users to create bogus caller IDs and faked display phone numbers. It takes just seconds and can be done for just pennies per call.
Earlier in the day, a democracy watchdog group urged MPs to demand more from Elections Canada when it comes to reporting on how the agency follows up on complaints.
A spokesman for Democracy Watch says 2,300 complaints were submitted to Elections Canada between 2004 and 2011, but the agency didn’t report on whether it investigated or what it found.
“Our MPs have kind of dropped the ball here because what they should have been doing is asking for this information, not only from Elections Canada but from every single watchdog,” Tyler Sommers said.
Elections Canada has refused to confirm its investigation in Guelph, although the RCMP has confirmed it is assisting in the investigation.
“It’s likely that the robocall issue is only the tip of the iceberg and that, because Elections Canada hasn’t been disclosing information like they should, there are going to be some serious questions about whether our elections have been fair since 2004,” Sommers said.
He said reports of automated calls directing voters to the wrong polling station in Guelph, Ont., in the last federal election are “very disturbing.”
Opposition MPs say they have reports of robocalls or strange, harassing live calls from more than 45 ridings in the lead-up to the May 2, 2011, election. Harper says the opposition parties are acting like sore losers.
Sommers said Democracy Watch will push MPs to demand information about any investigations Elections Canada leads.
“It’s very simple. Elections are the cornerstone of any democracy,” he said. “Without faith in elections, you can’t have faith in the rest of our democratic institutions.”
Article source: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/robocalls-battle-fires-commons-202841832.html
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