One, as they say, is an incident; two is a coincidence. But by the time you reach 30 or 40 coincidences, things start looking like a plan. What would call 31,000 incidents and rising?
Well, there are more than a few Canadians willing to call it a conspiracy.
By Friday, Elections Canada had received more than 31,000 individual complaints that Liberal or NDP supporters were called by Elections Canada on the last federal election day, and directed by automated voice messages to polling stations that didn’t exist. Or that they were called at inconvenient hours (on the Sabbath in ridings with large Jewish populations) by real people purporting to represent the Liberal Party, and who were brusquely intrusive or just plain rude in their work.
The so-called “dirty tricks” controversy that has gripped the capital will not go away. Not when 31,000 individuals have lodged official complaints with Election Canada that someone attempted to defraud the election.
Prime Minster Stephen Harper has been adamant that the Conservative Party was in no way responsible for the misdirecting robocalls. For now, we’ll have to take him at his word, even though “Pierre Poutine’s” burner cellphone number is linked to companies with Tory ties.
Companies with Liberal Party contracts in North Dakota, First Contact and Prime Contact, have been linked (by the Tories) to least at some of the calls, although on Friday, that claim was shot down by Prime Contact.
Attempting to muddy the waters with counter-claims of you-did-it-too is not going to make this go away, either.
If 31,000 complaints are not actual evidence of election tampering, they are evidence that people have been telling a very large number of lies.
Would it be possible for a rogue Tory operative to have made all those calls? It would have to be someone who can make a voice recording to sound either male or female. Perhaps that is possible for the robocalls, and you can choose to believe it.
But what about the thousands of phoney polling calls? You’d need a warehouse full of rogues for that. But in an infinite universe, that’s possible, too.
Likewise that tens of thousands of Canadians would call a government agency in order to go on record with a smear against the government. Hey, it’s tax time. Could happen.
It’s also possible that the Liberal Party is so incompetent, with leadership in the last campaign so divorced from its workers, that somebody in the chain of command could authorize a million-dollar contract to alienate the party’s own supporters in the most critical, hard-fought ridings in Canada. Yes, that’s possible, and you can choose to believe that, too.
It’s also possible to believe that in a Parliament so bitterly divided, with partisan lines so viciously held, that our governors have stopped seeing each other as colleagues, but as enemies not only of themselves, but of the state. That affairs have come to a point where anything is justified to keep the other side from winning, because “our cause” is worth anything to protect.
For his own part, Liberal MP Justin Trudeau said as much in an interview in last week’s Maclean’s magazine.
His interim leader, Bob Rae, having once apologized in Parliament for a party employee’s behaviour over the ‘VicyLeaks’ incident, seems confident that 31,000 official complaints to Election Canada need an answer.
“Unless the prime minister and his associates want to say there are 31,000 Canadians and more who are participating in a smear campaign, he’s going to have a hard time simply dismissing these concerns about what happened in the last election,” Rae said.
And if you believe that Ottawa is just a room full of liars, then what’s the point of voting? If you do believe that, then democracy in Canada was never there to be killed by rogue operatives — or anyone else.
What are you prepared to believe?
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.