CBC uncovers more Conservative links to fraudulent Canadian election calls

[Newsjock]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/03/15/pol-investigation-.html

An investigation by CBC News has turned up voters all over Canada who say the reason they got robocalls sending them to fictitious polling stations was that they'd revealed they would not vote Conservative.

Although the Conservative Party has denied any involvement in the calls, these new details suggest that the misleading calls relied on data gathered by, and carefully guarded by, the Conservative Party.

... Saj Aziz in the riding of Mississauga-Streetsville ... said a "research company" tried to find out who he was voting for as part of an "independent poll." When he declined to commit to the Conservatives, he was told that "a supervisor" would call him back. Then, he got a call from the Conservative party, trying to win him over. When that didn't work, he finally got a call saying that his polling station had moved. However, he'd already voted in the advance poll, at the right place.

In Guelph — where the robo-call scandal began — Gordon Webb says he made it clear to the Conservatives that he would not vote for them. He, too, got a misdirection call telling him to go to a phoney polling station. At least a hundred people showed up there and some of them angrily gave up on voting, blaming Elections Canada.

[teddy51]

1. I hope that this will bring the Harper Government down! n/t

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

2. And this is where Canada's archaic colonial idiosyncrasies can get reallly, really interesting

The Governor General of Canada, acting on behalf of Queen Elizabeth retains immense legal authority to act in a crisis. Simply put the Governor General can fire the Prime Minister if the Prime Minister is acting unconstitutionally, incompetently or criminally.

This has only happened once in modern Commonwealth history when the Governor General of Australia fired Prime Minister E.G. Whitlam in 1975.