UNDER THE BUS
It’s a long way from Hackensack, New Jersey, where he was born on October 6, 1988, to the media spotlight in a Canadian political scandal, and it wasn’t supposed to end this way for Michael Sona, who went from being a legislative assistant for a Conservative MP to being the only person charged in the robocall scandal.
When the tall, gangly, young man who likes to bake his own bread decided to enter the world of federal politics, it had never been anything more than a short-term plan. He would immerse himself in government for a few years, and then use the experience to enter the private sector, either as a lobbyist or a communications specialist—a common goal of many young interns who staff the offices of Conservative cabinet ministers and MPs in Ottawa.
Sona bought his membership in the Conservative Party of Canada in 2007. Over the next few years, he earned his spurs on a variety of campaigns, including a provincial leadership race in Ontario. He also gained experience in nomination races and party-executive elections. “Pretty much since the day I joined, it [was] one campaign after another in some capacity or other,” he told me.
Then came Ottawa. In Stephen Harper’s shop, Sona’s biggest task was to master the unique way this government wanted to “communicate.” Although Sona was never a staffer in either the PMO or party headquarters (HQ), he worked for cabinet minister James Moore. He also helped cabinet ministers and MPs on numerous campaigns to carry out the Harper government’s media strategy. It came down to three words: less is more. “No comment” was often a winning strategy. The cardinal rule was not to turn one bad story into two by advancing it with a comment or reaction. Without the oxygen of fresh information, the theory went, the story would usually die.
Communications in the Harper government was not about passing along facts but often about advancing politically useful narratives while withholding real information. The government tried that tactic during the Afghanistan and F-35 Lightning II fighter jet debates, and would try it again during the robocalls and Senate scandals. On one occasion, Harper even earned a citation for contempt of Parliament for withholding details of proposed bills and cost estimates from Parliament.1 Public apathy was the government’s greatest ally in this dubious policy, and it didn’t take Michael Sona long to figure that out. “In my experience, most voters are apathetic to the goings-on in Ottawa unless it involves one of two things: their wallets or their rights,” said Sona. “Mess with either of those things, and the voters will care and the story will not die.”
The second pillar of the Harper communications strategy was refraining from committing to anything, an approach that allowed the government to mould its message on the fly as new facts emerged. Sona noted that this method was often employed in Question Period, where opposition queries are virtually never answered, and in some cases, not even acknowledged. It left the opposition shadow-boxing most days, and reduced the government’s front bench to a platitude-with-attitude brigade.
Sona soon discovered that the Harper government was not a place for creative or independent thinkers. It was a party of one— Harper’s way or the highway. “We couldn’t even sneeze without calling HQ first,” Sona told me. “It wasn’t about the content, as I found out many times throughout that 2011 campaign: it was about control. HQ simply wanted everything to be run through them.”
The final training project HQ assigned to interns like Sona in the summer of 2009 was a presentation explaining how they would win the federal riding of St. John’s South–Mount Pearl in Newfoundland and Labrador then held by Liberal Siobhan Coady. Sona remembered his fellow interns being petrified at the prospect of presenting in front of HQ staff, including Jenni Byrne, Patrick Muttart, and Fred DeLorey. After the presentations, the director of political operations and her colleagues critiqued the presentations, often harshly according to Sona.
Observing how wooden some of the other interns looked who spoke from notes, Sona was glad that he had memorized his speech. The goal was now to look as though he were speaking extempore about his plan to win the riding. The talk went smoothly and he felt confident he had passed muster.
Prior to the election, the local Guelph campaign team had a “fairly vibrant website which was constantly being updated,” Sona recalled. But after the writ dropped, HQ micro-managed everything. All posts and photos had to go through Ottawa, and workers in the field could not upload content to the local site directly. Sona heard the same complaints from other ridings, but it didn’t pay to buck head office. People grumbled but crumbled when HQ cracked the whip.
According to Sona, the most remarkable thing he learned during his internship was that the Harper government didn’t care about the veracity of its pronouncements, just their effect. “It’s not the facts of situations that are important to this government; it is the perception of the facts. That is why this government spends so much time driving a simple narrative as opposed to actually fixing problems,” says Sona. “When they make mistakes at the top, they try to cover themselves by withholding the facts. . . . When you rode into town on that white horse of transparency and openness, that’s a very dangerous electoral position to be in.”
Sona, the “son of a preacher man,” had been well grounded since childhood in religious morality; his father ministered to his flock at the North River Road Gospel Hall in Guelph, where the family moved when Sona was five. His education in political morality was delivered during the 2011 campaign. “We were told that they weren’t telling us to go out and destroy the other guys’ signs,” Sona recounted, “but if we did, the best thing to use was oven cleaner. The guy said acetone would work just as well and we could get plenty of that from the printing company we were using. Then one of the top guys [deceased senator Doug Finley, allegedly] told us how to get around spending limits, which I thought was funny, since they were still tangled up in the in-and-out thing.”
So why, I asked Sona, did he get mixed up in unethical things, assuming it were true he was not “Pierre Poutine”? There were two parts to his answer. The first had to do with a rationalization he and some of his colleagues on the campaign had made: the Conservatives might be bad, but the alternative was so much worse that it justified their tactics. And then there were those dirty tricks the opposition was resorting to in Guelph. “We were getting hit by unidentified robocalls, very, very negative stuff. We wanted to mount a robocall campaign against Frank Valeriote that couldn’t be traced back to us—Frank the Flip-Flopper. But none of us knew how to do it. So I asked John White and he told me to contact Matt McBain [at Conservative headquarters] to find out. McBain emailed White to see if I was okay. White said I was on the team and a good guy and to go ahead and talk to me. We talked. I later texted McBain but never heard back.” The anonymous robocall campaign Sona was prepared to launch was to have referred to Valeriote’s history of alleged political hypocrisy on a range of issues, including his attendance at both Catholic and evangelical churches in Guelph. Sona explained that this robocall campaign never went forward because no one ever showed him how to make the required untraceable call.
Training their political operatives is a priority of the “modernized” Conservative Party of Canada and one of the secrets to the party’s success. Sona knew of operatives who were sent to the United States in election years to see how the Republican machine operated. The Conservatives also use the resources of the International Democrat Union (IDU), a global organization of centre-right political parties. Founded in 1983 by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and US vice-president George H.W. Bush, the IDU’s membership includes the US Republican Party, Conservative parties in the UK and Canada, and the centre-right Liberals in Australia. Other founding members included Margaret Thatcher, Jacques Chirac, and Helmut Kohl.
Today the IDU has seventy member parties from fifty-six countries. Based in Norway, the organization’s current chair is former Australian prime minister John Howard. An IDU Future Leaders Forum met in Washington in October 2013. The meeting was organized by the Young Republicans and aimed at drawing young representatives from IDU parties and their associated networks around the world. The program included senior speakers from the Republican Party, campaign experts, members of think-tanks, and representatives from the right-wing media. The gathering promised “high-level training and policy discussions.” The IDU executive has met in Canada, including a February 2009 gathering in Toronto. In 2012, the campaign directors from member parties in eleven different countries took part in the meeting of the IDU’s Standing Committee on Elections and Campaigns. The meeting was hosted by the Conservative Party of Canada in Ottawa on March 29 and 30, 2012. The IDU also regularly holds election technology seminars. The elected officers of the IDU for 2011–2014 included Tony Clement as a vice-chair, and Senator Doug Finley was an assistant chair until his death.
Former Harper chief of staff Patrick Muttart adopted his voter identification techniques from John Howard. Muttart, who was brought back from the United States to work for Harper as a key strategist in the 2011 campaign, was described by Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute as “the world’s leading expert on working-class voters in English-speaking countries.”2 Former NDP leadership candidate Brian Topp described work like Muttart’s as trying “to manipulate” blue-collar voters into “voting against their own interests.”
The idea of organized voter suppression to win an election is new in Canada, but the Republicans have used it effectively in the United States for several years. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) was founded in 2003 by billionaires Charles and David Koch. AFP president Tim Phillips said the group was focused on voter turnout—and, some would say, on suppressing it.3
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), funded in part by the Koch brothers, has put up the money for a drive to require photo ID to vote in the United States. Under the guise of preventing voter fraud, which is largely non-existent, the campaign actually disenfranchises the poor, students who move away to school, young voters, African Americans, and seniors who may not have a driver’s licence. That list is primarily made up of people likely not to vote Republican. ALEC was founded by Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. (It was Weyrich who actually coined the term “moral majority.”) Weyrich was also a co-founder of the Council for National Policy (CNP), headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, the secretive, ultraconservative organization Stephen Harper spoke to in Montreal in 1997 about the shortcomings of Canadian governance. Weyrich famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of the country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Not everyone thinks training people how to manipulate elections is an improvement over winning them the old fashioned way—by information, persuasion, and debate. On September 5, 2012, Preston Manning gave an interview to the CBC in which he condemned the idea of using robocalls to harass voters or divert them to the wrong polls. Manning said that workers needed better ethical training and that it was a mistake to link political dirty tricks to a single party. He believed that part of the problem is that all parties now send young Canadians to political training schools in the United States, where politics is practised with far fewer scruples. The founder of the Reform Party declared that Canadian politics had to be insulated from US-style tactics. Part of the answer was stricter oversight by campaign managers and Elections Canada, but Manning proposed a more fundamental solution: “I actually think the more effective thing is preventing it in the first place and that involves ethical training.”
The robocalls scandal dominated federal politics in 2012, and its ripple effect spread from the House of Commons and the daily Question Period straight across the country. Reports were heard of harassing and misleading calls to Liberal and NDP supporters in several ridings, including Eglinton-Lawrence in Toronto, a seat won for the Conservatives by Joe Oliver, now finance minister. Oliver beat incumbent Liberal Joe Volpe by more than four thousand votes. As reported by Postmedia, Jewish voters were called repeatedly on the Sabbath. Early-morning and late-night calls were also made, supposedly by Volpe’s campaign. This was a tactic remarkably similar to the dead-of-night calls that were planned but not carried out in Guelph with the second CIMS list. There were also allegations of a late influx into polling stations of unregistered voters without addresses, or who provided fake addresses.
In Thunder Bay, Ontario, a worker at the Conservative Party’s main call company swore in an affidavit4 she had been told to direct voters to the wrong polling stations in the final days of the campaign. Annette Desgagné said she and her co-workers had been instructed to identify themselves as calling from the “Voter Outreach Centre.” Desgagné swore that at least one of her colleagues had identified himself as calling from Elections Canada when misdirecting voters: “I became very concerned that I was participating in something that involved giving voters wrong information. My internal radar went off. I wrote down what I could recall from the script I was asked to read about Change of Address calls and I arranged for the information to go to the RCMP.” Desgagné also reported her concerns to Elections Canada.
Predictably, both Responsive Marketing Group (RMG) and the Conservative Party rejected Desgagné’s sworn affidavit as unreliable. And in his robocall report, elections commissioner Yves Côté said he had found no evidence to corroborate reports that callers posed as Elections Canada employees. However, some electors were told to vote at a specific poll, and the poll location indicated was incorrect.5 According to Elections Canada records, RMG worked on ninety-seven Conservative campaigns across the country, as well as the national campaign, billing them $1.4 million. The company had worked with CIMS as it was developed in 2003, and it was “the best in the business” according to Senator Doug Finley. The Conservatives won Nipissing-Timiskaming, one of the ridings called by RMG, by eighteen votes.
In its investigation of robocalls outside of Guelph, Elections Canada requested phone records from Shaw, Vidéotron, and Rogers. Elections Canada investigator John Dickson, who was conducting the national investigation, received records of incoming and outgoing calls of forty-five Rogers customers complaining of calls about poll location changes in the week before the 2011 election. NDP MP Pat Martin claimed that thirty-four federal ridings received fraudulent calls telling people that their voting station had changed. Prime Minister Harper responded by challenging the Opposition to “prove” that the Conservatives had made the calls.
After Postmedia journalists Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor broke the robocalls story on February 23, 2012, country-wide demonstrations erupted demanding a public inquiry to reveal the identity of the alleged election cheaters. Stephen Harper steadfastly refused to call an inquiry, practising instead his government’s 3-D approach to damage control: deny, deflect, and delay—and, if possible, catch the next plane out of town for important international work.
Part of the effort was public relations on the ground. Senator Mike Duffy was dispatched to downplay the scandal in the media. On February 27, 2012, Duffy appeared on Jordi Morgan’s Halifax radio show on News 95.7, claiming that it wasn’t “us doing it” and that the Conservatives welcomed the investigation. Duffy then offered an intriguing conjecture: the calls could have been made by what he called unnamed “third parties.” “I don’t believe it was the Conservative Party,” he said. “But if something is going on, don’t forget, we have all these other groups. . . . People have to remember that it’s not just political parties that are operating during a federal election campaign. Under the law, we have all kinds of interested third parties that are operating in election campaigns, and I think that’s where we have to be careful.”
Duffy didn’t say who these “third parties” were. It was enough to merely suggest a mysterious culprit to draw attention away from the Conservatives. Besides, as the senator made clear, “This isn’t the end of the world here. But it is something that needs to be investigated and frankly it burns my butt, because the dirty tricksters are at it and I don’t think anybody in politics likes this.” Duffy ended the interview by telling Morgan’s radio audience that in his forty years covering politics, Stephen Harper was “the straightest politician [he had] ever covered.” In less than a year, mired in the Senate expenses scandal, Duffy would offer a very different appraisal of how things were done in Stephen Harper’s PMO.
Although the Harper government and Conservative Party headquarters continued to protest their innocence in the robocall affair, the party’s credibility suffered a serious reversal. In late January 2013, Saskatchewan residents began receiving an interactive push poll, a robocall critical of draft changes to the boundaries of federal ridings in the province proposed by the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for Saskatchewan. With thirty new seats up for grabs across the country in the 2015 election, the new riding boundaries were crucially important public issues. The push poll asked residents if they agreed with a plan that would damage “Saskatchewan values” by pitting rural and urban voters against each other. No message accompanied the robocall to say who had commissioned it.
Saskatchewan Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski and Conservative Party spokesperson Fred DeLorey denied that the party was doing the polling, but the reporting team of Maher and McGregor weren’t buying it. Maher thought he recognized the voice on the recording from their previous robocall stories. To test their theory, the reporters hired an American forensic audio analyst to study the voice. It turned out to belong to Matt Meier of RackNine, the same firm used by the Conservatives—and “Pierre Poutine”—to make robocalls in the 2011 election. This time, Meier couldn’t claim he didn’t know the content of the message going out, because he himself had recorded it. Glen McGregor, who had reported Fred DeLorey’s denial that Conservatives were behind the poll, was shocked. “The Saskatchewan riding boundary robocalls story was utterly astounding to me,” said McGregor. “The idea that the Tories would be so brazen as to hire RackNine in the midst of the Poutine case, to make such dirty tricks calls, then to cover it up, lie to me about it—Just wow. . . . Providing patently false information, on the record, to a reporter is the worst thing a spokesman can do. Because of this, he [DeLorey] has very little credibility in my view.”
The Harper government’s deputy House leader, Tom Lukiwski, was livid. Blindsided by the illegal push poll in his own province, he immediately told Saskatoon radio station CKOM that the calls were “deceptive.” He went further on a CBC radio call-in show, declaring that Jenni Byrne, the party’s most senior official, should be held responsible: “I don’t know which party official it would be, but I know that Jenni Byrne, who is executive director, said, well, ultimately the buck stops with her. She should take full responsibility.”
Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair accused the Conservatives of lying about the call. After denying the story, Fred DeLorey now said that there had been an “internal miscommunication.” The prime minister insisted, “The party has already explained that it has followed all the rules and the law in this situation.” But the CRTC requires that all robocalls identify their sponsor. The Saskatchewan push poll did not declare that it was being paid for by the Conservative Party, and for that reason it was illegal.
After some serious bumps, things began shifting the government’s way in the robocalls affair. Matt Meier threatened to sue NDP MP Pat Martin unless he apologized for remarks he had made about RackNine’s involvement in the Guelph robocalls. Martin obliged, but Meier sued him for $5 million anyway. The case was eventually settled out of court. Ironically, in late May 2013, the CRTC announced that RackNine had agreed to pay $60,000 in fines for fifteen illegal robocalls campaigns sent out on behalf of political parties from March 2011 to February 2013. These included six campaigns for the Wildrose Party and two for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, all made without identifying who was behind the messages. The “Pierre Poutine” calls from Guelph were not part of the CRTC penalties. However, the federal Conservatives were fined $78,000 for doing the Saskatchewan boundary push poll without a declaration of origin.
The best break the Harper government got in the robocalls affair came at the expense of the Liberals. The riding association of the Liberal MP from Guelph, Frank Valeriote, was fined $4,900 for making illegal robocalls two days before the 2011 election. The anonymous calls attacked the Conservative candidate’s position on abortion. (This was the phone campaign against Marty Burke that Michael Sona wanted to counter with a barrage of calls aimed at Frank the Flip-Flopper.) Valeriote cooperated fully with the CRTC when he learned the call did not include identifying information, and told reporters, “I take full responsibility and apologize for the infringement.” After the CRTC levied the fine in August 2012, Harper never missed an opportunity of mentioning that the only person convicted in the robocalls affair was a Liberal—MP Frank Valeriote. It was a clever attempt at shifting the focus.
Maude Barlow and the Council of Canadians (COC) had earlier called the prime minister’s bluff. Just a month after the robocalls story broke, the COC began filing court applications on behalf of nine voters seeking to overturn election results in seven ridings won by the Conservatives because of alleged cheating. One challenge was later dropped. Reflecting the view of thousands of Canadians, the COC believed the case was of “fundamental importance to our democracy” and was “both critical and unprecedented.” The COC observed that although the Conservatives claimed they wanted to get to the bottom of the robocalls affair, “They seem to be doing whatever they can to prevent this case from being heard by a judge.” The COC was referring to the fact that the Conservatives had filed a 750-page legal brief asking the Federal Court to dismiss the challenges by Maude Barlow and her organization. Lawyers for the Conservatives argued that no evidence showed that anyone had actually been denied the right to vote. Strangely, those same lawyers seemed uninterested in the fact that if the Conservative Party had nothing to do with deceptive robocalls, the party’s database had been hacked, pilfered, and used to break the law.
Despite efforts by the lawyers for the Conservatives, the Federal Court ruled that the Council of Canadians’ suit could proceed. The council’s lawyer, Steven Shrybman, asked Elections Canada to provide the COC with details of complaints from voters in two hundred ridings. Ultimately, the results in six ridings in the 2011 election were challenged by voters in Federal Court, who were supported by the Council of Canadians. The case wrapped up in mid-December 2012. Although the Conservatives would claim victory when the judgment came down in May, it was in fact a stunning confirmation of electoral fraud in Canada—driven by Conservative voter information buried deep inside the electronic fortress of CIMS.
Federal Court justice Richard Mosley ruled that widespread telephone fraud targeting non-Conservative voters had taken place, likely based on CIMS, but not enough evidence had been presented to overturn the voting results in the six electoral districts. In an indictment of what went on, Mosley wrote, “There was an orchestrated effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election campaign by a person or persons with access to the CIMS database.” The COC had brought to light evidence of fraud in multiple ridings outside Guelph but no proof of the fraudster: “There is no evidence to indicate that the use of the CIMS database in this manner was approved or condoned by the CPC,” the judge wrote. “Rather the evidence points to elaborate efforts to conceal the identity of those accessing the database and arranging for the calls to be made.”
In a rebuke of the Conservative Party’s claim that it had always cooperated with investigations into robocalls, the judge also noted that the Conservatives had actually engaged in “trench warfare” to prevent the civil case from coming to a hearing on the merits. If Canadians believed the party line, either someone was trying to frame the Conservatives, or the party had been the victim of an elaborate theft without their knowledge. As Andrew Coyne pointed out in his column,6 someone had committed massive electoral fraud that could only benefit the Conservative Party, but apparently had done it without the party’s involvement.
The two seminal scandals of the Harper years intersected on what must have been a bad day in the PMO. On the same day as the Mosley decision, May 23, 2013, Senator Mike Duffy spoke to reporters for the first time since the bombshell report by CTV’s Bob Fife charging that the prime minister’s chief of staff had given the senator $90,000 to pay off improper expenses. Duffy said he wanted a “full and open inquiry” and promised to reveal what had happened: “I think Canadians have a right to know all the facts and I’m quite prepared, in the right place and time, to give them the whole story.”
After eight months of living under a cloud of suspicion created by senior members of his own party, Michael Sona made a fateful decision. Once he heard elections commissioner Yves Côté recommend charges in the Guelph robocalls case after a twenty-one-month investigation, Sona went public. The figure at the eye of the storm gave an interview to the Huffington Post and later to the Ottawa Citizen, making the point to anyone who would listen that many of the alleged facts about him in the affidavit of Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews were wrong. With the prime minister refusing demands for a judicial inquiry, and frustrated by the fact that he had been fingered by anonymous senior Conservatives in the Guelph case, Michael Sona reached for the ultimate megaphone: network television.
In an attempt to clear his name, Sona appeared on CBC’s Power & Politics on October 31, 2012. He told host Evan Solomon that his name had been leaked to the media by anonymous party sources and that he was not going to “take the fall” for something he didn’t do. On the main point—who was responsible for the deceitful Guelph robocalls—he categorically denied that he was “Pierre Poutine”; nor did he know who was. Sona’s suggestion seemed to be that important players in Ottawa had been deeply engaged in the Marty Burke attack campaign. Guelph was a targeted riding for the Conservatives, and HQ was “very involved” in trying to take it from the Liberals.
Sona told Solomon that Nick Kouvalis, a principal partner of Campaign Research, a company used by the Conservative Party in the 2011 election, was in the Guelph riding between eight and twelve times doing voter outreach. (Kouvalis countered by tweeting that he was in the riding twice.) Kouvalis had been campaign manager for Rob Ford in 2010, and worked for thirty-nine campaigns in the 2011 election, most of them in Ontario. The company was hard-nosed in its approach to politics. A formal complaint was lodged against Campaign Research for suggesting to voters in Liberal MP Irwin Cotler’s riding of Mount Royal that Cotler was about to retire, which was untrue. When Cotler complained to the Speaker of the House that his privileges as an MP had been breached by the false campaign, Speaker Andrew Scheer investigated. Though he did not make a finding that Campaign Research had breached Cotler’s privilege, Scheer called the deceptive phone campaign “reprehensible.” Kouvalis did not seem to be overly concerned. As he told Postmedia, “We’re in the business of getting Conservatives elected and ending Liberal careers. We’re good at it.”7
As for Sona, he wanted people to consider how credible it was that one person in a notoriously top-down operation could be responsible for the complex and nationwide voter deception caper that was robocalls. As he put it to me, had a “twenty-two-year-old guy managed to coordinate this entire massive scheme when he didn’t even have access to the data to be able to do this?” In fact, there were five workers on the Guelph campaign who did have access to the CIMS database during the election: Andrew Prescott, John White, Ken Morgan, Trent Blanchette, and Chris Crawford. Crawford, White, and Sona gave evidence to investigators. Prescott initially refused, then granted a telephone conversation, and finally cancelled a subsequent formal interview with Elections Canada investigators.
Morgan and Blanchette refused outright to speak to Elections Canada, Morgan by email in April 2012. Four months later, he moved to Kuwait. Not even the dogged reporters who had broken the robocalls story could get to him, as Glen McGregor told me. “Did everything we could to contact him,” said McGregor. “I even spoke to the father of his American girlfriend in Kuwait City. He would never talk to us. Still won’t. He’s a huge open question in robocalls.” Though Morgan remained incommunicado, he revealed glimpses of a lonely man on Twitter between November 7, 2012, and June 7, 2013: “Missing Canada today. Family, food, smells . . . even politics.” Even the name of his blog site—“The Captain’s Quarters 10,410 kilometres from home”—showed the depth of the isolation he felt.
Given that Sona did not have access to CIMS during the writ period, which would be necessary to obtain the list of non-supporters used in the fraudulent calls, the most likely alternative to the “rogue operator” theory was that robocalls was a highly coordinated deception by skilled and knowledgeable people. There were individuals at HQ, at the automated calling companies, and on the Guelph campaign team who had those technical skills.
Sona had barely washed off his TV makeup before Conservative Party headquarters fired back. Fred DeLorey responded to the claims Sona made on Power & Politics in an email, stating that the party “ran a clean and ethical campaign and was not involved in voter suppression.” Andrew Prescott, the Burke campaign’s official contact with RackNine, again denied he had anything to do with misleading calls. Jenni Byrne also denied that the party was involved in dirty tricks. The narrative was that someone had acted alone, and the party let out the word that that someone was Michael Sona.
Although media critics were impressed by Michael Sona’s aplomb during his television appearance, Elections Canada had come to its own conclusions. Five months after his interview with Evan Solomon, Sona was informed of pending charges against him. As a devout Christian, the timing could not have been worse—just prior to the Easter weekend. On April 2, 2013, in the Ontario Court of Justice in Guelph, Michael Sona was charged with having willfully prevented an elector from voting, contrary to paragraph 281(g) of the Canada Elections Act. Yves Côté, who became Elections Canada commissioner after incumbent William Corbett’s surprise retirement in June 2012, said, “The strong public reaction to the fraudulent telephone calls made to electors in Guelph during the May 2011 general election shows how deeply disturbed Canadians were by what happened. I hope that the charge we filed today will send a strong message that such abuses under the Canada Elections Act will not be tolerated.”
The Crown decided to proceed by indictment, which meant that if Sona were convicted, he would be going to jail. The justice department assigned one of its top guns, Croft Michaelson, to the case. He had participated in the prosecution of the so-called Toronto 18. Sona, who believed the government was out to get him, was not comforted when he allegedly found a tweet from Michaelson to Treasury Board president Tony Clement inviting the minister for drinks when he came to Toronto. In the accused’s favour, silence would no longer be an option for witnesses such as Ken Morgan and Trent Blanchette, who had declined to be interviewed by Elections Canada investigators. They and others, along with their documents, would be subject to subpoena if the matter came to trial.
The Conservative Party communications operation blundered in its response to news of the charge against Sona. Even though the former Tory worker was still clothed in the presumption of innocence, Conservative spokesperson Fred DeLorey emailed that the party was “pleased” with the development, commenting, “In 2011 we reached out to Elections Canada when we heard of wrongdoing in Guelph and did all we could to assist them.” Not only was DeLorey’s statement Disneyesque, it certainly didn’t represent what a lot of Conservatives were thinking. Both Marty Burke and his wife left the Conservative riding association in Guelph, allegedly over the treatment HQ had meted out to Michael Sona and the party’s apparent gloating over his being charged. Harold Albrecht, the Conservative MP for Kitchener-Conestoga, raised his objections to the Sona affair in caucus. Even the prime minister’s former parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro, offered Sona support and disagreed with what had been done to him. Finally, the patron saint of anyone thrown under the bus, long-time Conservative Hill staffer Chris Froggatt, extended his sympathy and support to Sona.
Sona’s lawyer, Norman Boxall, issued a statement on behalf of his client: although the charge was disappointing, “If the government was interested in the public being fully informed, and the issue of robocalls being properly addressed, a full public inquiry would be called. . . .” On May 3, 2013, Michael Sona made his first court appearance in Guelph. Boxall indicated that his client would be fighting the charge, a not unexpected plea given that the penalty for his alleged offence carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
A pretrial conference was held at the Guelph courthouse on August 29, 2013. The judge seemed to suggest that the case might not go to trial. Justice Norman Douglas said the lawyers would meet again on September 25, 2013, for another pretrial conference: “If there needs to be a trial, we’ll set the date at that time.”
Court documents made public in August 2013 claimed that Michael Sona admitted to involvement in the scheme, but Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews “suspected that others were involved as well.” According to Information to Obtain (ITO) documents that Mathews filed in May, Conservative officials finally acknowledged that the party’s database had been used to create the list of non-supporters who received the calls.
The charge against Sona was based on evidence from six current or former Conservative Party staffers who had been named in May 2013 by Mathews. Oddly, Mathews had not found the witnesses himself. With one exception, the five others—Rebecca Dockstaeder, John Schudlo, Tyler Barker, Mitchell Messom, and Conrad Johnson—were all produced by Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton. Immediately after RackNine was served with a court order for its records in November 2011, Hamilton had embarked on his own internal investigation into the robocalls affair. He interviewed key party workers and asked them not to discuss the robocalls publicly.
It is not known if Hamilton had access to all the data RackNine provided to Elections Canada investigators under court order. Meier would later admit that he had contacted Chris Rougier at party headquarters after the initial visit from Mathews seeking records from Guelph. It was presumably during that three-month period before the story became public that Hamilton learned about the witnesses against Sona. Exactly when he received that information, and what he did with it, is not known. What is known is that before Maher and McGregor published their first story in February 2012, it had taken Hamilton three months to respond to Elections Canada’s request that he arrange interviews for them with party officials. After the story was published, the Conservative Party immediately leaked Sona’s name as the rogue operative, and Hamilton quickly supplied witnesses against the party worker. Most of them were junior staffers who worked for Conservative members on the Hill. Investigator Mathews admitted in court documents that Rebecca Dockstaeder, John Schudlo, and Mitchell Messom “were strangers to me, and I had no reason to anticipate what evidence [they] could provide or not provide.” Hamilton had simply called Mathews and told him he had three relevant witnesses whom he thought the investigator should talk to.
Arthur Hamilton was present for interviews with five of the witnesses as counsel for the Conservative Party of Canada. Witness Benjamin Hicks, who came forward at the request of Elections Canada, provided his information in the form of a written statement. One after another, the witnesses produced by Hamilton told investigators that Sona had bragged to them about his role in the robocalls scheme after the election. In an ITO dated September 2013, Mathews described what he and Ronald Lamothe learned from interviewing two of the witnesses in an MP’s office on March 21, 2012: “Both witnesses said that one afternoon, about a week to ten days after the May 2, 2011, election, Michael Sona visited the office.” It was a social visit that allowed party workers to catch up—nothing unusual. Both people knew Sona and described him as someone given to exaggeration and telling tall tales. Two other witnesses interviewed the same day also talked about Sona’s tendency to mythologize the facts. Mathews wrote, “Both witnesses knew Michael Sona and both described him as someone given to exaggeration.” They also told investigators Sona admitted to them that he had been involved in the false calls that went out to Guelph voters.
Rebecca Dockstaeder told Mathews that Sona had described “what sounded very, very similar to the story that we’d been hearing about these robocalls.” She claimed Sona told her he paid cash for the disposable phone and Visa card, and obtained a list of Liberal voters from a friend who owed him a favour. Sona then proceeded to record a message impersonating Elections Canada, according to Dockstaeder. The witness told investigators that it was only after she heard about the robocalls investigation in the media that she reported the alleged conversation she had had with Sona to her boss, MP Chris Warkentin. The Conservative MP for Peace River did not contact Elections Canada with the information but called Jenni Byrne at Conservative Party headquarters. HQ then contacted Arthur Hamilton. If the Conservative Party was reaching out to investigators, as Jenni Byrne and others constantly claimed, several group huddles took place before the information was passed on—and only after the story broke.
The investigation had taken a strange turn. Rather than serving the Conservative Party of Canada with search warrants, Elections Canada investigators relied on Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton to obtain emails and documents and set up meetings. Since the Conservative Party itself was to some extent a participant in the investigation, this was unsettling. Ottawa defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon thought the party’s involvement cast a shadow over the investigation. “The presence of a Conservative party lawyer during interviews being conducted by Elections Canada investigators takes away from the appearance of an independent investigation and therefore takes away from the appearance of justice,” said Greenspon.8 Ottawa defence lawyer Michael Spratt agreed, calling Hamilton’s presence at the interviews “highly unusual.” Spratt said, “That’s almost never seen. Normally witnesses aren’t interviewed in the presence of their lawyer for the very reason that it potentially could contaminate the evidence.”
Both of the reporters who broke the story found it hard to believe that Elections Canada investigators had relied so heavily on the Conservative Party and Arthur Hamilton to filter so much of the evidence. “I think there are very serious questions about EC’s approach to the investigation,” Stephen Maher told me. “Why didn’t they get production orders? . . . Why did they let Hamilton sit in on interviews with the witnesses? I suppose they didn’t have much choice. Still, it raises big questions about the contamination of evidence, particularly given the authoritarian culture of the party.”
There were more problems with the interviews. Some of the details gleaned from the Hamilton-supplied witnesses were later proven to be incorrect. Investigators knew that the list of Conservative non-supporters in Guelph came from CIMS, yet the witnesses reported that Sona had suggested that a Liberal friend had been the source. More embarrassing, author and Globe and Mail journalist Lawrence Martin reported that Michael Sona had actually been holidaying in Aruba on the dates some witnesses said he was with them in Ottawa bragging about his role in the Guelph robocalls. But the most potentially damaging aspect of Hamilton’s presence during the interviews of witnesses such as Conrad Tigger Johnson was the allegation of interference in the process.9
Documents obtained by the Huffington Post and Global News showed that during the interviews with Elections Canada investigators attended by Arthur Hamilton, the Conservative Party lawyer interrupted the investigators, directed questions to the witnesses, and at times appeared to tell them what to say. What made that more astonishing was that Hamilton wasn’t representing the witnesses he appeared to be directing. Laura Stone of Global News obtained an email from one of the witnesses, saying, “Well, I said I didn’t need a lawyer, wasn’t commenting. I don’t suppose the Conservative Party lawyer counts, because my choice in the matter wasn’t exercised.”
The question was this: since Conservative lawyer Arthur Hamilton had breached the appearance of an independent Elections Canada investigation by taking part in these Elections Canada interviews, and had played a role in eliciting information from witnesses, would the witnesses’ evidence be discounted in court as tainted?