I have proposed that there were elements of farce in the trial of Michael Sona -- in which the prosecution's star witness, against whom there was serious material evidence, was given immunity to confabulate, while the accused was convicted on evidence not unlike that of the jail-house snitches whose testimony is used to sew up corrupt criminal trials in the US.
Read MoreIn the preceding entry, we saw how the Conservative Party supporters or agents who in 2008 engineered Minister of Natural Resources Gary Lunn's re-election through robocall fraud got away with the crime scot-free; and we noted some of the deficiencies in Elections Canada's investigation in the 2011 ground-zero riding of Guelph. Let's consider now some of the more substantive failings in the investigation of the 2011 vote-suppression fraud.
Read MoreIn the 2008 election, the riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands was subjected to what amounted to a dress rehearsal for the 2011 fraud, and a laboratory test of the efficacy of fraudulent robocalls. The re-election bid of Conservative Minister of Natural Resources Gary Lunn in that BC riding had been thrown into crisis by the late withdrawal of NDP candidate Julian West, which gave Liberal Briony Penn a strong chance of upsetting Lunn. But taking advantage of the fact that West's name remained on the ballot, Conservative agents or supporters flooded the riding on the day before the election with robocalls, falsely claiming to be from the NDP riding association, which urged NDP supporters to vote for West. A poll had indicated that less than 1% of the electorate intended to vote for this non-candidate -- but on election day another 4.7% were deceived by the robocalls into throwing their votes away.
Read MoreOn May 2, 2011, the election day whose outcome gave Stephen Harper's Conservatives a parliamentary majority, journalists observed that the ridings from which reports of fraudulent misinformation calls were coming in seemed not to be a random set. As Kirk Makin wrote in The Globe and Mail, "The false messages appeared to be clustered primarily in ridings where a close race was anticipated, meaning a small swing in voting preferences could mean the margin between victory and defeat." [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/messages-provide-false-polling-station-info/article2007127/]
Read MoreWe've seen that Elections Canada complaints data indicate that harassment calls made up just over half of a total of more than 1.1 million fraudulent phone calls received by Canadian voters in 261 of our 308 federal ridings during the 2011 election. Those late-night harassment calls seem to have gone out, for the most part, to people with a record of supporting the Liberal Party. But can we be sure that this was not, after all, as Conservative ethics spokesperson Dean Del Mastro insisted when the matter came up in Question Period, just an indication of Liberal Party incompetence?
Read MoreWhen he suggested on the same day on Twitter that journalists "might just want to ask other questions" rather than digging into government scandals, singer-songwriter Raffi Cavoukian replied: "It's the Harper #elxn42 [2015 election] run that ought to be in question -- a lawless, rogue [prime minister] running again -- that's the issue." Raffi added that the Harper Conservatives were "convicted of wrongdoing in each of last [three] elections. That's a huge issue." Wells responded that "The Governor General, Elections Canada and the Constitution disagree with you, you flatulent crank."
Read MoreThat 2011 vote-suppression scandal, the "robocalls" fraud: it was all smoke and mirrors, right? So how could Harper's Conservatives have organized a fraud that never happened? Try consulting Paul Well's book The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006-, published in 2013. The jury citation for an award this book won called it "impeccably researched" -- and it contains not a whisper about the scandal.
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