Where does the time go?
Ten years in the past this coming Sunday, I was sitting in the foyer of a west end Guelph school as a duly appointed greeter for Elections Canada, directing people down to the gymnasium where they could vote in the 41st Canadian general election.
That night, Stephen Harper would win a minority government, but the real news story happened that morning.
It was sometime after 9:30, when woman came up to my table and explained to me that while this was her polling place, she had just gotten a phone call at home that told her she needed to go to a new polling place downtown. I told her the truth; I didn’t know anything about this.
Sometimes you don’t recognize history even while it’s being thrown past your head, and the complex web that this conversation presaged would be an exhaustive article in its own right.
In brief, months after the election, two investigative reporters for two Ottawa papers uncovered a scheme to misdirect voters in dozens of ridings to the wrong polling place. But the focus would fall mostly on Guelph because the only person charged, tried and convicted was a Conservative Party random staffer right here from our own backyard.
Here’s the thing though: this is still, in many respects, an unsolved crime.
Michael Sona went to jail for a spell as the first person to ever do time for the crime of “willfully preventing or endeavouring to prevent an elector from voting in an election,” but even the judge that sentenced him noted that he did not do it alone, and that he was probably not the mastermind behind the crime.
It’s also worth noting that according to some analysis, it seemed unlikely that Sona had the access to play the part he was convicted of playing in the scheme as it was laid out in the agreed upon facts of the case. The eyewitness testimony of the Crown’s star witness, a former friend and colleague of Sona’s, seemed so silly on the face that it sounded like the TV movie version of what happened, and not something that happened in reality.
All of this is to say that 10 years later, we still do not have a complete picture of what happened on May 2, 2011. How many votes were lost by people who gave up when they got to Old Quebec Street? Who else in the Guelph Conservative campaign knew about the plot? How much national co-ordination was there since similar reports came from other ridings across the country?
Imagine for a minute that Eliot Ness didn’t arrest Al Capone, or that Capone associates like Frank Nitti or Louis Campagna also went free. Consider the optics if the one person ever arrested in the Chicago bootlegging trade was one guy who owned a corner speakeasy, and there are still some people that swear he only ever ran a soda shop.
Would it be acceptable and just if no one ever paid a price for all the blood that was spilled in the Chicago gang wars of the 20s and 30s? And why do we only get mad about unsolved crimes when they’re about violence? Why aren’t we still mad about the organized campaign to undermine our faith in the ballot?
Let’s consider too that electoral fraud has gotten more technologically sophisticated in the years since the robocall. You would certainly be justified in your concern about black hat hackers taking over voting machines and online voting portholes, or social media content mills in eastern Europe creating fake news, but despite the name, the robocall fraud was remarkable lo-fi.
With a pre-paid cell phone, a vanilla credit card, and a fake name, a small group of people were able to create widespread disruption in a Federal election without needing to hack a damn thing. What’s stopping them from doing it again, or doing something like it? Certainly criminal charges, or the lawful reach of Elections Canada, is not a deterrent since they only punished one guy that was, at least, sort of involved.
I think it’s safe to say that the people behind robocalls in 2011 decided that getting away with a crime once is not worth testing fate for a second crime spree, but this was still a crime that happened, and almost no one was punished for it. What’s to stop the next group of criminals who think they can, if not outright steal an election, at least attenuate the election in order to get a more favourable outcome.
Famously, the nom de guerre of the robocall mastermind was Pierre Poutine, and you may not remember that there was once a poutinerie downtown called Pierre’s Poutine. It closed in 2019 and was replaced by a new eatery within a month or two. It seemed like the ideal metaphor for the situation: Pierre Poutine is gone, he’s not coming back, but someone will easily take his place.
