Monday, February 24, 2014

The Butt of Fair Elections Act fraud

Con MP Brad Butt, who sits on the PROC Committee reviewing the Cons new Fair Elections Act, alleged in the HoC on Feb 6 that he had personally witnessed evidence of vouching voter fraud in his riding.

Today as the G&M informs us :  
Conservative MP backtracks on claims he personally witnessed voter fraud
Or as Butt put it himself on Twitter this morning: "I misspoke during debate and corrected the record."

But he made that allegation in the House not once that day, as the G&M reports, but twice.
He had an hour to think over his first misspeak before he stood up and repeated it again.

You can watch him here on Hansard by clicking on "View the video" at the timestamp next to his name under "Explore by Members". Hansard does not give an exact translation of his remarks, so with the aid of their handy video option, I've corrected it in blue. 

Feb 6 2014 @16:19 : Brad Butt, Mississauga-Streetsville :
"Mr. Speaker, I want to talk a bit about this vouching system again. I know the minister represents an urban city. I am from a semi-urban area of Mississauga, where there are many high-rise apartment buildings. So one of the things that I have seen - On mail delivery day when the voter cards are delivered to community mailboxes in apartment buildings, we often find that many of them are discarded in the garbage can or the blue box. I have actually witnessed other people coming in, picking up the voter cards, going back to the campaign office of whatever candidate they support and handing out these voter cards to other individuals, who then walk into voting stations with a friends who then vouches for them with no ID.
Does the minister not believe this kind of thing will get cleaned up properly with this bill?"
Not content with making up this allegation once, he enlarges on it again an hour later @17:19
"I think my friend from York South-Weston will appreciate this because, just like the riding I represent, he has a lots of apartment buildings in his riding as well. I will relate to him something I have actually seen. Here's what I've seenI've actually seen this on the ground. On the mail delivery day when voter cards are put in those mailboxes, residents come home, pick them out of their boxes, and throw them in the garbage can. And I have seen campaign workers follow up after that, pick up a dozen of them afterward, and walk out. Now why are they doing that, Mr Speaker? They are doing it so they can hand those cards to other people, who will then be vouched for at a voting booth and vote illegally. That is going to stop."
Other Con members of the Procedures and House Affairs Committee [6 Cons, 3 NDPers, and a Lib] reviewing the Fair Elections Act alongside Butt include Con Chair Joe Preston and Con MP Scott Reid, plus :

Con MP Ted Opitz, the most recent member of Perps for donating $9,000 to his nomination campaign and thereby being cited by Elections Canada for exceeding his allowed expenses by nearly $7,000. Opitz' campaign manager also allegedly shut down a poll and frightened away seniors trying to vote during the last federal election. - which he won by 26 votes. This same campaign manager was recruited by Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research to work on Rob Ford's election campaign in 2010. 

Con MP Tom Lukiwski, whose riding was the occasion of deceptive push-poll robocalls he blamed on Steve's director of political operations, Jenni Byrne

Con MP Blake Richards - fined $14,400 by the CRTC for two anonymous robocall campaigns in 2012

Gosh, I wonder if any of these committee members are carrying a grudge about elections law.

Making up the minority voices on the PROC committee are Lib MP Liberal Kevin Lamoureux, and NDPers Craig Scott, Dave Christopherson, and Alexandra Latendresse.
.
Update : Arggghhh. 
Election act changes could muzzle report on probe into robocalls, lawyer warns

According to James Sprague, senior general counsel at Elections Canada until 2006 : 
"the bill tabled by the government earlier this month actually may prevent Marc Mayrand, the chief electoral officer, from reporting to Parliament on the results of an investigation into allegations of dirty calls across the country.
The new act would forbid the Commissioner of Canada Elections, Yves Cote — who is in charge of investigating election crime — from disclosing “any information relating to an investigation that comes to their knowledge in the exercise of their powers.”
Sprague says that means Canadians may never learn what investigators uncover about fraudulent and deceptive telephone calls in the past election.
...the act will prevent the commissioner from discussing investigations with Elections Canada, so Mayrand will not be able to report on the investigators’ work. Instead, the director of public prosecutions will include information about the commissioner’s work in an annual report to the justice minister, but, Sprague says “that report cannot set out the details of any investigation.”
Just read the whole thing, keeping in mind the makeup of the committee studying it.
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9 comments:

double nickel said...

I have no words.

Purple library guy said...

So basically, they don't have the power to do much investigating.
If they do investigate anyway, the Justice minister will stop them before they get to reach any incriminating conclusions.
But if they do reach any incriminating conclusions, or just gather evidence that would look really bad even though they're not allowed to conclude anything from it, it's OK because they can't tell us there was an investigation in the first place.

Election fraud goes down the memory hole from now on.

West End Bob said...

Why even bother with elections?

harper can just appoint MPs as a "cost-saving measure."

The end result probably won't be much different the way this is going to play out . . . .

the salamander said...

.. what is actually happening .. is that a vast collection of misfits, quislings, toadies, thuggies.. traitors & failures, are trudging forward under the odd banner of Toronto's cowboy wannabe westerner Stephen Harper.. The Carbon Crusaders !!

Like some sort of toxic twisted Monty Python cartoon, we also find Sir Lancelot de Ray Novak, the court jester Poilievre, dark yankee wizard Tom Flanagan.. and various sundry, tawdry dullards (hello Peter Mackay! & Jimbo Flaherty, Clement, Oliver et al) with their very large horses & squires (spokespersons) The brave slayers of caribou & salmon, pensions & elections

They're all very busy bees .. building & tilting at a monument to their self adulation, bank accounts, directorships, waistlines and self proclaimed fiefdumbs and squalid legacies ..

As any public school Canadian child could observe .. they are way out there, in public.. wearing scary underwear.. or naught .. building gigantic outhouses memorializing & honorizing their fat arses, stupidity, utter failure, Stephen Harper, complicity, treachery, vacant ideology, incompetance ... and uselessness..

yes.. Canada will spend years analyzing.. these opportunistic dinosaurs.. and how they devolved like coke addled fund managers and tumbled into tar pits.. true fossils in lockstep with the little mail room clerk-economissed.. all unable to recognize their own country ..

scotty on denman said...

His most often used modi operandi has been to bend rules to the breaking point before changing them--- modi pugna, it could be called---which always takes risks; Harper found this out in the "In&Out" campaign financing fraud conviction (a mere "difference of opinion", he called it). Do the Cons really regret getting busted for that and other electoral infractions like Robocalls and the Deanster? Or is it a trite demonstration of rules they find unduly restrictive, a frustration they trust the electorate will sympathize with? It's as if the vote count can be found guilty of inhibiting Conservative Lebensraum.

The risks are considerable, foremost the balancing powers of complementary arms of government: the Constitution, the courts, the provinces and citizens across Canada (BC has, additionally, Citizens' Initiative legislation which might be used to spoil federal intrusions) in ways supplemental to voting; Harper feigns ermined intransigence while his Comes strut and jeer from behind the shield wall but it is before these other arms of government that he hesitates ( like the prospect of Constitutional/ court challenges to pipelines crossing un-ceded First Nations territory in BC) or which turn him back ( like Idle No More did in reaction to the attempted FN character assassination at Attawapiscat).

Next comes eroding Conservative support. Not the necessarily the Bible thumpers (although Steve's terminally pissed-off some of them), definitely not the Machiavellians, but probably many who believed in the kinder, gentler Steve that a majority was supposed to have allowed---and who've been disappointed. Veterans probably represent the most serious potential for loss of core Conservative support. The Neo-rightists finally and irrefutably cut themselves off from their claimed Tory credentials, this one being patriotism, as big or bigger than 'family values' or religious, social conservatism. I too just shake my head.

Next is time running out. All his character assassinating, Senate-baiting, Constitution-challenging, regulation-castrating and election-rigging has left Steve too short of time to get the Big Oil and Big Trade Deals done before the next election, hence this extraordinary circumstance calling for extraordinary measures: cheating at the polls. Steve's so-called "electoral reform" bill is rash and the time squeeze is at its root.

ron wilton said...

Put this guy in your perp pic so I can flesh out my collection.

Mike said...

Guess who Jenni Byrne is/was dating nd in a long term relationship with?

Good ole Pierre Polievre.

j from wpg said...

So, community mail boxes lead to identity theft and voting fraud?

Alison said...

j from winnipeg : Oh, good one. And quite possibly the reason behind Buttface's apology. So now he says it was something he heard "many, many years ago" form "second and third" hand sources. Ok then.

Hey, a Rational Reasons Mike sighting! Yeah, see also. And from there on to Poilievre's biz partner Chipeur and US republiCon Weyrich.

Ron : Not really a perp though, is he? More of a calandra.

Scotty : THIS bend rules to the breaking point before changing them
and the rest of your great synopsis.

Salamander : Poetry you are.

Bob : Yesterday Mulcair proposed a Lib/NDP coalition for 2015 - and thank you MSM for not bothering to cover it. While Trudeau rejected it, it's early days yet.

PLG : It reminds of CSEC and its watchdog model, and what a howling all round success that's been.

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