The Robocalls "scandal" that never was

There are 525,600 minutes in a year.

And there have been 3,581 news stories written about the Robocall scandal, according to the Infomart database.

Except last week, we found out it was fake. There was no conspiracy to use automated phone calls to dupe voters in the 2011 election into going to the wrong place to vote.

After three years and millions of wasted tax dollars, Elections Canada – possibly the most anti-Conservative government agency in Canada, other than the CBC – concluded the whole thing was a myth, like Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster.

It’s not just that the Conservatives didn’t do anything wrong. It’s that no one did anything wrong. As Yves Cote, the Commissioner of Canada Elections, put it: “the evidence uncovered in the investigation is not sufficient to give me reasonable grounds to believe that an offence was committed.”

Robocalls hysterics do their opponents a favor every time they open their mouths

Jon Allen was one of the main organizers of a clownish rally demanding new elections and a Parliamentary inquiry on the basis of robocalls made during Canada's 2011 election campaign, which evidently did not prevent a single person from casting a vote. The allegations of callers misrepresenting themselves as Elections Canada officials suggests a crime which merits police investigation. But the ridiculous hysteria of people like Allan, while professing devotion to "democracy," is clearly motivated by nothing other than an intense hatred of the Conservative government and conservatives in general.

And how do we know that? Because they tell us so.

Sun TV host Michael Coren and Allan have become embroiled in a war of words in the last couple of days, in which Coren mocked Allan for his histrionic idiocy of suggesting the robocalls were the beginnings of a fascist Canada.

Allan responded with a facebook posting that while meant to refute Coren, actually helps reinforce the conservative pundit's case. Aside from a dispute over the numbers where Allan inflates the attendance of his gathering by a factor of about 3 times the actual amount, the real meat of the dispute comes from the perceived value of rally co-organizer Zafar Bangash. While accusing Coren of "mental disabilities" Allan praises Bangash, a fierce advocate of the Holocaust-denying Iranian regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as "an exemplary citizen." Some of Bangash's exemplary citizenship includes implicitly threatening the lives of Jews in Iran, his racist reference to American President Barack Obama as "this black man in the White House," his call for war and the imposition of Islamic law in Israel, and his support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah.

While he might be able to credibly profess ignorance about Bangash, since ignorance is obviously an area in which Mr. Allan excels, his claim that his wishes are for "democratic accountability, regardless of the party in power" are undermined by his inability to keep himself from making statements revealing his partisan biases.

In response to one of his online cheerleaders in his posting's comments, Allan replied, "I hate Sun media, and I hate that they;re (sic) buying up all the small town newspapers in Canada because now they are propagating this filth to the small towners... no wonder the Conservatives are gaining support."

Aside from betraying an astonishing contempt for the intelligence of small town Canadians by assuming their political leanings could be so easily affected, Allan conveniently lets anyone interested know that his real motivation is hatred of the Conservative party.

Mr. Allan is not unique in his dissembling. This profession of concern for democracy, which he paradoxically wants manifested in the form of the rejection of a valid election because of the objections of a few radical activists, is a position shared by the partisan LeadNow organization. The difference between Allan and LeadNow's intelligent Executive Director Jamie Biggar is that the latter is smart enough not to publicly boast about his more obvious motives.

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

The people pushing the "robocalls" scandal have their own credibility issues

From a small office in Vancouver,  rented in a shared space with the Canadian branch of PBS station KCTS, Jamie Biggar and the people behind LeadNow.ca want to undo the decision reached by almost 15 million voters in Canada's 2011 election.

Biggar, LeadNow's Executive Director,  is a thoughtful, personable young man who was once the Chairman of the Sierra Club of British Columbia, the provincial branch of a US-based environmental group. In a talk last week,  Biggar pointed out that his organization is not partisan in that it doesn't endorse any particular political party and its goal is to hold the government, any government, to account for its potentially destructive policies. The goal, he said, is to serve the interests of democracy.

However the campaign to have democratic elections undone based on conjecture and unsubstantiated allegations would not appear to support those goals.

Biggar acknowledged that the much vaunted "31,000" number of complaints to Elections Canada were not actually people complaining about receiving calls misdirecting them to non-existent poling locations. That number, which has now grown to over 43,000 is merely automated messages of pre-written "concern" that are generated from LeadNow's website with the ease of clicking a "send" button. As we now know, the actual number of complaints to Election Canada about 700. But more significantly, not a single one of those complaints, on the basis of which LeadNow suggests new elections should be held, alleges that they did not cast their vote because of those calls.

In fact, LeadNow's campaign to delegitimize the 2011 election is based entirely on stringing together a bunch of ifs, could-haves, and maybes, without a solitary piece of solid evidence of wrongdoing by the Prime Minister of any senior Conservative Party member. One such piece of so-called support that Biggar referred me to was a report produced by Simon Fraser University Professor Anke Kessler which is based entirely on guesswork, corollaries and false postulations, such as the figure of 31,000 complaints being from people having reported receiving the robocalls rather than the actuality of that number only being LeadNow generated emails of "concern."

If one is going to make reasonable guesses based on corollaries, something more indicative of reality can be inferred from the people involved with LeadNow. Biggar was adamant that media reports of financial involvement from far-left activist funders like George Soros and the Tides Foundation were not true.

But LeadNow's Advisory Board reads like a who's who of vociferous enemies of the Conservative government, who have been known to become hysterical in their opposition to not only almost anything the Harper government does, but its very existence.

Zafar Bangash speaking at
robocalls rally in Toronto
(photo by Blazing Cat Fur)

People like Judy Rebick, who founded the fanatical website rabble.ca, which is financed almost exclusively by public service unions and NDP-linked organizations, Ian Capstick, a former top-level NDP backroom fixture, Jim Stafford, an economist in the employ of the Canadian Auto Workers union. The LeadNow-inspired rallies decrying the government over the robocalls issue went so far as to involve people like Zafar Bangash as organizers. Bangash is a Khomeinist propagandist and notorious hatemonger who advocates Sharia-Law and supports the Iranian dictatorship of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. One of the many absurd ironies that the robocalls hysterics have produced is a criticism of Canadian democracy supported by the radical left coming from one of the most brutal, undemocratic regimes on earth. That came in the form of Rebick's rabble.ca republishing a report from Iranian state-owned Press TV condemning Canada's so-called election fraud.

Whilke LeadNow may not be dishonest in any outright, planned way, their zeal and hatred of the Harper government has made their commitment to honesty highly suspect and what they purport to be facts to be false. As an investigation proceeds into the robocalls matter, LeadNow's efforts to damage the credibility and validity of the Harper government may just have the reverse effect and discredit LeadNow and those associated with it.

Toronto Robocalls 'outrage rally' a big fail, no matter what the media tells you

At the height of the gathering at Dundas Square
Not exactly a massive outpouring of support

A rally of the usual suspects in the anti-Harper left failed to mass much of a turnout in Toronto this afternoon.

Piggybacking on Toronto's St.Patrick's Day Parade, they were still unable to accumulate more than 1000 people, despite the organizers' inflated claims of three thousand being in attendance.

Some "average Canadians" outraged
about the Robocalls

What was striking about the rally was not who was there, but who wasn't. Other than a handful of curiosity seekers and media, there was no indication of interest from any normal, mainstream Canadians in the manufactured outrage that opponents of the current government are trying to inflame.

The crowd was made up exclusively of members of the International Socialists, some unkempt burned-out pseudo-hippies who were ejected from the Occupy Toronto encampment a few months ago, union activists who have a pro-Islamist bent, like Ali Mallah, and some pro-Iranian Islamists like notorious hatemonger Zafar Bangash who employ radical leftists as their useful idiots in their efforts to harm the pro-Israel government of Stephen Harper.

Ali Mallah chats up some Harper-hatin' 'sisters'

Rally co-organizer Bangash mounted a pick up truck sporting an AL QUDS vanity plate owned by the recently defunded terror-apologists at Palestine House to deliver a heated speech. He denounced Harper and threatened that Canada's Prime Minister would "end up in a cage" like Egypt's recently deposed Hosni Mubarak. Another of the organizers suggested that Harper is a fascist,  failing to understand that if we actually were living under fascist rule, rallies of the type he was speaking at wouldn't be allowed to occur.

The rally itself was less impressive than the anti-Harper rallies that were initiated by the far left and NDP activists prior to the last general election when the Governor General prorogued Parliament at the Prime Minister's request. The public also saw through the AstroTurf political movement behind that hyperbole. At the time, the Conservatives had a minority government, and if the outrage expressed by the Liberals and NDP wasn't fake, they had only to pass a non-confidence motion to force another election as soon as Parliament resumed. They failed to do that, and when they finally mustered the initiative to bring down the Harper government with a motion finding it in contempt of Parliament, the resulting election gave the Conservatives a solid majority.

The media to protester ratio was extremely high

The "robocalls" issue is a serious one and deserves police investigation for the possibility of election fraud. But LeadNow.ca is behind the manufactured outrage that is preposterously suggesting that the government itself was responsible for misleading automated phone calls they claim invalidates the last election. One only has to look at who is involved with LeadNow to get an accurate idea of what the "outrage" is really about.

Lead Now's advisers read like a who's who of the Looney Left, with Judy Rebick, NDP advisor Ian Capstick, Canadian Auto Workers economic advisor Jim Stafford,  and a host of other fellow travellers who are lending their hand to a political manipulation machine.

Not quite the 3000 people the organizers claimed
Not by a long shot

Combined with characters like pro-Iran shills Bangash and Mallah, the fake movement to stir up anger at the government over the robocalls will end up as just another tiresome exercise in bias confirmation for a handful of radical leftist fanatics and their cheerleaders in the media. For the rest of Canada, it's just another yawn.





UPDATE: a picture of the massive anti-Harper Robocalls rally at Parliament Hill in Ottawa today at THIS LINK. There aren't enough people to get the group discount seating rate for a Blue Jays game.

Another 'typical Canadian' expressing her disdain for the government...
or practicing her hula-hooping skills
(Photo by BCF)

Blazing Cat Fur has a report and pictures

All photos in this post © 2012 Eye on a Crazy Planet

unless otherwise indicated