Tories used more phone firms in election than their two rivals

Twice as many Conservative campaigns were registered to make live and automated calls during the election than for all the other parties combined.

Details from the first Voter Contact Registry, released by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission last week, show that phone bank companies filed 308 registrations to make “robocalls” and calls from live operators on behalf of the federal Conservative Party or local Tory campaigns.

The registry contains 145 registrations for Liberal campaigns and eight for New Democrats.

Some calls to voters are currently under investigation by the CRTC.

The commission said it has received 95 complaints about political phone calls.

Of these, 56 were referred by the office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections and another 33 from Elections Canada.

Six others came to the CRTC directly from the general public.

The CRTC’s Voter Contact Registry was created by the Conservative government through the Fair Elections Act.

It came in response to the 2011 robocalls scandal, in which a prerecorded message directing voters to the wrong polling location was sent out to more than 7,000 phone numbers in Guelph on election day.

The negative press around robocalls in 2011 didn’t appear to discourage use of the technology this year.

There were 362 registrations of political calling campaigns using either automated dialers or both dialers and live callers combined, the registry data show.

RackNine, the Edmonton-based voice company that gained national attention during the scandal, was among the list of companies that registered to make political calls during the 2015 campaign.

This year, RackNine made automated calls on behalf of the campaigns of Conservative candidates Jason Kenney, Randy Hoback and Blair Lockhart.

Someone using the pseudonym Pierre Poutine used an account with the same company to send out the Guelph robocalls in 2011.

The firm later denied it knew its services were used illegally and helped Elections Canada investigators track down the culprit.

Michael Sona, a worker on the Conservative campaign in Guelph, was last year convicted of breaking the Elections Act and sentenced to nine months in jail.

He is currently appealing his sentence.

The Responsive Marketing Group (RMG), which helped pioneer the use of the Conservatives’ voter-contact database paired with calls to potential supporters, again did the bulk of Tory phone work in 2015, registering calling on behalf of 121 candidate campaigns.

PrimeContact Inc. took on most of the Liberal calling.

The CRTC registry shows a large number of third-party advertisers sent out their messages using automated dialing during the campaign.

The Union of National Defence Employees, the United Steelworkers and the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting were among those registered as a clients of phonebanking companies.

The CRTC has responsibility for investigating and enforcing telemarketing rules, including the new provisions governing political calls, but Elections Canada can still investigate misuse of robocalls or other calling for alleged violations of the Elections Act.