Kelly McCullough says she is angry with herself for believing the information provided to her in an automated call that led her to the wrong polling station during the last 2011 federal election.

“I was very empathetic to people who were at the polling station because clearly they had received several people who had come. They had to let me and other people in my position know that we had foolishly believed what we shouldn’t have,” McCullough says in a new documentary about voter suppression mischief in Canada by filmmaker Peter Smoczynski.

The film, “Election Day in Canada: The Rise of Voter Suppression,” is available in a draft screener form online until midnight, October 18.

In 2011 voters across Canada received automated phone calls, also known as robocalls, that notified them their polling station has been relocated when they in fact had not. Other calls seem designed to harass voters with fake calls from opposition parties late at night or on holidays.

The new documentary film shows how these and other ‘voter suppression’ tactics, such as placing the name of candidates on ballots who were not in the running, were used to the benefit of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Smoczynski plans a full release of the film in 2016 but made an early version of the documentary available to the Canadian public before they hit the polls on election day, October 19.

In the film Smocyznski interviews McCullough and several other residents of Guelph, Ontario where robocalls misled voters in 2011.

“I was definitely frustrated, I was angry with myself for believing the message that I received,” McCullough says. “I was annoyed with my partner for not seeing through the transparency of the robocall he received and then passing along information to me.”

NDP leader Tom Muclair says in the film: “Think about what this is about. This is about phoning people in their homes, impersonating someone from Elections Canada and saying, ‘oh they’ve changed your voting section’ and sending them to the other side of town.”

In late 2014, former Conservative staffer Michael Sona, was sentenced to nine months for his roll in the robocall scandal and interfering with citizen’s ability to vote fairly under the Canada Elections Act. Sona was only 22 at the time of the scandal.

Justice Gary Hearn, an Ontario judge who passed the sentence, said senior Conservative colleagues failed Sona.

In the documentary, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, former CEO of Elections Canada, calls the scandal criminal.

“This is a criminal activity that is beyond competiveness, that is beyond what Canadians expect during an electoral campaign,” he says.

“That is why Canadians in general are so offended by this.”

Watch the preview version of Election Day in Canada: The Rise of Voter Suppression on Vimeo.

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Mel Arnold, a federal Conservative candidate from the North Okanagan-Shuswap riding in B.C., told the CBC he remains “unconvinced” by climate science and that the role of human activity in the rise of global temperatures remains undetermined.

In an interview with the CBC’s Daybreak South radio show this week, Arnold told host Chris Walker he believes only 1.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions are human-caused.

Arnold also said cycles in climate could be responsible for recent changes in temperature.

"I don't know that it has been determined for sure that human activity is the main cause. It is part of the process," he told Walker. “But how much of it is actually naturally occurring, that's I think where the debate is."

"As you know, this area was once buried in kilometres of thick ice during the ice ages. And we have approximately 30-year cycles on weather conditions here. Those types of things are still in play."

Cindy Derkaz, federal Liberal candidate from the North Okanagan-Shuswap riding, said Arnold was simply toeing the Conservative Party line.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Derkaz said. “I feel that he is following a party line and bound to do that and I’ve noticed that there’s been no rebuttal of [Arnold’s statements] from the party.”

Derkaz said the science of climate change, including the role of human activity, is “unequivocal” and that constituents in her region are already feeling the effects of warmer global temperatures.

“We are experiencing some of the hottest years on record one after another. We are experiencing serious forest fire seasons, problems with our water supply drying up which leads to a diminished flow in rivers which negatively affects the return of fish.”

“These are all problems we are dealing with.”

NDP candidate Jacqui Gingras said Arnold is “actively denying climate change” and it is “outrageous and dangerous to hold the view” that humans are not contributing to increasing temperatures.

“We’ve been measuring climate change for 150 years and have been able to reconstruct climate going back 8,000 years,” Gingras said. “Thirteen of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000.”

Gingras said that researchers from Climate Central calculate that the odds of climate change not being attributable to human activity is one in 27 million.

Gingras said Arnold is apparently willing to bet against those odds.

“To the south of us in Kelowna there were terrible fires this year that had enormous costs on people's lives,” she said. “Our local industry, the forestry industry, relies on those trees.”

“We’re on the brink of something traumatic, not only locally, but globally there’s a crisis building.”

Wildfires and trees were also present on the mind of federal Green Party candidate Chris George.

“These fires have been a big issue,” George said. “All of the surrounding forests are vulnerable to beetle kill because winters don’t get cold enough to kill the insects off which means that more dry standing forests and they are more vulnerable to wildfire.”

George added that before this season’s wildfires, heavy rainfall caused mudslides in the Shuswap region.

“We basically lost our tourism season. The mudslides wiped out roads, filed our lakes and streams with mud and shut down houseboat operators.”

George said the increased intensity and frequency of both drought and heavy rainfall are “easily linked to climate change.” Both tourism and agriculture, which the area depends upon, are being “disproportionally hit” by the effects of warmer temperatures, he said.

George added he’s surprised to hear any candidates would question the impacts of human activity on the climate. “I was a bit astonished that that’s still a position out there.”

According to Environment Canada, greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere as a result of transportation, oil and gas development, the production of electricity, energy use in buildings, industrial and trade activities, agriculture and the production of waste.  

Andrew Weaver, climate scientists and MLA for the B.C. Green Party said the comments are “outrageous” but he is “not surprised” to hear them coming from a representative of Conservative Party.

“This is common within the Harper Tories to find people whose views are based on… I don’t know where they get their views from, but they’re not scientific,” Weaver said.

He added the statements point to the larger problem of scientific literacy in political decision-making.

“If you make decisions as a matter of faith — ‘I believe this to be true’ — it’s the beginning of the downfall of society.”

Campaign manager Linda Hawkes said Arnold was unavailable for comment.

Image: Mel Arnold via Twitter

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When Greenpeace Canada’s climate and energy campaigner Keith Stewart filed an official complaint with Elections Canada, he did a lot more than question the implications of the Ethical Oil Institute’s collusion with the Conservative Party of Canada: he called national attention to the corrosive effect oil money has had on Canadian politics in recent years.

“At the broadest level,” Stewart told DeSmog Canada via e-mail, “we are trying to rebalance the playing field between money and people power in Canadian politics. You can never eliminate the influence of money on politics, but you can limit it and make it more transparent.”

Greenpeace’s request for an investigation is based on the fact that corporate donations to political parties are banned in federal politics — yet money raised by the Ethical Oil Institute appears to have been spent on advertising and other activities developed and implemented by people directly involved in the Conservative Party of Canada. The institute does not disclose its funding sources, but its website states it does “accept donations from Canadian individuals and companies, including those working to produce Ethical Oil.”

Stewart’s request outlines the revolving-door relationships driving pro-oilsands communications strategies from Fort McMurray to Ottawa and how deeply those relations are embedded in the political soil. The institute was founded in July 2011 by Alykhan Velshi, who left Jason Kenney’s political staff to create Ethical Oil. He returned within a few months to a senior position in the Prime Minister’s Office.

A Greenpeace map of the overlapping relations between Ethical Oil and the Conservative government. Click to enlarge.

Ultimately, the request to investigate the Ethical Oil Institute’s use of contributions to carry out a Conservative agenda has to do with uprooting the pernicious influence of oil on Canadian democracy.

“We are trying to prevent the oil patch from pouring money into an Ethical Oil-led, pro-Conservative ad campaign in advance of the 2015 federal election,” Stewart said.

According to Stewart, Ethical Oil “is trying to import a U.S. model of establishing fake grassroots groups” to lend cultural legitimacy to an “elite agenda.” In this case, he said the campaign is designed to make the protection of oil interests — in the face of a warming world — seem “somehow in the interest of the average citizen.”

“It’s dishonest and destructive,” he said.

Ethical Oil responded to the complaint by claiming “EthicalOil.org does not give any money to any political party, nor has Ethical Oil campaigned in any election,” even though Greenpeace’s charge is leveled at the Ethical Oil Institute, not against the website EthicalOil.org — which is just one aspect of the institute’s work.

The Ethical Oil Institute is behind arguments such as Canada’s oil being like fair-trade coffee and foreign-funded interests lurking behind Canada’s environmental movement. The accusations have been instrumental in the ongoing audits of Canada’s most prominent environmental charities, many of whom were targeted in Ethical Oil attacks.

“Ethical Oil is trying to hide the corrosive effect of oil on our politics by telling Canadians that the poor little oil companies are being picked on by big mean environmentalists,” Stewart said.

Yet, as Stewart lays out in his letter to Elections Canada, the work of the Ethical Oil Institute has been in lockstep with the Conservative party to influence public opinion on oil development and mischaracterize environmental groups.

“Their attack on environmental charities is a blatant attempt to silence those who are critical of the Harper government agenda on oil and the environment and to block a national conversation on what kind of an energy future we want,” he said.

Ultimately, Stewart said, Canada needs to start taking climate science seriously, a move impaired by the work of groups like Ethical Oil.

“I’d like to see the government take the latest reports from the IPCC and boil them down to what this means for Canada in terms of possible impacts and what opportunities are there for us on an energy pathway that is consistent with avoiding the worst impacts of climate change,” Stewart said.   

“We could then take these on the road and have the kind of community-led discussions that have happened before on the issue of national unity, which could help build consensus on what we need to do.”

Image Credit: Greenpeace Canada

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