There is nothing useful on this web site.
Even though the internet is the source of all truth, the only truth here is that everything else is a lie.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.- Oscar Wilde
I'm as cynical as anyone about the decline of newspapers and the sad state of affairs that defines journalism in Canada these days. There seem to be far more columnists than journalists in the media and way too much boot-licker journalism.
But there are exceptions to this. Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher of the Ottawa Citizen are two of them. Their work on the 2011 Election fraud stories have been dogged and brilliant.
There latest story is no exception. Using Access to Information Request, they have stitched together a timeline of e-mails between Elections Canada staff, and Conservative Party of Canada lawyers (one of the worst jobs in the world, I'm sure).
An excerpt from this story. Hamilton is a CPC lawyer. McNeil is with Elections Canada.
By Sunday afternoon, Elections Canada had received reports of the calls from 13 different ridings. Legal counsel Karen McNeil sent another email to Hamilton:
“These calls are continuing and the frequency of calls seems to be increasing,” she wrote, providing a list of the originating phone numbers that some voters had recorded. Voters who called the numbers back heard only recorded messages identifying them as Conservative Party lines, she said.
McNeil told Hamilton the poll-moving calls had been reported by voters in the ridings of Avalon (Newfoundland and Labrador); West Nova (Nova Scotia); Ajax-Pickering, Halton, Kingston and the Islands, Kitchener-Conestoga and Vaughan (Ontario); Kildonan-St.Paul, Saint Boniface and Winnipeg Centre (Manitoba); and Cardigan (Prince Edward Island).
There were also later reports of poll-moving calls in two Quebec ridings: Outremont and Lac-Saint-Louis, as well as Prince George-Peace River in British Columbia.
Hamilton replied at 10:45 a.m. the following morning — election day — saying only that he would forward the same response he had sent Apostolakos.
As Hamilton sent the email, hundreds of voters in Guelph were heading to vote at the Quebec Street Mall, victims of an as-yet-unsolved mystery call from “Pierre Poutine.”
Canada has an Election Fraud scandal that is every bit as big and far more important as the Chretien-era Sponsorship scandal.
We already know there is no way in hell that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will call a commission into the matter as his predecessor Paul Martin did with the Sponsorship scandal.
Instead, expect any challenges to this to be fought in court at great expense, all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada, if and when necessary.
The Council of Canadians currently has a lawsuit challenging the results in 7 ridings where the margin of victory was low and there is strong circumstantial evidence of fraud. They will need help. Consider a donation to a worthy cause, even if it is for the lawyers.