Ottawa

Crank yankers

The Kitchener-Waterloo Record traces mischievous calls made during the election to the Conservative party.

The complaint filed by Joe Nowak, president of the Kitchener-Conestoga federal Liberal association, was obtained by The Record and includes the phone number Siopiolosz traced. When called, the number goes to a voice mail for the “Conservative Party.” The message asks callers to leave their name, number and a detailed message and says the party will get back to them within three business days. [Fred] DeLorey, director of communications and deputy director of political operations for the Conservative Party of Canada, confirmed in an email “that the number was ours.”

Numerous complaints about crank calls were made during the spring campaign.

The Conservative party has now released a statement explaining its side of the story.

“Yesterday afternoon a reporter from the Kitchener – Waterloo Record contacted us about a person being told to go to a wrong poll during the past federal election. We confirmed that the call came from a call centre that we hired for the campaign, using a line clearly labelled as belonging to the Conservative Party.

We have found that the person named in the article, Carolyn Siopiolosz, was in our database twice. Once under Carolyn Siopiolosz living in Kitchener—Conestoga and the second as C. Siopiolosz, living in Kitchener Centre. The phone number was the same for the two profiles.

The call was made by RMG, which was one of our companies hired to do calling by Kitchener Centre and the Party. Because she was listed as living in Kitchener Centre she was instructed to vote in a polling station in Kitchener Centre.

We made over a million calls on Election Day. In this case there was a mistake. We have corrected Ms. Siopiolosz’s information in our database to avoid this in the future.

We spend the entire campaign identifying supporters and we work hard to get them out to vote on Election Day.

Our job is to get votes out, we do not engage in voter suppression.”

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