Before the Ontario Liberal AGM, delegates receive suspicious mail
Who paid for this, and how did they get a list of delegates' home addresses?
In just two days, Ontario Liberals will make their way into Toronto from all across the province, to participate in their party’s Annual General Meeting. This AGM will feature more excitement than previous ones, as not only will there be the normal elections for the party and commission executives, but there will also be a vote on whether Bonnie Crombie can remain leader of the party.
I’ve already written about this before, including my concerns about flaws in the way that the central party is running the contest. To the credit of the staff and volunteers running this process, several of those complaints have been resolved. For one, the Campaign Debrief report has been released, and there has been healthy discussion over how it reflects on Crombie and her team.
And for another, the party has taken the unusual but very welcome step of allowing the New Leaf Liberals to scrutineer the ballot count for the leadership review vote. Normally, the party’s constitutional provisions only require scrutineers for votes on MPP nominations and executive positions, but to ensure there is no question as to the validity of the result, both the New Leaf Liberals and Crombie’s team will be able to send a representative to verify the ballot count.
As a critical voice, it’s incumbent upon me to recognize these positive attempts to rebalance the scales and address concerns. I respect it and I appreciate it. But there’s also a new problem now, and it raises serious questions that demand truthful answers.
I already wrote in my last piece about the dirty but open secret that many illegal copies are made of the information in the databases of political parties, and then spread about between friends, colleagues and allies for mutual benefit, until eventually nobody actually knows the original providence.
It’s not just against party policy, it’s against Canadian law, but it occurs in every single political party that holds elected office, and there is zero will to crack down upon it because they all benefit from being able to do these things. This results in various party organizers obtaining things like lists of party members, or lists of voters in a specific riding.
You may never have given any of your information to a political party, but if you’ve ever been a registered voter, some political organizer probably has your name, your address, and your phone number. If you have given any information to a political party, then you can count your email in that as well.
Case in point, I recently got a call from a 226 area code in Southwestern Ontario, and when I picked up the phone the caller was a volunteer reaching out on behalf of David Farrow, one of the two candidates for Executive Vice-President of the Ontario Liberal Party at this weekend’s AGM. David currently serves the party executive as a Regional VP, and serves the public as Chair of the Rainbow District School Board.
So I asked the volunteer very politely and respectfully how they obtained my phone number when I knew the party is not providing phone numbers to delegates. When the volunteer claimed they now were, I told him several other executive candidates still told me they weren’t! The volunteer then said it was “above my pay grade”, so I thanked him for his time and ended the call.
I think this makes my point pretty clear about the inequity between candidates in how the party allows them to communicate with delegates. None of them are supposed to have a list of delegates phone numbers, and yet somehow an executive candidate does. Perhaps they just used the list of names that the party does give, and then asked around if someone had my phone number, but that wouldn’t explain why the volunteer said they were given a list.
But things get worse, and you can guess how if you looked at the header image for this column. Earlier this week, several delegates to the OLP AGM received flyers in the mail in support of Bonnie Crombie, telling them to “Vote NO to a leadership review at the Ontario Liberal AGM. Keep us focused on the real fight.”
On the reverse, a Canada Post marking shows that this flyer is under their Personalized Mail rates, allowing targeting to specific addresses rather than blanketing a street like a normal advertisement. The back speaks more in Crombie’s favour, and then closes with “Let’s use this AGM to say NO to a costly leadership race and get on with the real work: nominating candidates and preparing to defeat Doug Ford.”
At no point anywhere on the flyer, however, is there a disclaimer as to who sent this, and who paid for this.
While I’ve only pictured one copy of the flyer above with a blank address field, I have confirmed with multiple sources, all of whom I am protecting the identities of, that they have received the flyers to their homes.
There are several immediate questions that rise to the top of my mind. Did Bonnie Crombie send this privately, or did party staff work on it for her, or was this sent by a third party uninvolved with her?
Where did the money come from to fund this mailer? Were any donations to the party used for the purpose of campaigning for Crombie in the leadership review? Did the party that sent this flyer spend their own money?
And how did they obtain a list of delegates who will be attending the AGM, and their home addresses? That would imply a very recent pull of the party database, and it would be a serious invasion of the privacy of those delegates for an individual to create this list without the party consenting to it. And if the party did consent to it, or use party resources on it, that creates its own problems.
I don’t have the connective tissue here to answer these questions and connect the dots. What I do know is that the only possibilities for connecting the dots are raising red flags, and that party members and the public at large deserve assurances and protections about the handling of their personal data.
I hope I don’t need to explain just how dangerous it is for someone to pilfer a political party’s database to create a list of home addresses for their personal use. There are so many nefarious things that an evil person could do to vulnerable people, considering all the details recorded about age, gender, race, religion, and even whether other people live in that household with them.
Regardless of the specifics of this flyer, or of the call I received, or any other instance of this, one thing is clear: the personal and sensitive information of the Canadian public needs to be tightly controlled, even if the political parties don’t want it.