In & Out scam… $52,000 fine. Repaying Elections Canada for illegal campaign rebate for overspending in 2006 by ~$1,300,000 … 230,000 dollars. Occupying the Prime Minister’s Office… Priceless. Some things in life are free. For everything else, there’s Election Fraud.
This civil case took a lot of chutzpah for the Conservatives to bring, never forget that:
Elections Canada looked into the expenses and said the Conservatives violated campaign financing rules by moving $1.3 million in and out of 67 ridings to pay for national ads. The manoeuvres allowed the party to exceed the campaign spending limits and allowed candidates to claim rebates on expenses that weren’t incurred, the agency said.
Candidates can be reimbursed by Elections Canada for 60 per cent of their expenses and the national parties can make claims for 50 per cent of their expenses. Elections Canada refused to issue the more than $800,000 in total rebates to the Conservative Party and the party then sued to get the money.
Got that? They sued to get taxpayer reimbursements for local candidates as a result of purely national money having gone in-and-out of local accounts, sometimes for just a matter of hours. So that their local candidates would gain those moneys for future political endeavours. Anything to win, anything to get a leg up, irrespective of the taxpayer dollars at issue.
As someone else said, they love seeing Conservatives standing up for their convictions. Here’s a case of them sitting down because of a conviction, and RoboCon breaking into the news internationally.
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In And Out Fraud 2.0 is hitting the news recently too. The Conservatives are on the verge of being investigated for mysterious $15,000 figures that appear to go into, then out of local campaigns from the national campaign, to RMG call centre run by people very chummy with senior federal Conservatives. The Quebec ridings affected were charged $15,000.01, apparently as a joke. Penny for my thoughts, since you can spare one? This stinks, and on the surface it appears no different from what the Conservatives have already been caught for once, and charged and convicted for doing.
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In RoboCon news, The Manning Centre is getting some attention, after John Fryer O.C., mentioned that there was discussion about voter suppression at a course for political junkies, run by Preston Manning. The people who discussed the suppression were not named, to my recollection, but the story is available. He felt it was newsworthy after RoboCalls came to light, especially since some of the techniques mentioned seem to have come to pass. Odd coincidence that Manning Centre trains federal campaign managers, and some federal campaign with a lot of phone numbers put more than one of those techniques to use the following year?
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 