UPDATE: I’ve made some changes to the chart, adding the TIDES Foundation and their New Age plastic shaman centre Hollyhock. I also added the Ottawa event, where Brigette DePape spoke. The results were quite telling…
_____________________________
When I first read about the Robocall scandal in February, 2012, the allegations shocked me. If it was true that the Conservative Party was using auto-diallers to guide voters en-masse to the wrong polling locations, it would have been an affront to our country’s democracy. There wasn’t much information available back then, but I did my best to dig-in and see what I could find.
A couple of days later I saw an event posted on Facebook by a man named Jon Allan, a meeting to plan a protest. Wanting to learn more about the Robocall issue I figured this could be a good place to start. I also had an idea I wanted to share- that, rather than using all of the scandal’s energy to complain about the past, why not use this as an opportunity to get more people to vote in the future! I’d led US voter registration drives back when I was in university, and thought we could replicate the idea by setting-up a table and a laptop.
Walking into the meeting, one would never had expected it was anything but grassroots. We sat in the basement of Trinity-St Paul’s United Church, in a room used for teaching small children- it was almost too grassroots. Then as time passed and the first protest came to fruition, it quickly became obvious I was observing an AstroTurf fraud.