2018 Ontario Provincial Election Discussion

[SunriseChampion]

Um the number people of deleting facebook would likely be recovered by the growth of Facebook in developing countries 100 fold I imagine.

Not in China which would count for the most. US numbers were on a downward trend well before this blew up and especially among those under the age of 40.

 

[SunriseChampion]

This is by far the most of Channel 4 that I've watched without Jimmy Carr being on. He isn't the essence of Channel 4 after all!

 

[steveintoronto]

This is by far the most of Channel 4 that I've watched without Jimmy Carr being on. He isn't the essence of Channel 4 after all!

It's all over the UK front pages today (Sunday).

Here's the Guardian (Observer):

Revealed: the ties that bind Canadian data firm AIQ to Cambridge Analytica and Brexit
[...]
Cambridge Analytica has undisclosed links to the Canadian digital firm AggregateIQ that played a pivotal role in the official Vote Leave campaign in 2016, which was headed by the environment secretary Michael Gove and the foreign secretary Boris Johnson, the Observer has learned.

Christopher Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, has revealed that as well as playing a part in setting up the firm – which is now facing increasing scrutiny from investigators on both sides of the Atlantic over its role in harvesting Facebook data – he was also a central figure in setting up AIQ, which accounted for 40% of Vote Leave’s campaign budget.
[...]
Wylie said that, in 2016, the relationship went far beyond that. Although AIQ and Cambridge Analytica appeared separate, the two were bound by a skein of threads so intimate that some Cambridge Analytica staff referred to the Canadian data firm as a “department” within the company. Wylie said that the two businesses shared the same underlying technology.

“AIQ wouldn’t exist without me,” he said. “When I became research director for SCL [the parent company of Cambridge Analytica] we needed to rapidly expand our technical capacity and I reached out to a lot of people I had worked with in the past.”

That included Jeff Silvester, his former boss, who lived in Wylie’s home town – Victoria in British Columbia. Wylie suggested Silvester should work for the firm in London. “But he had just had a family and wasn’t keen to go to London,” he said.
[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...q-data-firm-link-raises-leave-group-questions

There's a couple of other cases paralleling this but separate of whistleblowers coming out of the shadows.

It keeps getting closer to the OntCons, but the FedCons thinking this is going to be all about the Libs, think they want it all out in the open. What they don't realize is that sunlight kills bacteria. No matter what political affiliation it has.

Bring it on!

 

[animatronic]

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/meet-the-tiny-victoria-firm-that-helped-sway-the-brexit-vote

From a year ago - interesting context without the Cambridge Analytica piece

Still struggling to see the connection to PCPO without anything concrete linking them together. Also don't think it will be a factor in the election given tight timelines.

 

[Admiral Beez]

'Facebook made me do it' is no excuse for bad decisions
http://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-facebook-made-me-do-it-is-no-excuse-for-bad-decisions

 

[steveintoronto]

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/meet-the-tiny-victoria-firm-that-helped-sway-the-brexit-vote

From a year ago - interesting context without the Cambridge Analytica piece

Still struggling to see the connection to PCPO without anything concrete linking them together. Also don't think it will be a factor in the election given tight timelines.

Already been referred to in these forums.

B.C. privacy office to probe political use of personal Facebook info
Victoria company a focus of province’s privacy commissioner investigation
By Deborah Wilson, CBC News Posted: Mar 21, 2018 3:06 PM PT Last Updated: Mar 21, 2018 3:06 PM PT

British Columbia's privacy watchdog has joined international investigations into the alleged misuse of personal Facebook data belonging to tens of millions of individuals.

Canadian and U.K. information and privacy officials launched investigations following media reports that online information belonging to millions of Americans was obtained by a company working on U.S. President Donald Trump's election and the U.K. Brexit campaign.

The investigation's B.C. connections include Victoria tech company AggegrateIQ and Christopher Wylie, a 28-year-old data expert originally from Victoria. Wylie has said his ideas made a key contribution to the creation of Cambridge Analytica, the company at the centre of the data-mining projects.

• Who is Christopher Wylie? How a B.C. high school dropout set out on path to political data harvesting

Drew McArthur, the acting information and privacy commissioner for British Columbia, spoke with On the Island host Gregor Craigie about the investigations so far.
[...]
The unique thing about our position in B.C. is we're the only jurisdiction in Canada that has the ability to investigate political parties.

As a result of that, information that is being used by political parties is important to us and we have a separate investigation looking at how and if political parties elected to use people's personal information.
[...]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...-aggregateiq-victoria-investigation-1.4586341

BC Liberal candidate hires consultancy whose role in Brexit is under investigation

JUSTINE HUNTER
Globe and Mail
VICTORIA
PUBLISHED JANUARY 11, 2018UPDATED JANUARY 11, 2018
A Canadian campaign consulting firm whose role in Britain's Brexit vote is under investigation is operating in the leadership contest to replace former B.C. premier Christy Clark.

AggregateIQ Data Services Ltd. has been retained by leadership candidate Todd Stone, and is also seeking a contract with the opposition BC Liberals to help the party to return to power in the next provincial election.

The small Victoria-based agency says in its pitch to the BC Liberals that it "launched and supported" the official Leave campaign that persuaded British voters to choose to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum.


U.K. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham is looking into AggregateIQ's role in the campaign after Britain's Electoral Commission revealed that the Vote Leave campaign paid the equivalent of $4.6-million to the Canadian company for political work. The commission is examining funding associated with the referendum.

In a blog posted in December, Ms. Denham expressed frustration in her quest, and said she has required assistance from authorities overseas "to seek answers on behalf of U.K. citizens" about how personal information was analyzed to target voters in the campaign. The B.C. Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner has confirmed it is working with the U.K. probe, and it is investigating whether AggregateIQ is compliant with B.C.'s private-sector privacy legislation.

No specific allegations of wrongdoing have been made, but in her blog, Ms. Denham said she is concerned about how personal data are used in political campaigns.

"We are concerned about invisible processing – the 'behind the scenes' algorithms, analysis, data matching, profiling that involves people's personal information," she wrote. "When the purpose for using these techniques is related to the democratic process, the case for a high standard of transparency is very strong." [...]

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/new...n-brexit-under-investigation/article37587456/

That was two months ago, we know how far the story has moved since. Lots more online.

As to Massingham, the centre of the story Animatronic links, and what was known at that time, but not yet connected to more recent events emerging:

[...]
Last March, when the Observer started asking questions about the connection between Cambridge Analytica and AIQ, the former removed “SCL Canada” and Massingham’sphone number from its website and said that AIQ was a “former IT contractor”.

Cambridge Analytica is already under scrutiny for its work for Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, and AIQ is also involved in an investigation by the Electoral Commission into Vote Leave.

On Saturday the Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham said that “AggregateIQ has not been especially co-operative with our investigation. We are taking further steps in that matter.”

The mystery of how Vote Leave even found AIQ, a firm with just 20 staff that operated 2,300 miles away out of a cramped office above an opticians in the provincial Canadian city of Victoria, was raised by the Observer last May. [...]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...q-data-firm-link-raises-leave-group-questions

I posit that it may not be, probably isn't AggregateIQ working with the OntCons, albeit Warren Kinsella has raised the possibility, but the *methods* and abuse of data by someone else are.

http://warrenkinsella.com/2018/03/big-trouble-big/

https://dumpharper.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/inside-the-conservative-voter-information-database-cims/

I repeat the essential question, and Cons themselves should be concerned about this, how did Ford win even when he clearly lost the popular vote? * (The FedCons, I'm led to believe, are quite 'alarmed' over what's happened in OntCon election, not coincidental that Mulroney especially has deep roots in the true Conservative Party, not the aberration the OntCons have become)
* (How did Ford win?) Because the 'game' was set up giving him a huge advantage in weighted ridings that would and do mean nothing in a real election for Conservatives. Is that illegal? Of course not, the Cons can have a staring contest if that's how they want to elect a leader, or a fist banging one, Ford would have an advantage in both. But there are procedural aspects under 'Contract Law', and certainly aspects of *funding* in the campaign that might come under closer scrutiny.

You don't have to be doing something illegal to be a cheat...

Or do you? Ontario Proud claims to be financed by only $5000. And yet:
The most popular political Facebook group in Ontario targets Kathleen Wynne
Its Facebook page has amassed more followers than Ontario PCs, Liberals and NDP combined
By Mike Crawley, CBC News Posted: Jun 24, 2017 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Jun 24, 2017 5:00 AM ET
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...ook-kathleen-wynne-liberal-election-1.4173817

Meantime, in the US and the UK, it's now being proven that such "non-partisan" orgs have been funded externally, oddly by firms working for political parties and candidates, such as the latest headline story up at the Globe indicates:
Brexit campaigners skirted U.K. electoral spending laws, former employee says

DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
LONDON
THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
PUBLISHED 58 MINUTES AGO
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/wor...rs-skirted-uk-electoral-spending-laws-former/

The UK Press is a 'day ahead' of this, and new whisteblowers and revelations are emerging daily. Does this directly relate to anything provable yet in Ontario's case? Not yet, but it's closing in fast. Wylie is scheduled to sing at the Cdn Commons Ethics Cmte hearings in a few weeks.
Committee agrees to seek testimony from Cambridge Analytica whistleblower
By Beatrice Britneff. Published on Mar 22, 2018 10:22am

https://ipolitics.ca/2018/03/22/com...imony-from-cambridge-analytica-whistleblower/

 

[steveintoronto]

Further to Ontario Proud, and the 'funding' question, let alone other aspects of outsourcing what would otherwise be illegal for the OntCons, here's from a very reputable source:

The Progressive Conservatives' not-so-secret weapon
Steve Paikin
Published on Jul 20, 2017

It’s one of the oddities of Ontario politics that among the Liberal party’s most helpful means of ensuring its last four consecutive election wins has been a group that technically has nothing to do with the Liberal party.

For a decade, the Working Families coalition has represented a group of public- and private-sector unions that never explicitly said “vote Liberal” in any of its millions of dollars’ worth of election-time advertising. But it sure did say “don’t vote Progressive Conservative,” no doubt depressing the Tory vote and helping the Liberals stay in power since 2003.

Because Working Families didn’t have an official affiliation with the Liberals, their expenditures were never included in the Liberal election spending totals, even though you could argue the coalition and the Grits essentially had the same aim.

If you’re on the progressive side of the political spectrum, you marvelled at the election expenses legal loophole the coalition had discovered (whose legality was confirmed five years ago by the Ontario Court of Appeal). However, if you’re on the conservative side of the spectrum, chances are you’ve been appalled at what has felt like an uneven playing field. Former PC leader Tim Hudak, who led his party through two general elections, often bemoaned the fact that there was no counterbalance to the onslaught of political ads that successfully demonized him.

For some reason, conservatives have never been able to create their own equivalent of the Working Families coalition. The thinking is, businesses amenable to the PC platform are too afraid to jeopardize their contracts or relationships with government by supporting an entity opposing the Liberals.

But that may be on the verge of changing.

A new political action group called Ontario Proud sprung up a year and a half ago, and like its progressive counterpart, its message isn’t focused on getting a particular party elected. But the group sure is clear that it wants one party in particular defeated.

“Ontario Proud is a people powered organization dedicated to holding Kathleen Wynne and her Liberal government accountable for their scandal plagued governance and unaffordable hydro rates,” the group’s website says.

At the moment, the group’s focus is online. Its Facebook page has about 180,000 “likes,” it claims an email distribution list of nearly 80,000 supporters, and it has a presence on YouTube and Twitter. It describes itself as “the most popular and engaged Facebook page in Ontario politics.”

It seems to be part of a family of similarly right-leaning groups such as B.C. Proud, Alberta Proud, Saskatchewan Proud, and Toronto Proud. The relationship and the degree of coordination between these sites isn’t clear to me, but the groups do sometimes share one another’s Facebook posts.

Ontario Proud has so far mostly been pushing anti-Wynne messages on social media. This one has a rather cheesy and unprofessional look and sound to it:
[...]

https://tvo.org/blog/current-affairs/the-progressive-conservatives-not-so-secret-weapon

Following quote is from above, but I post it separately because of how prophetic this is:

[...]
There’s always a danger in trying to equate political phenomena in other countries with what’s happening in Canada. Canadians at the moment seem quite uninterested in giving life to the kind populist movements that have appeared in many European countries, and that have catapulted Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency.

But inevitable questions will be asked about Ontario Proud and how closely it hopes to mirror the Trump phenomenon that harnessed voter anger, often by unconventional means, including through Twitter.

While Ontario Proud does love to mock Wynne with some of its social media content [...Twitter and other examples inserted here in source article...]
it has so far been careful to avoid some of the truly inflammatory language Trump continues to indulge in. However, a number of people have crossed the line on the group’s social media sites and subsequently been called out for making misogynistic comments.

The group seems to be mindful of avoiding over-the-top personal attacks, since it appears to make a concerted effort to scrub all inappropriate comments about Wynne from its site.

As Ontario counts down to the June 2018 election, it will surely be intriguing to see how influential Ontario Proud becomes. ]

 

[animatronic]

Everyone's assumption going in was that the riding points system would favour Elliott over Ford - even Ford's team appeared to think so.

As for funding of proxy groups, I'm far more interested in who is coordinating content and giving their marching orders. The money is a minor thing.

Also can't trust the Facebook numbers because you can't assess how many of them are bots.

 

[steveintoronto]

Everyone's assumption going in was that the riding points system would favour Elliott over Ford - even Ford's team appeared to think so.

So did the polls, something to think about, but here's even more to think about:

[...]
Toronto businessman Doug Ford suggested Tory officials had sided with rival Christine Elliott in refusing to extend the election, a decision he said would deny “thousands” of PCs the right to vote.

He also called the process “corrupt,” and went so far as to suggest – though without offering any corroborating evidence – that the party had favoured a select group of “VIP insiders” when it mailed out the secret codes needed to register for the election.

Ford himself stressed that Elliott is the only one of the four candidates for leader who has not echoed his call to extend balloting by a week because of various glitches.

“What would you call an election where only 1 out of 3 members can vote? I call it a scandal,” he said on Facebook. ”All the candidates are united, except one: Christine Elliott. It’s unbelievable. But the Party sided with her … This is just another in a long line of scandals coming out of Party HQ. What games are being played here?” [...]

http://nationalpost.com/news/politi...favour-of-christine-elliott-doug-ford-charges

lol...Guess we'll have to wait for the "tell all" book on that one. I'm sure there's a many-layered one. Ford, by logical extension, states that his win was based on a flawed system. He got that one right.

The money is a minor thing.

Money is a huge thing, although *declared* funds don't guarantee a win. Mulroney is evidence of that. Funding for/of 'outsourcing' is going to be at the centre of the Cdn revelations once testimony starts to flow on the Hill. It is already in the UK and US, albeit not limited to funding alone.

There's going to be a massive push for more transparency of the funding of 'special interest groups' with otherwise direct connections to parties vying for power.

How anyone can think that what happens in the US, UK, EU and elsewhere doesn't happen here is puzzling.

And as to funding, consider the paltry sums Kogan (Dr Spectre) used to incredible advantage in the early years of SCL:

[...]
Wylie said he and others at Cambridge Analytica were initially sceptical of the power of this tactic for gathering data. But when the company approved $1,000 for Kogan to experiment with his app, he produced data on 1,000 people who downloaded it and roughly 160,000 of their friends – all in a matter of hours.

Cambridge Analytica next approved $10,000 for a second round of testing and was rewarded with nearly a million records, including names, home towns, dates of birth, religious affiliations, work and educational histories, and preferences, as expressed using the popular Facebook “like” button on many social media updates, news stories and other online posts.

They soon married that data with voter lists and commercial data broker information and discovered they had a remarkably precise portrait of a large swath of the American electorate. [...]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ch-whistleblower-trump-election-a8267991.html

Let's flip this over for a moment: What "marketing" company in their 'right mind' would ignore this incredible yield per paltry cost to get an advantage over their competitors? This goes back a few years, and has been known in the biz for almost as long.

Funding is almost everything when it comes to gaining political advantage. With the gullible public walking around like zombies with their iDevices telling them what to do, say, think and vote, anyone who wants to get elected only has to throw enough money at the media and their win is bought for them.

I leave it at that for now....developments in this story are unfolding rapidly.

 

[animatronic]

The money reference is to who funded the $5k to Ontario Proud. Who cares about that - someone else is paying a lot more to feed strategy and content to them, which is the important thing.

 

[steveintoronto]

Ontario Proud got a hell of a lot more than $5000 in some form or other. That there's no accountability for it in Canada is the problem. The altruistic goal isn't to stop this, it's to regulate it, so that in effect, no-one can 'buy' an election. Opiates are regulated, so should digital mind drugs.
Meantime:

[...]
Oddly, these policy debates are largely absent in Canada. Instead, Facebook is intertwined in the workings of governments, the development of public policies and the campaigns of political parties. Recent policy decisions have seen the company remain largely untaxed and called on to help solve the journalism problem for which it is the leading cause.

Thursday's announcement further illustrates the dilemma of this laissez-faire approach. How exactly should the Canadian government protect the integrity of the next federal election, in which interest groups, corporations, foreign actors and political campaigns may all run hundreds of thousands, or millions, of simultaneous microtargeted ads a day?

It could force complete transparency of all paid content of any kind shown to Canadians during the election period, as with other media. It could demand disclosure of all financial, location and targeting data connected to this paid content. It could place significant fines on the failure to quickly remove misinformation and hate speech. It could ensure that independent researchers have access to the platform's data, rather than merely relying on Facebook's good intentions. Political parties and the government could even model good behaviour themselves by ceasing to spend millions of dollars of our money on Facebook's microtargeted ads.
[...]

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/is-facebook-a-threat-to-democracy/article36661905/

The big debate will be about whether the Feds have the right to impose regs on Provinces. Since Criminal Law is clearly a federal competence, as are tax rules and communications, then the Feds will have a profound influence on provincial elections and parties. Remember, the House voted *unanimously* for the Ethics Cmte to start hearings.

There's more to come...

 

[Jasmine18]

What about the endless third Party ads liberals go in the past elections?

 

[steveintoronto]

What about the endless third Party ads liberals go in the past elections?

What about them? If you think there were aspects of cheating with data, funding or illegalities, then you should welcome action to discover that.

Let me help you:

Elections B.C. has been asked to investigate political contributions made to the BC Liberals by high-ranking Kinder Morgan staff, including president Ian Anderson.

The democracy advocacy group Dogwood submitted a formal complaint to Elections B.C. this week after discovering a series of political donations from individuals connected to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker project that received provincial approval in January 2017.

The complaint comes on the heels of a bombshell investigation by the Globe and Mail that revealed corporate lobbyists were illegally reimbursed for contributions made to the B.C. Liberals.

Donations from Kinder Morgan staff to the BC Liberals include:

• Ian Anderson, President, Kinder Morgan Canada: $7,300
• Gavin Dew, Stakeholder Engagement Specialist: $13,120
• Lexa Hobenshield, External Relations Manager: $3,725
• Stephanie Snider, consulting lobbyist: $1,000

“If Kinder Morgan reimbursed any of its staff or lobbyists for event tickets, tables at fundraisers or other political contributions, they broke the law,” Kai Nagata, communications director for Dogwood, said in a press release.

B.C. has long been criticized for having some of the weakest political donation rules in Canada. There are no restrictions on corporate, union or foreign donations and there are no limits on what individuals can contribute.

It is explicitly illegal, however, to donate on behalf of or conceal the identity of another individual or entity.

“I think the people that have been tuned into what’s going on have looked at the B.C. political donation system with horror for many years but it does appear that current government has really elevated this style of fundraising to an art form,” Nagata told DeSmog Canada.

“The big difference we’ve seen in the last week is the realization that in their greed these players have found a way to break one of the few rules we do have which is around “straw donors.’ ”

The B.C. Liberals raised $12 million in 2016, more than any other ruling provincial party in Canada and two-thirds as much as the federal Liberal Party, according to the Globe investigation.

Nagata said the massive amounts of corporate and foreign cash flowing into B.C. raise significant concerns about decision-making in the province.

“The fundamental question is whether politicians are governing in the public’s interest and the scale of infiltration of foreign and corporate money raises serious questions about whether that is the case.”

Dogwood calculates that prior to the approval of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline project, the BC Liberals received $771,168 in donations from project supporters including Kinder Morgan, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association and oilsands producers. The same group donated $51,210 to the BCNDP.

A recent report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Corporate Mapping Project found the B.C.government has been lobbied more than 22,000 times by the fossil fuel industry since 2010 and received $5.2 million in industry political donations between 2008 and 2015, 92 per cent of which went to the BC Liberals.

“Each of these examples highlights how politicians have turned this lack of laws and regulations to their advantage politically,” Nagata said.

Despite numerous calls to modernize B.C.’s political donation system, no changes have been made under the BC Liberals.

“People are starting to wake up and realize every decision this government has made, and contracts they’ve given out and billions in tax breaks they’ve awarded to donor companies — all of that is now in question.” [...]

https://www.desmog.ca/2017/03/09/political-donations-top-kinder-morgan-staff-draw-call-investigation

 

[adma]

May I reiterate my point about this shaping up to be a "Dollarama election", i.e. voters opting for the Ford (and yes, specifically the *Ford*) Tories on the same grounds that they might get certain basic goods from Dollarama--and in a way they might never have done so before, mainly because they hadn't yet clued into the draw of "Dollarama politics".

And maybe the CamAnalytica/FB scandal highlights things, but it even seems that the kinds of social-media realms through which one might once have mediated such results and outcomes are looking tattered. Like, it's not just a march to a DoFo premiership, but a shrugging, resigned march at that. Like, the Wynne Liberal efforts to push against that are looking impotent, or even the Horwath NDP third-option assertions aren't going far beyond those already with a vested interest in the party. The only ones left voicing those cases are the same-old same-olds--it's like an all-seeing fly-on-the-wall perspective is dying out. Like Doug Ford being just another boring Brad Wall or Brian Pallister type landslide-consensus premier in the making.

This is playing out as a *very* dismal, depressing election, unless some mid-campaign miracle happens.

 

[SunriseChampion]

This is playing out as a *very* dismal, depressing election, unless some mid-campaign miracle happens.

I've been saying this. Then again, most of our elections in this country are depressing affairs. Nothing entirely new here.

If people want to vote in a way that results in a government that goes against my best interests then I'll just laugh when it turns out that said government goes against their best interests.