Call John Gomery to investigate the robocalls scandal, says a Vancouver Liberal MP whose riding was among those allegedly targeted by fraudulent calls.
Vancouver Quadra MP Joyce Murray is urging Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get Gomery — the retired judge who headed up a public inquiry into the sponsorship scandal involving Jean Chrétien’s former Liberal government — to look into the suspicious calls that allegedly discouraged and misdirected voters in last year’s federal election.
“It’s (the prime minister’s) responsibility to investigate and come clean with everything they know,” Murray said. “We cannot allow this to go uninvestigated and unpunished, otherwise we don’t have healthy democracy.”
Murray claims she learned just three days before election day that several supporters in her riding got “bizarre, rude and harassing” late-night phone calls from people purporting to be from the Liberal party.
The calls came from a number in North Dakota, she adds. Murray says she only realized that her riding is one of up to 34 across Canada that was targeted after watching the news.
“This makes Canada a laughingstock on the international stage,” she said. “Canada and Elections Canada have been proud to go and do election observations in other countries, teaching how to do proper elections, and here we are with the prime minister and his party implicated in a potentially nationwide election fraud.”
Harper told the House of Commons Wednesday that the Conservatives had no role in the robocalls scandal and dismissed it as a “smear campaign” by the NDP and Liberals.
Elections Canada is investigating reports that voters in Guelph, Ont., received phone calls directing them to the wrong polling stations.
With files from the canadian press
Local news from metronews.ca/vancouver
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