While it is never wise to disagree with a judge, we hope the superior court justice who tried the case goes easy on the kid blamed for the Guelph Robocalls. As much as you agree with how reprehensible the act might be, letting the perpetrators of the crime pick the scapegoat is not justice.
When the Prime Minister can throw his chief of staff under the bus at the hint of possible legal action, you know that nobody is safe in politics. It is the way the system works and nobody should be proud of it. It leaves us without honour.
The truth is that in politics, nobody has your back. In a political campaign, everyone but the candidate is expendable. If you choose to act like a band of thieves, there are consequences. The arbiter of what transpires in a campaign is the campaign manager. Candidates must deal with their own demons but the campaign manager is the stand-in who deals with the workers and the suppliers. The campaign manager is the buffer that hopefully protects the candidate from liability.
This young gentleman who has been found guilty of the Guelph Robocalls charge was believed to be the campaign communications person. In most riding campaigns this person reports directly to the campaign manager. Even if the candidate requests a specific chore of the communications person, the assignment is routinely discussed with the campaign manager. That is the routine that keeps a campaign on message and on budget.
And no supplier to political campaigns would ever accept verbal instructions from some stranger named “Pierre Poutine” on behalf of the candidate. There are only three people in campaigns who can routinely order something. The people with the authority are the candidate, the campaign manager and the official agent. Delegating any person other than those three is asking for confusion and budget problems.
When talking about campaign budget problems today you are not talking about problems of paying the bills but problems of keeping expenditures within legal limits. All candidates face the challenge of presenting campaign expense reports that can pass inspection. It is not the federal or provincial election officials that candidates worry about but the angry inspection of disgruntled opponents.
Any experienced campaign manager is likely to wonder at what was claimed at the Robocall trial. It appears the judge might have been gulled. If he had experience in political campaigns, he might never have given credibility to what some people said in the trial. The kid convicted probably deserves a slap on the wrist for being naïve but not having his life ruined with a jail sentence.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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