It's been slightly like going to sleep in Canada during a non-election year and waking up in the U.S. during the Republican primaries.
South of the border, the candidates who would be president are giving each other trouble over questionable “robocalling” tactics.
North of the border, parties that seem to be in full campaign mode despite it not being an election year are giving each other trouble over questionable robocalling tactics.
It's been all robocalling all the time since the story about the investigation was broken by Postmedia last Wednesday. It's like no other story matters – and, in terms of stories on the Canadian federal political scene, no other story should matter during a time like this.
It's been reported Elections Canada has received 31,000 complaint calls about robocalling from across the country.
In the meantime, all the parties and pundits are throwing around the accusations. It's a Conservative conspiracy. It's a Liberal snafu. It's all unfounded anyways. It's akin to Watergate. It's voter suppression of the worst kind.
Most fingers seem pointed at the Tories while the Tories are pointing at the Liberals.
The robocalls that are the source of the problem actually are not all the same. Some are complaints of calls, allegedly from the Liberal party, coming at annoying hours of the day.
Those are the ones the Tories have latched onto, suggesting the Liberals actually did hire someone to make these robocalls and are trying to avoid the backlash.
While I'm sure being interrupted at inconvenient hours of the day was vexing for many people, these are not the calls Canadians should be focused on.
I'm not saying those calls aren't an important issue, especially if it's found that another party was impersonating the Grits, but there's a far more nefarious robocalling issue at hand.
That's the one about which the news originally broke – that in Guelph, Ont., voters apparently received phone calls giving them the wrong polling station information on the day of the election.
That's the case where there's an ex-Mountie trying to track down Pierre Poutine of Separatist Street, a brilliantly obvious Canadian pseudonym. The identity of Pierre Poutine has not yet been revealed but according to news reports the paper trail shows whoever is behind the dastardly deed is an unsophisticated operator at best.
It's important that the identity and motivation of Pierre Poutine's alleged attempt at dissuading voters through misdirection be discovered quickly so that facts, instead of political finger wagging, get scrutiny from the media and the public.
Trying to trick people out of supporting a party by calling them during dinner? It's a dirty trick deserving of a reprimand, but not entirely unexpected tactic as our politics start to resemble those south of the border.
Trying to trick people out of voting? That should be sounding alarms for every Canadian.
