​Conservative Who Was Either the Mastermind or Fall Guy in the Robocall Scandal Loses Appeal

It looks like Canadians will never find out what really happened in Guelph, Ont. on election day 2011 when thousands of voters got a fraudulent robocall sending them to the wrong polling station.

Michael Sona, the only person charged in the case, is 30 days into a nine-month sentence at Maplehurst Correctional Complex (also known as the the Milton Hilton), the only election fraudster in a combined medium and maximum security prison.

His sentence appeal was rejected last month in the Ontario Court of Appeal. The reasons were released Thursday. His lawyer had asked for a short sentence, arguing that 14 to 30 days would send the right message, since Sona's career has been destroyed. The Crown wanted 20 months, to deter election fraudsters. Justice James MacPherson ruled that the trial judge found the right balance.

Sona, now 27, was a 22-year-old Conservative election staff on May 2, 2011, when someone used an Edmonton-based robocalling company to send a recorded message to 7,676 opposition supporters in the Guelph riding, telling them their polling station had moved.

The scheme worked, to a point. Hundreds of voters turned up at the wrong polling station, causing a traffic jam, and some of them ripped up their voter cards in frustration. The dirty trick didn't change the outcome in the riding, where the Liberal MP held onto his seat, but when reporters discovered that Elections Canada had linked the robocall to the Conservatives, it caused a huge headache for the government of Stephen Harper.

The party went into damage-control mode, struggling to explain how and why one of their campaigns tried to trick voters, while the opposition accused them of trying to trick Canadians with dirty phone calls across Canada.

Not long after the story broke, the now-defunct Sun News Network reported that Sona -- the director of communications for the local campaign -- was linked to the scheme. He lost his job on Parliament Hill and eventually found work as a machinist.

Investigators followed the electronic trail behind the call, learning that whoever was responsible used untraceable gift cards to buy an untraceable burner phone registered in the name Pierre Poutine, seemingly a homage to a popular Guelph poutine shack where Conservative staffers had late night snacks.

Investigators pored over electronic records and tried to interview the people who ran the Conservative campaign in the riding, but complained the party wasn't as helpful as it could have been.

But some young staffers told party bosses that Sona had bragged about his involvement in the scheme. Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton brought them in to Elections Canada and sat in on their interviews.

At Sona's trial, his lawyer tried to cast doubt on their testimony, pointing out that most of what they said had been in media accounts, but the judge was convinced that they were telling the truth, and Sona was convicted and sentenced to nine months in jail.

Sona didn't testify at his trial and has never admitted guilt. He has described himself as a scapegoat and a fall guy for the party, and complained that higher ups were never investigated.

In his unsuccessful sentence appeal, lawyer Howard Krongold said that Sona was motivated by "partisan fervour and emotion, not greed," saying that he "lost his moral bearings during a campaign that developed a 'siege mentality."

But Sona has never personally acknowledged involvement, maintaining in interviews that he was too junior to be involved in electoral skullduggery.

"How is it possible that any investigation into what happened in Guelph did not include an investigation of CPC Headquarters staff?" he said in a recent interview with Michael Harris while he was out on bail.

Sona's continued silence leaves many questions unanswered.

We don't know who put up the money for the gift cards, who bought the phone, who created the fake gmail account, the account with the robocall company and who logged in to send the calls.

The Crown wasn't able to link Sona to any of those key elements of the crime.

When Judge Gary Hearn of Ontario Superior Court convicted him, he acknowledged that Sona was not in it alone: "Although the evidence indicates he did not likely act alone, he was party to the offence and, as noted previously, there will be a finding of guilt registered."

The admitted facts—agreed on by the Crown and the defence —seem to show that Sona couldn't have done it alone, since at 1:20 pm on May 1, someone logged onto the robocall system at the very moment that someone else was buying a prepaid gift card at a drug store.

Some key Conservatives always refused to meet with Elections Canada investigators. Campaign manager Ken Morgan moved to Kuwait to teach at the height of the scandal.

The local Conservative volunteer—businessman John White—who may have downloaded the list of opposition supporters used in the call from the central Conservative database, couldn't recall doing so.

And Elections Canada, without saying who specifically refused to speak to them, repeatedly complained that party officials were not doing all they could to get to the bottom of the scheme.

The party's chief defender in the House of Commons, Dean Del Mastro, then the parliamentary secretary to Harper, always maintained that allegations of broader party involvement were "entirely false."

But Del Mastro was himself convicted of cheating in the 2008 election and sentenced to a month in jail, so his assurances may carry less weight than they once did.

Del Mastro is out on bail, awaiting an appeal, Harper has lost, the scandal is receding into the past and Sona, who may know more than he says about what happened in Guelph five years ago, seems to have decided to keep his secrets and do his time without implicating anybody else.

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