As an NDP candidate in the last election, I was often dismayed that my party seemed to view the internet as a giant ATM for the coffers of the party. I had one exasperated volunteer approach me one day showing me a list of the dozens of email solicitations she had received from the NDP in the past 48 hours. “I support you, Jamie,”she said “but this stuff makes me not support your party.” I apologized to her. It was out of my control but I was partly responsible. Every party collects lists of their supporters and those end up in the parties databases. The Conservatives had CIMS, we had Populus and the Liberal party had Liberalist. There were times when I would specifically communicate to the party that a donor was NOT an NDP supporter and to please not put them into the database even though they had made a donation. I’m fairly confident the party listened to me because I never received complaints from those people but I was never sure if they were solicited or not.

Liberalist is by far the most sophisticated of the three systems and is one of the elements that is cited for the Liberals victory in 2015. Communications were better and more efficient through Liberalist. The system is based on the Voter Activation Network Platform, used by Barack Obama in 2012 and by Bernie Sanders right now. One of the elements of the platform gives the ability to share information on social networks. Believe me, if you were part of the supporter class during the Liberal leadership race, if you contacted the Liberals in any way, donated money or time, you are in Liberalist. It could also well be that your social media accounts are in Liberalist, too.

In light of what transpired last week, the surprise vote on C-10, the flack for the composition of the electoral reform committee, the use of closure on the assisted dying legislation, the threatened imposition of government motion no.6 that curtailed the rights of MPs, the continued incarceration of people charged with marijuana posession, the lack of action on reforming C-51, the pigheaded rush to impose the TPP amongst many other issues, it looked like a bad week for the government. Until the elbow, Gabrielle Gallant, Jaro Giesbrecht and the internet.

I’m not an expert on the Liberals Data Machine so I wouldn’t accuse them of organized sharing of Giesbrecht’s vile video that implies Ruth Ellen Brosseau set up the whole deal. It was shared a lot. It has over a million views. I have heard rumours of paid partisan trolls for years but they have been just that, rumours. What does truly worry me is the ability of the Liberal party to do just that if they wanted to: To use Liberalist to disseminate misinformation and multiply personal attacks. It would bother me if the Conservatives or NDP did it with their networks as well. Some say that that is the way politics is done now. I may be out of the mainstream but I think that we, as Canadians, have and can do better.

Colin Bennett’s ipolitics article ‘How the Liberals won the Big Data war’ is particularly illuminating on how the parties collected information in the run up and during the election. Bennett is the Canadian expert on these issues.

Bennett states: “social media can, and does, reinforce impressions for supporters, and for undecided voters. In this respect, the positive and upbeat image of Trudeau could be accentuated, and he could come across as someone fundamentally at home in this young and vibrant medium. For Harper and Mulcair, it was more of a stretch.”

When Team Trudeau, Mulcair or Harper can get your personal details and geo-locate you, we have drifted far from the idea of the secret ballot. The secret ballot was conceived to protect political privacy, prevent vote buying and ostracism. In my ideal world, not only would I strictly legislate the use of these databases, I would go as far as to outlaw publication of political polls during the writ period as I feel they unduly influence voters in FPTP electoral systems. To learn more about these privacy issues I suggest you read The Electronic Freedom Frontier’s take on these issues. The peril of being steamrolled into a party’s data machine is not only the loss of privacy, it is the risk of abuse. Brosseau is a leadership candidate who has a great social media profile. Wouldn’t it be convenient for her political opponents to kneecap her before she even gets out of the gates?