MONTREAL — It’s election day. The phone rings. It’s an automated call from Elections Canada informing you that, due to circumstances beyond their control, your polling station has been changed. You scramble to find a pen to jot down the new address. Turns out, it’s miles from where you live.

Suspicions have logically fallen on supporters of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, even though the Liberal Party isn’t exactly a stranger to robocalls.

Turns out, too, that when you show up there later in the day, you find an abandoned church or a parking lot, but no polling station. Surprise! You’ve been had by Pierre Poutine.

Elections Canada has been contacted about 31,000 times by people concerned with robocalls and election irregularities since the May 2 election last year. And Poutine’s dirty-tricks campaign has rocked the Canadian political establishment. Liberal and New Democrat voters seem to have been targeted in parliamentary districts in which the governing Conservative Party was competitive. In at least one case, robocalls made largely to older voters appear to have won the Conservatives one seat.



At the center of the scandal is Pierre Poutine — or whoever lives behind the silly, fast-food inspired pseudonym and used it to register the prepaid cellphones and telecom services needed for the stunt. Canada’s newspapers have read like a police procedural over the last few weeks as federal investigators work to trace Poutine’s real identity. According to them, he used a prepaid credit card to buy a prepaid cellphone registered under this fake name and a phony address to hire the robocall provider.

Suspicions have logically fallen on supporters of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, even though the Liberal Party isn’t exactly a stranger to robocalls: it has used them to spread rumors that some Conservative candidates are pro-life, something of a slur here. Whoever the culprit is, the Pierre Poutine saga shows that enduring stereotypes about Canada as an unfailingly nice country full of scrupulously polite people is out of date. Politics here may not have degenerated into the all-out, nonstop mudslinging match that dominates the public sphere south of the border, but it has acquired an unmistakably hard edge.

Much of this is about regional differences: the ascendancy of Harper Conservatives since 2006 has also meant the rise of a political culture heavily tinged with the values of the province of Alberta, where Harper built much of his political career.

With its cowboys and its oil wells, Alberta is Canada’s Texas, and the brand of politics practiced out there is as far removed from the genteel tones of Ontario and Quebec politics as a Dallas N.R.A. meeting is from a Boston Rotary Club luncheon. Indeed, while the Eastern Establishment howls at the criminality seemingly involved in the robocalls, the Conservatives’ response has been a bemused what’s-the-big-deal? shrug of the shoulders.

It’s all very far from the Canada that American liberals like to fantasize about, isn’t it?