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Slack said she spent most of her life in academia, working for public schools around Edmonton and in postsecondary education in England. Her husband, who passed away earlier this year, held a Canada Research Chair, she said. If you ask, Slack will tell you where she thinks the Liberals should stick their survey and its “obvious biases.”

The National Post tried the same electoral reform hotline she did and, after a short hold, asked an “agent” questions about the committee. That person gave what sounded like a scripted answer: the committee wasn’t involved with the survey; the questions were designed by Vox Pop Labs and reviewed by an “academic advisory panel.”

Even if it happened to only a few people, Cullen said, hearing Slack’s story “felt like the government was trying to hide behind the committee.”

“They’re lying,” he said. “I don’t want my name, my committee, associated with this junk. We worked really hard. We did a good job.”

Cullen said there are even bigger problems with the survey, and the government should just axe it.

Despite Monsef saying personal details including gender, year of birth and postal code are “optional” in question period Wednesday, it says in the fine print of the website that responses lacking those details won’t be included in the data. There’s also an option to provide an email address so you can “send yourself a record of your results.”

“This is the cheapest form of marketing, where you get the customer in, they spend 20 minutes, and at the end they say in order to get your free coffee you have to give us your email address,” Cullen said.

“Is it a bait-and-switch where part of the exercise is really just to get enough data that you can start mining for fundraising, for polling, for whatever? And using taxpayer money to do it?”

Canada’s privacy czar is set to review the survey to see if any rules are being broken.

• Email: mdsmith@postmedia.com | Twitter: amariedanielles