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Our new finance minister, Joe Oliver, still has a hurdle to clear.

Oliver’s riding of Eglington-Lawrence is among those being probed by Elections Canada in an investigation of automated robocalls and other alleged illicit activities in the 2011 election campaign. That investigation is scheduled to wind up shortly, with a report to follow soon after.

Oliver defeated Liberal incumbent Joe Volpe in that campaign by more than 4,000 votes. So convinced of wrongdoing was Volpe that he took the unusual step of filing a grievance with Elections Canada even before voting day. He said his supporters were being harassed by calls coming from North Dakota and elsewhere. Two years after the campaign he went to Elections Canada again with more allegations, which included a claim that large numbers of electors were wrongly registered.

That last charge did not hold up. As Oliver spokesperson Melissa Lantsman pointed out Wednesday, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand subsequently revealed that he could find only three cases of improper voter registration in the riding.

Mr. Volpe said Wednesday he has not been contacted by Elections Canada investigators since that time, though he said some others on his campaign team have been.

Mr. Oliver also has denied other media reports alleging vote suppression in the riding. “We conducted a completely clean campaign in Eglington-Lawrence” he said in 2012, adding he would cooperate with Elections Canada investigators. His spokesperson declined to respond to a question yesterday on whether he has spoken with Elections Canada and had his name cleared.

A source said that after the campaign, Oliver checked into the Volpe allegations and discovered that others in the Conservative party ran vote suppression operations in his riding without his knowledge. Oliver was furious when he found out …

A source who knows the Oliver family says that Oliver knew nothing about any illicit activities in the campaign. However, he said that after the campaign, Oliver checked into the Volpe allegations and discovered that others in the Conservative party ran vote suppression operations in his riding without his knowledge. Oliver was furious when he found out, the source said.

In respect to Eglington-Lawrence, Postmedia and the Ottawa Citizen reported two years back that it was one of 14 ridings where many electors reported receiving fake live calls, some in the middle of the night. Jewish voters were being repeatedly called on the Sabbath by workers claiming to be Liberals. This was something Volpe’s campaign said it studiously avoided doing, knowing it would be offensive to those voters.

As for calls reportedly coming in from North Dakota, Conservatives tried to deny the allegation in the House of Commons, saying it was the Liberals who were using that state as a base for such operations. But the Conservatives embarrassed themselves. The Liberals were using a Canadian-based call centre with the same name — Prime Contact — as the one in North Dakota.

On a robocalls case brought before the Federal Court by the Council of Canadians, Judge Richard Mosley ruled last year that misleading calls about the location of polling stations “were made to electors in ridings across the country” and that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the vote. He said that he was not making a finding against the Conservative party.

“I am satisfied however,” he said, “that the most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database” — which, he added, is maintained and controlled by the Conservatives.

The Conservatives also tried to an unseemly degree to hamper progress on the court case, the judge said. The case involved six ridings; Eglington-Lawrence wasn’t one of them.

The Elections Canada probe has gone on for almost three years but only one charge has been laid — against a Conservative party worker, Michael Sona, in the riding of Guelph.

The lone charge is a signal to many that Elections Canada has not made much progress in getting to the bottom of what went on in an election which produced 31,000 complaints of underhanded activities from voters across the country.

Lawrence Martin is the author of 10 books, including six national bestsellers. His most recent, Harperland, was nominated for the Shaughnessy Cohen award. His other works include two volumes on Jean Chrétien, two on Canada-U.S. relations and three books on hockey.

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