OTTAWA—The Conservative party says it didn’t use U.S.-based call services to get out the vote in the May election, but the Liberals did.

The Tories say that means they can’t be behind allegations of harassing phone calls originating from American area codes during the last campaign, but maybe the Liberals were.

A growing number of Canadians report receiving strange calls — some from American numbers — during the May election that either misled them about polling stations or came at odd hours.

Conservative party spokesman Fred DeLorey says the onus is on the Liberals to prove the calls aren’t connected to the dozens of contracts that party has with its own calling firms.

In question period, Prime Minister Stephen Harper challenged Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae to produce his evidence about the robocall accusations.

“We’ve done some checking,” Harper said. “We’ve only found that, in fact, it was the Liberal party that did source its phone calls from the United States.

“I wonder if the reason the honourable leader of the Liberal party will not in fact show us his evidence is it will point in fact that it was the Liberal party that made these calls.”

At least one of those calling firms, First Contact, is believed to use software that could produce calls coming from American numbers.

On its website, First Contact bills itself as “the leading Canadian supplier of call centre services to Liberal candidates and office-holders in Canada.”

When reached by telephone, First Contact President Mike O’Neill wouldn’t say whether calls from his firm could be traced back to the U.S.

But when asked whether it was possible that First Contact was involved in harassing or misleading calls, O’Neill said no.

As the New Democrats and Liberals pressed the government in question period about suspicious calls and accusations of electoral fraud, the Conservatives stuck to their standard response that this is a “smear” campaign by electoral losers.

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