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Thomas Lukaszuk emerged from a meeting Wednesday to find he was a popular man.

His voice mail was full and he was inundated with texts. He took a closer look and noticed that each voice mail was about five seconds long, mainly from acquaintances, apologizing for missing his call.

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Odd, because the former MLA for Edmonton-Castle Downs had made no calls for anyone to return.

After looking into the situation, he realized people were replying to robocalls generated by the new NDP MLA in his former riding about the government’s new electricity plans.

“It has made my evening and morning very eventful,” he said.

Aside from the general annoyance of fielding all these calls, Lukaszuk wondered if the party broke the rules by making those calls.

“If an MLA is doing it from a constituency, it would break another law. MLAs cannot promote government policies using the constituency budget,” he said.

The NDP said that’s not the case and have since apologized to Lukaszuk. They blame the caller ID gaffe on an IT problem at the phone company. In fact, a reverse lookup on the number shows it still belongs to “Thomas MLA Lukaszuk.”

For now, the former Progressive Conservative MLA wants people to know that he hasn’t changed his party colours to NDP orange.

“It’s problematic because a lot of people think I’m affiliated with it somehow,” he said.

sxthomson@postmedia.com

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