OTTAWA—The man behind right-wing advocacy group Ontario Proud is using a pre-existing network of supporters to boost Erin O’Toole’s leadership campaign.

Jeff Ballingall confirmed to the Star that his company, Mobilize Media Group, is using an existing database of supporters to help O’Toole’s outreach efforts and to micro-target his campaign’s Facebook ads.

The database could prove to be a crucial leg-up in a leadership race that partly hinges on selling memberships, identifying supporters and winning over delegates across the country. While O’Toole doesn’t have the name recognition of perceived front-runner Peter MacKay, the ability to micro-target conservative supporters with his message is an important asset.

“A lot of what the campaigns are trying to do is build a list of potential supporters to mine. And so getting that list ready-made allows you a kind of kick-start and ramp up, and you’re not starting from scratch,” said Fenwick McKelvey, a professor at Concordia University who researches social media activism and politics.

Screenshots provided to the Star by a Conservative source show Ballingall’s organization uploaded a list of supporters to Facebook’s powerful custom audience tool, which allows advertisers to target users based on demographic and location information, on Dec. 1.

That’s before outgoing leader Andrew Scheer announced he would resign as party leader, and well before O’Toole officially jumped in the race to replace him. Ballingall, who is working as O’Toole’s digital director, confirmed the authenticity of the screenshots.

But Ballingall refused to say if the database was scraped from Ontario Proud’s existing list of social media followers, which number in the hundreds of thousands.

“Mobilize Media Group has proprietary advertising optimization,” Ballingall said in a brief statement. He declined to elaborate on the O’Toole campaign’s tactics. An O’Toole official suggested the campaign has spent roughly $6,000 on Facebook ads in the early days of the race.

While the use of external databases to boost O’Toole’s campaign does not appear to violate any rules, the Proud network’s perceived support for a specific candidate is raising eyebrows within Conservative circles.

Ballingall has grown Ontario Proud — an online advocacy group created to oust former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government — into a dominant player in Canada’s growing number of third-party advocacy groups. Its offshoot, Canada Proud, attempted to tip the scales against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2019.

The Proud network consistently outperforms traditional media outlets in attracting eyeballs and “likes” on Facebook and Twitter, according to a 2019 analysis by the Star and BuzzFeed News.

A ready-made database of conservative supporters — including those who don’t currently have a party membership — could be a considerable advantage in the race to sell memberships and win over delegates to the Conservatives’ June 27 leadership convention in Toronto. It’s not clear if Ballingall’s Mobilize Media is using Canada Proud or Ontario Proud’s supporter list to help O’Toole’s campaign.

Ballingall is also the chief marketing officer for The Post Millennial, an online politics website that primarily publishes conservative commentary and rewritten news stories from the mainstream media.

Given its main subject matter, The Post Millennial has been aggressively covering the Conservatives’ leadership race. In a statement to the Star, senior editor Graeme Gordon said Ballingall is “not an editor” with the website.

“Mobilize Media Group, a company owned by our CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Jeff Ballingall, has been contracted as a vendor by Erin O’Toole’s campaign for leadership,” Gordon wrote in a statement to the Star.

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“We will continue to give fair and balanced coverage to all major CPC candidates throughout the leadership race.”

But The Post Millennial’s content is routinely shared by the Proud network. Despite Ballingall being involved with both organizations, and his employment by the O’Toole campaign, the Proud network presents itself as neutral in the leadership race.