What Mr. Fryer Was NOT Forced To Do.

ThisIsWhatADemocracyCentre

LooksLikeVille

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Update, Sunday Mar 11/12...At the bottom of this post we originally noted reports that Mr. Stephen Maher, one of the reporters who broke the voter suppression story, may have been asked to leave a Manning Centre soiree in Ottawa on Friday night...Turns out that Mr. Maher was, indeed, asked to leave but he, Mr. Maher, is now satisfied that it was all just a 'misunderstanding'...

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First, what Mr. Fryer, the public administrator guy from UVIC, did do...

He apologized and made it clear that his statements were not meant to suggest that two very fine folks, and the even finer 'Campaign Research' group, have done anything illegal or unethical.

To wit:

Campaign Research

Attention : Aaron Wudrick

Dear Sir,

Re: John Fryer

I am writing, at your request, to state that my comments which have been published recently, were not intended to suggest that Mr. Kouvalis, Mr. Ciano, or Campaign Research provided, discussed or made suggestions to participants regarding any illegal or unethical tactics and apologize for any distress that has been caused to your clients.

Yours truly,
John L. Fryer

Now.

What Mr. Fryer did NOT do was 'retract' his original letter to The Globe and Mail.

Thus, we reprint it, once again, here, for the record.

In January, 2010, my UVic inbox had an e-mail invite from a democracy centre to attend a campaign school. Intrigued, I signed up for the three-day event.

Topics covered included voter identification. Discussion ensued about suppression techniques. Instructors explained voter suppression tactics were borrowed from those used by the U.S. Republican Party. Many kinds of suppression calls were canvassed. Another instructor gave detailed explanations of how robo-calls worked, techniques for recording messages, plus costs involved. He distributed his business card upon request.

Instructors made it clear that robo-calling and voter suppression were an acceptable and normal part of winning political campaigns...

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Now one thing we should perhaps mention here, just for completeness, is the fact that the fellow who posted Mr. Fryer's apology, who is himself a very, very, very fine fellow that we do not mean to impugn, slight, or implicate in absolutely anything in even the slightest whiff of a way, is himself a former winner of a 'Pyramid' award from the finest of the fine 'Manning Centre for Building Democracy' in the 'Political Technology' category along with some other really, really, really fine folks who have also never, ever, ever done anything wrong, ever:

Political Technology: Awarded to an individual or organization that has employed political technologies to strengthen Canada's conservative movement.

2010 Winner is the C2C Journal for their success in building an excellent online journal. Editorial Board members Joseph Quesnel and Chris Schafer accepted the award on behalf of the C2C Journal.

Past winners:
2008: Stephen Taylor and Craig Smith for founding BloggingTories.ca.
2009: Michael Davis from RMG for his achievements with phone and online GOTV, fundraising, and voter ID....

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Meanwhile, Alison is reporting that those finest of the very fine folks from the 'Manning Centre For Building Democracy' reportedly requested, in what we can only assume was done in the nicest most non-threatening way possible, that a member of the media, who just happens to be one of those pesky reporters who broke the RoboCall story, head on home from their 'retreat' party just a wee bit early yesterday:

...And to cap it all off with a huge dollop of irony, Stephen Maher of Postmedia, who along with Glen McGregor of the Citizen broke the robocalls story in the first place, was reportedly thrown out of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy conference party last night...

Oh.

And in case you missed it, this is what that particular reporter, Mr. Maher, had to say on Evan Solomon's CBC radio show two weeks ago:

"This was not one kid with a robo-dialer"

No matter how really fine and dandy that kid might be.

OK?

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