Meet the Team Harper reprobates?

Blogger vows to dig deep on Conservatives' online histories

By Kyle Duggan
Friday, October 2, 2015

Tim Dutaud in a screengrab from a YouTube video. (The Canadian Press)

Brace for some more embarrassed candidates. Maybe a lot more.

Activist blogger Robert Jago, dubbed “the most dangerous blogger in Canada” after unearthing information that took down three Conservative candidates, has launched his research team’s new website Meet The Harper Gang, which promises to post dirt on Tory candidates every few hours, starting later today.

Jago said his team has recorded conversations with dozens of Tory candidates and claims that by election day he will have published dirt on close to 100 candidates.

Jago has already unearthed the social media pasts of a number of candidates, and was responsible for the Tories ousting Tim Dutaud, who was running in Toronto-Danforth, after he outed him as the caller in a YouTube prank call series where he mocked people with disabilities. He also caused the party to lose Bonavista-Burin-Trinity candidate Blair Dale — because of controversial comments he made online about women and racial minorities — and Gilles Guibord, who was running in Rosemont-La-Petite-Patrie, over offensive comments about women he made on news websites’ comment boards.

Jago said he had been holding off on publishing new information on candidates until September 28 — the day the candidate nomination period closed — to make it harder for the Conservatives to drop embarrassing candidates.

So far, most of what he has published has been candidates’ past comments about First Nations and women. He said he’s aiming for a “PKP moment” for the Tories, referring to Pierre Karl Peladeau’s emergence as a star Parti Quebecois candidate in the Quebec 2014 election and how his enthusiasm for another sovereignty referendum ended up dragging the party down.

His team of 40-plus researchers is also crowd-sourcing opposition research, putting forward tips they’ve gotten that need verification.

His campaign is an attempt to highlight what he calls the Conservatives’ bench strength problem: prominent candidates like John Baird and Peter MacKay have left the scene, leaving a slate of much more obscure, less talented people he describes as “the least-employable, the weirdest, the creepiest …”

“I want to help create a change in the narrative,” he said.

Yaroslav Baran, a consultant at Earnscliffe Strategy Group, says the number of candidates who have gotten in trouble appears to be much higher in this campaign. He noted it’s a problem that runs across all parties — but the damage done to a party by a nominee scandal now would be much greater, because it’s too late to pull a candidate’s name off the ballot.

“Before the deadline, you get rid of a candidate and life more or less goes back to normal,” he said.

Case in point: Victoria Liberal candidate Cheryl Thomas resigned on Wednesday after highly controversial comments she made about Israel and mosques surfaced — but her name will still appear on the ballot because she was dropped after the 28th.

That info was dredged up by the website True North Times, started by a McGill university student, which just wrapped up its “Nine Days of Scandal” project, downing several candidates in the process.

Baran said that parties will need to step up their vetting process for the next election.

“This campaign has largely demonstrated parties are still basically using the vetting techniques and scale of campaigns of 10 or 20 years ago when everybody needs to kick it up a notch or two,” he said. “If this is the new normal, the new age we’re living in, so many things should not fall through the cracks.”