'Obvious attempt to create chaos,' Charest campaign says of fake donation pledges

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Jean Charest’s team says it is aware that fake donation pledges were made to the Conservative leadership candidate’s campaign, calling the situation “an obvious attempt to create chaos.”

Charest’s campaign says it was made aware on Wednesday afternoon of emails going out to “several individuals” suggesting incorrectly that they had made financial donations to the leadership hopeful, when they hadn’t.

“This is an obvious attempt to create chaos. Our campaign will not tolerate it,” Charest spokesperson Laurence Toth said in a statement to CTV News.

According to the Canadian Press, The Conservative Party of Canada has said that it is confident that its membership data has not been compromised. CTV News has asked the party for confirmation.

Conservative strategist and former senior staffer to Erin O’Toole, Melanie Paradis, took to Twitter on Wednesday to warn fellow party members of the alleged breach, after she received an email from a campaign which she did not identity, thanking her for donating $120 to the candidate.

Except, Paradis said she didn’t make this donation, as she is not backing any Conservative leadership candidate. She said she then reached out to the candidate’s campaign manager to investigate.

What they found was that it appeared as if Paradis—and according to her, “hundreds more”—had filled out an online pledge form, using personal information that Paradis suspected dates back to the last leadership race, from an IP address originating in Kyiv.

“Upon investigation we discovered that someone had gone to the campaign website and created false pledge submissions with IP addresses originating in Ukraine,” Toth confirmed.

Charest’s campaign told CTV News it has notified those who were impacted by the error as well as the Conservative Party’s Leadership Election Organizing Committee (LEOC), and will be working with LEOC as they review what went on and who may have been behind it.

Paradis said that while some may chalk this up to “juvenile trolling meant to mess with a campaign’s data,” in her view, it’s “an attempt to corrupt the process” of the party’s leadership election.

According to the current rules of the Conservative leadership race, candidates are able to access the party’s membership list as well as old membership records dating back to 2019, with conditions. In order to get access, hopefuls have to submit 500 signatures from members, pay half of the party’s $200,000 registration fee, and acknowledge that the data is “confidential and the exclusive property of the Conservative Party of Canada.”

For years, privacy advocates have expressed concerns over the lack of transparency when it comes to what political parties do with the data they collect and what requirements there are for Canadians to be informed if a privacy breach has occurred of a political party’s database.

As part of a series of elections law changes made by the Liberals in 2018, the government required political parties to post their privacy policies online, but stopped short of subjecting parties to tougher privacy rules and oversight for the information they harvest from the electorate, despite calls to do so.