Evidence of meeting #101 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was work.
A video is available from Parliament.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Vote Leave made the donation to BeLeave directly to us, yes.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Vote Leave paid the invoice that we provided to BeLeave, yes.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
You've told us time and again there was zero coordination between Vote Leave and BeLeave—
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
—and now I just heard that BeLeave contacts you, engages your service, and—guess what?—Vote Leave paid. You've told us and led us to believe there was no coordination. How did they know to call up and pay the exact amount that you invoiced them? How did they know that?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
When we sent the invoice to Mr. Grimes, he let us know that Vote Leave would be paying for that.
Liberal
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
You led us to believe there was no coordination between BeLeave and Vote Leave, and yet somehow they picked up the phone and said, “You know what? I'm not only going to pay BeLeave's invoice; I'm going to pay the exact amount.” How did that happen if there was no coordination?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
When that happened, we, as I was—
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
No, you said there was none. I'm asking how it happened.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
I'm trying to explain that. As Mr. Erskine-Smith asked earlier and I was trying to explain, when BeLeave told us that Vote Leave was going to pay for that information, we thought it a little odd ourselves. We looked into it on the website from the electoral commission and we talked to the folks we knew at Vote Leave who were doing compliance.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
You told us there was no evidence of any coordination between BeLeave and Vote Leave. You said that. Now you're telling us that they had enough coordination to pay an invoice, not just any invoice: 625,000 pounds. That's a million plus dollars, and there's no coordination.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you, Mr. Baylis and Mr. Silvester.
The next questioner up is Mr. Kent for five minutes.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Thanks, Chair.
Gentlemen, you said that AggregateIQ merely works with volunteer information, supporter information, donor information, which the client provides to you. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, or SCL, how can you determine that the information that they are providing you to work with in campaigns of different sorts, like the ones we're discussing today, has been acquired legally, properly?
It would seem that shifting all of the responsibility to your clients provides you with plausible deniability. Surely you must sense in some situations when particularly large databases are presented to you that you might have questions and that, given that you have worked with Mr. Wylie in the past and know the circumstances of his contract ending with the Liberal Party in 2009, there might be invasive elements to the way the data was acquired.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
I don't know the nature of why he stopped working with the Liberal Party in 2009. I know, though, that the data that we get or the information that we get is typical voter file information. In the United States, for example, it includes their name and address and oftentimes it will include their voting history. That's typical information that any registered political party or any candidate is going to get. That's the type of information we get. That's not unusual by any stretch of the imagination.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Mr. Vickery, in his testimony regarding the Republican National Committee's Data Trust data and any number of other groups that they worked with, such as the Koch brothers-backed information company i360, said that, in fact, this goes far beyond that basic voter information. It digs down deeper into sexual preferences, religious biases or attitudes, and racial attitudes. He says that basically it's a complete identity profile and that the information that you may have worked with on the Republican campaigns was deeply personal and beyond the line, over the line, in terms of profiling those individuals who you were targeting.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
I haven't seen datasets that have the specific information you're talking about, but we are doing some work with the Republican national database for one client in particular. That's for that client. The information in that database that we have access to is basic border data in each state that we're working with.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
My last question is more simple housekeeping. I understand that AggregateIQ received an industrial research assistance program grant. Would you be willing to provide the committee with a list of the names of the individuals you communicated with regarding the application and awarding of that grant?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We worked with the NRC, with an industrial technology adviser, to complete that grant, and went through a very rigorous process with him. I think all that information is available through NRC.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
And the program, the work that was done with the benefits of that grant funding was what?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We made a reporting platform that took information from online advertising or door-to-door to gauge a general idea about how a campaign was performing in that time. We have not deployed that program yet, but we're looking forward to doing that in the near future.
Conservative