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.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Zackary Massingham  Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ
Jeff Silvester  Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

We placed online ads for Vote Leave.

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

Okay, in that one there, you did online ads for A, B, C, D, all four of them. So you were doing the same thing.

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Yes, I mean, that's what we do.

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

No, you do a bunch of things. You said you do door-to-door knocking—

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

No, we don't do the door knocking. We create—

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

You create the software, but you didn't sell them software for doing door to door.

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

No, we also did a little bit of—

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

But you didn't sell any one of them door-to-door knocking software.

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

Okay, did you sell any of them...to make a new website?

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

We did some website work just as part of the online advertising for BeLeave and for Veterans for Britain.

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

So you did the same thing for Veterans for Britain as you did for BeLeave.

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Well, I wouldn't say they're the same. They are websites, but they're not the same websites.

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

Yes, they had different names, but the same background work.

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Website work is fairly standard.

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

That's what I thought, too. So what did you do differently, because there's been no coordination to your argument behind it. You have no specific skills that you've said. You haven't said, “Look, Frank, we can do this that no one else in the world can do” or “We have this amazing database that no one else in the world has.“

We have done no coordination. You get contacted, and you don't know why BeLeave called you up. They just called you out of the blue. Fair enough, it happens, I guess, and they asked you to do exactly the same thing for the same amount of money that they've just been transferred.

What specifically different did you do that would tell me that they were at least, “You know what? You've done something great here.” We don't know. Theoretically, they don't even know, right? Because how would they know, unless they coordinated it, that you were working with Vote Leave?

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

I believe at that point that Vote Leave had made a reporting of their financials to the Electoral Commission, which had been released publicly, and there was a little bit of media about that—

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

So you think that BeLeave read this financial report and said, “Hey, look at this. It looks like Vote Leave has got this great company.” They went on your website, and looked it up, and called you. Is that what happened?

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

I don't know.

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

You don't know.

April 24th, 2018 / 9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

But to your question as to what was different—

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

But before on that, you didn't bother to ask them. You're in data gathering. You're looking for customers, I assume. You didn't bother to ask them. Like you get this box asking if you were you referred by a friend, if you saw our website, or if you had a coupon. You didn't ask that question.

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

No, they emailed us to ask if we could help out. But to your question—

9:20 a.m.

Liberal

Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC

But you didn't ask them, “How did you get my name?”

9:20 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Sorry, we didn't ask them what?