Evidence of meeting #113 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 know.
A video is available from Parliament.
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
I believe we provided it in our last bit of documentation that we provided you—
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
—but I'll double-check, and if not I'll certainly provide it.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
It may be my mistake if I didn't see it, but yes, I need a copy of that invoice.
You say that you kept the two campaigns separate, although I guess there's a Chinese wall in your office, then, that looked at the BeLeave campaign and—what's the name of the other one—Vote Leave?
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
I guess there's a Chinese wall in your office to be sure that you separate those two cases when you work in your office on those two campaigns.
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
In terms of those two campaigns, there's not a separate office for that, because the people who are doing the work are not decision-makers in that respect. We get the direction from the client, and we don't share that information back and forth between clients. It is possible that someone in our office was able to see both campaigns at the same time.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
When you say you siloed those two campaign, how did you end up with a Swift message where there's an amount of money from one campaign saying that this amount should be treated for the other campaign? Therefore, you were the middleman in the transfer of money, helping one company to avoid exceeding the expense limit by doing so.
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Well, the donation that we received from Vote Leave to BeLeave, as I mentioned, was entirely allowed under electoral law in the U.K.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
It's a donation from Vote Leave to BeLeave.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
Are you an agent to solicit donations from someone else on behalf of one campaign?
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
Are you authorized to solicit money from people to give to whatever camp you work for?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
I don't know that I understand, but certainly when we—
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
A donor is somewhere. A donor gives money to help a campaign. In order to do that, someone takes money and gives it to the campaign. Instead of giving it to one specific campaign, they give it to you, who then transfers it to the other, while they just have to call the person and transfer the money.
Why do you use a third party to transfer what seems to be a donation and apparently not money for contracts?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Well, I understand at the time that the BeLeave campaign didn't have all of their bank accounts set up, and so they asked Vote Leave to transfer the money directly to us. We understood that was entirely allowed.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Nathaniel Erskine-Smith
We are unfortunately out of time, so we'll move to Mr. Kent for five minutes.
9:40 a.m.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Earlier, Mr. Silvester, when we were talking about access to databases, you pointed out that you don't need a huge database.
Did you use the modifier “huge” advisedly? What size of database do you require?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Well, you'll want to keep track of the ads that you're running, and you'll want to keep track of the click rates and conversion rates, and this sort of thing. Typically you do that in a small database, but that's not personal information. That's information about the ads themselves, not about the individuals you're targeting.
9:45 a.m.
Conservative
9:45 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
A custom audience is made from a list of individuals, so that would be, at minimum, about a thousand people, with their names and email addresses.
9:45 a.m.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Mr. Wylie, in testimony, made that point, that Facebook limits the custom audiences to a thousand, but he said that you could have a thousand custom audiences of a thousand to make up a million, and then you have a thousand different messages to a million people. Exponentially, you can grow that as you wish to use those custom audiences—
9:45 a.m.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
—either as part of the same demographic or in different demographics.