Information & Ethics Committee on June 12th, 2018

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

It's not necessarily shown here.

[Jeff Silvester]

No. We don't do the money translation. Typically, we will do an approximate translation the day of in terms of what the fee ought to be.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

If you could provide the committee with that information, it would help us better understand how you work with invoices and—

[Jeff Silvester]

Yes, but that would have been sent at the time of the invoice and everything that went along with it. If there's a mistake with the date, I can certainly look at it. It was likely a Word document and I opened it up to see if that was what it was. Then I printed it. Sometimes Word documents auto-update. I apologize if that happened. I will certainly double-check.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Thank you.

I will share my time with Anita.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

Can you tell me what the “salt the earth” script is?

[Jeff Silvester]

Yes. We were doing some work for a client outside of the U.K. We had been creating a reporting tool for them to show where in their area people were volunteering from. They could see a map and little dots as to where people were coming from. When we did that, we found that there were some people coming from the U.K. who showed up on their map. In light of the information we had been providing in working with the U.K. ICO, we didn't want any U.K. information in there, so I asked my programmers to remove the information from the database and then to make sure that more information couldn't get back in there from the U.K.

It does happen from time to time in campaigns, even here in Canada, that people go to the website from outside of Canada. It could be that they are expats, or it could be that they're just generally interested in what's going on. We saw that a lot in the U.S. primaries. But in this case, because of the investigations that were ongoing with respect to Brexit and the ICO, we didn't want any of that information in that database.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

So the note that was in there, that suggested that it might violate U.K. privacy laws, was simply because the data was there accidentally. It wasn't because—

[Jeff Silvester]

The data wasn't there accidentally. Someone from the U.K. went and put their information into a form, and that ended up in the database. That's not accidental. We just—

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

“Someone.”

[Jeff Silvester]

Yes, well, we had their name and their email address, because they came to the website we created for our client and entered it. We just didn't want it there. So I asked the developers to delete it and to make it not possible for people from the U.K. to enter that information again.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

What is the “database of truth”?

[Jeff Silvester]

That's a comment in relation to a particular project we're working on for a client. As I think I was saying to Mr. Kent earlier, it's a reference to which database is more accurate than any other database.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

So you would have us believe....

Here you have comments on one of your files that, well, this might violate U.K. laws. You have another file called the “database of truth” that includes huge repositories of Republican voter data, which should not leave U.S. jurisdiction. You're set up in Canada. You tell the U.K. Information Commissioner that they have no jurisdiction over you.

So we're to believe that you're here in Canada; that you are outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. and the U.K., so you conveniently don't have to apply those laws; that you were given £600,000 for a single...just go onto Facebook and click, and pick some demographics; and that you had no idea that this might be something fishy or that there might actually be some sort of collusion. You just sat there and took these very similar datasets to different clients, took huge amounts of money for it, happened to be outside their jurisdiction, and it had nothing to do with trying to get around laws within the U.S. or U.K. for privacy. That's what you're actually telling us today.

[Jeff Silvester]

There are three points there that I think you've made.

With respect to the work in the U.S., that particular project is a project for a client. They use it; it's their servers. We help them set it all up, sure, but we don't use that data for anything. It's theirs. They use it with their client. That's the ephemeral project. It is for a client.

The database of truth is not even built yet. That's not what it's called; it's a comment about it. That particular thing is not even built. There are other components of that project that are finished, but that one isn't.

With respect to Brexit, we didn't use any information from anyone in the U.S., or anywhere else for that, other than what was provided to us by the clients. That's the only information we used there.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

With that, we'll go to Mr. Gourde for five minutes.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Regarding the advertising you placed on Facebook, were the computer graphics, design and video or image production already done, or did you take part in those steps?

[Jeff Silvester]

Both. Sometimes we help with making images. We have done a limited few videos, but usually videos come from some other place. Oftentimes, what happens is that a client has an idea. They have an image. They generally have the text they want to have, or the message they want to convey, and then we help them craft that into the advertisement that we then place on their behalf.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

So you provided advice to make the advertising more attractive or more effective. If you see that some advertising makes no sense, you have a word to say about it. You may say that you won't touch it.

[Jeff Silvester]

Yes.

Sometimes clients want to do advertising that is just not going to work. We know from experience that it's not compelling or it's not particularly interesting. The individual or the campaign thinks it is, but we know that it's just not going to work. We let them know. If they insist, we'll certainly run that ad for them. We certainly provide that level of knowledge to say that here's the context where it will tend to work in the future, and this would work better if you put it as a tiny ad versus a big ad, and this sort of thing. We work with them to provide all that information to make their campaign as efficient as possible.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

To comply with the election laws, is there a notice indicating that the advertising is paid for and authorized by the official agent of the party or the candidate? In the advertising we place in newspapers, and even on the campaign posters along the roads, it must say that they are paid for and authorized by the official agent.

Was that authorization published in that advertising?

[Jeff Silvester]

If it's a requirement in that particular jurisdiction, then certainly we would add that information. I know that in British Columbia, for example, as long as the ad links back directly to the candidate who is advertising it, then you don't need to have the “paid for by” at the bottom of that particular ad. It depends on the jurisdiction that you're working in. We certainly make sure we comply with all of those rules. If the campaign asked us for something and we think there's a problem, we'll let them know about it.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Was any of the advertising you placed negative? There is positive advertising, but there are also attack ads that are negative. Do you use that type of ads?

[Jeff Silvester]

Clients have asked us to run ads that are quite negative. We let them know, typically, that they are less effective than ones that might be towards their campaign, but we have run ads that have been negative, in limited circumstances. They are attached directly to the campaign, and that's very clear.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

How did you determine that an ad that you probably accepted because your client absolutely wanted it to appear corresponded to the category of negative advertising? The margin between negative advertising and disinformation is very thin. If the information in a negative ad was inaccurate and thus constituted disinformation, were there measures to deal with that, or did you accept it anyway as it was?