Information & Ethics Committee on Dec. 11th, 2018

[Ryan O'Connor]

The NationBuilder database would be cross-referenced with some of the Facebook information that you describe. A lot of that was started with soliciting email addresses from individuals, so that goes directly into NationBuilder, as you can appreciate—

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Yes. I completely understand. Emails go in it. I understand you get the Facebook IDs because you have 419,000 Facebook followers. But you're gleaning a significant amount of information from the 2.5 million phone calls and the text messages, and presumably that information is going into NationBuilder as well.

Is that right?

[Ryan O'Connor]

No. It was aggregated data that we received from the vendor, so that specific data I don't think would be of any utility to, and it isn't—

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

How do you get aggregated data if you're running a voter outreach campaign?

[Ryan O'Connor]

We get the results from the vendor. If you can understand what we were doing.... It was categorized by area code. We saw what the results were—

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Yes. That's like a poll.

[Ryan O'Connor]

That's correct. Then the vendor would follow up with phone calls to encourage participation.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

So you would say, “Undisclosed vendor, do a poll for me, and then follow up. Don't send me any of the information specifically. I just want aggregated data about the poll. You know the information specifically, and you follow up for the get-out-the-vote campaign, but don't give us any of that information.”

[Ryan O'Connor]

The aggregated data was provided to us, yes.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Okay.

So you never got any personalized information about people texting back from this cellphone number to say, “I'm looking forward to voting for Doug Ford in the coming election.” You never got that information.

[Ryan O'Connor]

A lot of it was just “Press one”, “Press two” or “Press three”.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Right, but it was from a specific cellphone number.

[Ryan O'Connor]

Yes. That was—

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

And you didn't get that information.

[Ryan O'Connor]

That was aggregated, and the vendor provided it to us in aggregate form.

In terms of its interplay with NationBuilder, I can't speak to the specifics of that.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I have two questions for you to follow up on for the committee.

One is to absolutely confirm that it was all aggregated, and that you never got any information from a specific cellphone number that would be attached to a voting intention.

Two, I know you don't know today, but can you confirm if Ontario Proud has ever used Lookalike Audiences on Facebook? I know you don't know today, but talk with Jeff and get back to us. I just want to be clear: I've never spoken to Jeff, and I know he's a constituent because I saw he was voting NDP in the provincial election. I don't have any bad blood for Jeff. The only bad blood I have is for a constituent named James Sears.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Erskine-Smith.

Last up, for three minutes, is Mr. Angus.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

I want to follow up on the question of this voter identification campaign. For the 2.5 million calls and the one million texts to identify voters in that final week, what did that cost?

[Ryan O'Connor]

I don't have the figures in front of me right now.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Can you get that to us?

[Ryan O'Connor]

Again, to the extent that we're required to comply with the legislation—

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Excuse me. I'm asking you for our committee to understand whether our elections have been undermined. What you've complied with is to respond, so that if our committee asks for it, you will supply it.

It's a simple question. I want to know what it cost.

Second, I'd like to know what happened to that data. If you're doing voter identification and you're getting voter contact information, you have gathered now quite the war pool. What happened? Are you going to be using that in the federal election?

[Ryan O'Connor]

We'll be using data that we.... For example, on Facebook—

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I'm not asking about Facebook. I'm asking about the phone campaign, because the phone campaign was a specific voter identification campaign to identify voter intentions. You have their names, their cell numbers and their voter identification.

You did say that you're thinking of setting up a separate entity for the federal election. Will you be transferring that data, those phone numbers, those names and their voter intentions to this separate entity?

[Ryan O'Connor]

No.