Evidence of meeting #131 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 proud.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
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—
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
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?
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
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—
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON
How do you get aggregated data if you're running a voter outreach campaign?
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
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—
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
That's correct. Then the vendor would follow up with phone calls to encourage participation.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
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.”
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
The aggregated data was provided to us, yes.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
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.
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
A lot of it was just “Press one”, “Press two” or “Press three”.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON
Right, but it was from a specific cellphone number.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
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.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
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.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you, Mr. Erskine-Smith.
Last up, for three minutes, is Mr. Angus.
12:30 p.m.
NDP
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?
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
I don't have the figures in front of me right now.
12:30 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
Again, to the extent that we're required to comply with the legislation—
12:30 p.m.
NDP
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?
12:35 p.m.
Lawyer and Director, Ontario Proud
We'll be using data that we.... For example, on Facebook—
12:35 p.m.
NDP
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?