Let me start now before I use all the minutes up trying to figure out why that is.
Mr. Mayrand, you were before this committee on March 29, 2012. At that time we were looking into the question of robocalls.
As everybody recalls, there were two separate issues at work here. Issue number one was matters going on in Guelph. I'm well aware that these are now before the courts; in fact, I think they are before the courts this very day. I won't ask you to comment on them, but separately, there was an investigation into the accusation, which turned out to be an entirely unfounded accusation, that there had been a widespread nationwide robocalls attempt to mislead voters and guide them to the wrong polling locations.
It turned out after the fact that it was actually a group called Leadnow that was trying to encourage people to phone in. There were thousands of calls, mostly expressions of concern or e-mails, and most of them turned out to be template letters. Nonetheless, this created a media storm over an imaginary scandal.
You came before the committee and gave some testimony at that time on the subject. You said at that time, around 11 a.m., “We have added sufficient resources to deal with the inflow of communications and to contact electors who have specific factual allegations”, in other words, not the ones for addressing concern as a Canadian, but those who had specific allegations. That was subsequently something that was turned over to the commissioner who reported that in fact there were 1,700 actual complainants making 2,448 complaints, a substantial number of which turned out to be on an unrelated phishing scam that was confused in the minds of those electors.
At any rate, what I wanted to find out is, how much in actual resources was devoted to this? How many actual dollars wound up being involved?