MIKE HAGER AND
ANDREA WOO
VANCOUVER
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 2, 2018UPDATED FEBRUARY 3, 2018
A former provincial cabinet minister running to lead the BC Liberal Party has lost nearly 1,400 new memberships ahead of this weekend's convention, after irregularities that were linked to a Canadian company under investigation for its role in helping the Leave side win the Brexit campaign.
Todd Stone's campaign said on Friday that 1,349 party memberships – out of the party's roughly 60,000 registered members – had been disqualified after the party discovered missing e-mail addresses. His campaign confirmed the memberships were connected to consultancy AggregateIQ.
Campaign co-chair Peter Fassbender said the memberships involved people whose first language is not English.
BC Liberal leadership race: Who's running and what you need to know
"They were having problems in terms of the process," Mr. Fassbender said in a Friday interview with Radio NL in Kamloops.
Mr. Fassbender, who did not respond to requests for an interview, told the radio station that the sign-ups violated party rules and were due to an "individual in the company [AggregateIQ] who was trying to find a method to assist these people."
The new leader will be announced on Saturday after three days of voting. The party said "thousands" of new memberships were disqualified in the lead-up to the vote, but would not provide an exact number or a breakdown of which campaigns they were connected to.
Mr. Stone drew criticism from some of his five leadership rivals last month when news broke that his campaign had hired AggregateIQ for the race to replace former leader Christy Clark.
Britain's Information Commissioner is looking into AggregateIQ's role in the Brexit campaign after the country's Electoral Commission revealed that the Leave side paid the equivalent of $4.6-million to the Canadian company for political work. No specific allegations of wrongdoing have been made, but commissioner Elizabeth Denham has said that she is particularly concerned with how personal information was analyzed to target voters.
B.C.'s Privacy Commissioner confirmed it is working with the British probe while also investigating whether AggregateIQ is compliant with privacy legislation in its home province. A representative from that office declined to comment on Friday on either investigation.
AggregateIQ did not return calls or e-mails seeking comment on Friday. One of the company's founders has previously said the firm was co-operating with the British investigation.
When AggregateIQ's connection to Mr. Stone emerged, his spokesperson said the firm was maintaining and marketing "digital campaign assets," but Mr. Stone's team had complete control over the voter and supporter information gathered by these digital tools. [...]
You see my siggy, below the radio station and airport bit? That's meant as a mockery of the oversimplification of political thought and those who throw around vague and near-meaningless terms.
