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Secret recordings just the latest in a long tradition of political dirty tricks

Secret recordings just the latest in a long tradition of political dirty tricks

Dirty tricks are as old as politics. It’s only the techniques and technology that change.

If you’re scandalized by the idea of a low-level political operative trailing an opposition candidate with a recorder, hoping to catch them in a gaffe, your political education is sadly incomplete.

For those just tuning in, the federal Conservatives have been scrambling to get out from under a debacle this week triggered when a low-level party worker secretly recorded a conversation that allegedly caught an Alberta Liberal candidate demeaning families at a public meeting in Canmore.

The young woman, carrying a recorder under her coat, listened in as Banff-Airdrie candidate Marlo Raynolds spoke with two other men about the government’s plans to introduce income splitting for two-income families. Raynolds allegedly said the plan would do “arguably nothing” for children, as parents would spend the extra money on TVs, cars and other things that wouldn’t help the economy.

The poor-quality recording was passed to Sun News personality Brian Lilley, who played it on the air and quoted it in a newspaper column.

[ Related: Conservative attempt to embarrass Liberal candidate backfires ]

He compared it to a “beer-and-popcorn" remark made by a prominent Liberal during the 2006 election campaign that gave the Conservatives a minority government.

The only problem was that this time, Raynolds insisted he wasn’t actually the one who made the comment. One of the other men in that chat, Tam McTavish, told The Canadian Press it was him.

According to CP, the recording was made by a woman who worked for Calgary Conservative MP Rob Anders. Anders had previously given Sun News an audio recording of former general Andrew Leslie, now running for the Liberals, criticizing Israel for “firing indiscriminately” on Palestinian civilians in the recent fighting in Gaza.

[ Related: Star Liberal recruit Andrew Leslie criticizes Israel in leaked recording ]

The woman, who signed in to the Canmore meeting under a false name, insists the comments she recorded came from Raynolds.

The Conservatives previously caught Toronto Liberal MP John McKay in a gaffe when a young man who turned out later to be working for Health Minister Rona Ambrose asked to speak privately with McKay about Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s decision to bar anti-abortion candidates for running from the party. McKay called Trudeau’s decision a “bozo eruption” and that recording was passed to CTV News.

What’s the line between tough politics and dirty tricks?

The irony of the Canmore affair, according to veteran Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella, is that the payoff was so small and the risk of blowback on the Tories so unnecessary.

Candidates have been shadowed quite openly for years by people working for their opponents, said Kinsella in an interview with Yahoo Canada News.

“I have young people on every campaign who follow around usually the leader of the other party,” he said in an interview. “We call them road warriors.

"They make sure to let the media know of their presence in advance, let the other side know about them."

They’re supposed to behave respectfully and keep their mouths shut, simply recording what’s said in public.

"That’s the key word," said Kinsella.

They even become fixtures in their rivals’ campaigns, he said, recalling how during Ontario Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty’s first victorious campaign, Conservative leader Ernie Eaves even gave opposition observers bottles of champagne and a standing ovation.

“So there is a way of doing it by respecting the job that journalists have to do and respecting the other side,” said Kinsella.

“You don’t need to do anything sneaky. You just need to hang around long enough that eventually the other side will do something stupid.”

What also makes this incident so mystifying is that the Liberals don’t have a hope of winning Banff-Airdrie in solidly Tory Alberta, he said. Why take the risk? And why use someone who worked for the famously gaffe-prone Rob Anders?

"Seriously? You want to entrust that person with your reputation. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Dirty tricks have always been a part of politics, from the brazen vote-buying of the 19th century, to modern push polls and negative personal ads, all the way up to the recent robocall affair that sent a Conservative campaign worker to jail.

The tricks exposed by the media may generate outrage, but many are never uncovered, said political scientist Nelson Wiseman, director of the University of Toronto’s Canadian Studies program.

Some campaign tactics fall in a grey area

Some, like the push polls intended to plant a negative perception of a candidate’s chances or overtly-negative TV ads, are in a grey area, he said. They may torque the message but they don’t cross the line into criminal dishonesty like the robocall case.

It could be argued the RCMP’s decision to announce in the midst of the 2006 election campaign that it was investigating a leak of the previous budget out of Ralph Goodale’s office was a calculated effort to undermine Paul Martin’s re-election campaign, said Wiseman. The Liberals led in the polls up to that point, but afterwards, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives surged to win a minority government.

"That struck me as the pivotal event in that whole campaign," he said. "Was that a dirty trick? Some people think it was a dirty thing to do on the part of the RCMP, that they were actually out to get the Liberal government.”

[ Related: 5 political dirty tricks we learned from the robocalls trial ]

The Mounties were said to have been angry at getting their wrists slapped for raiding an Ottawa reporter’s home in search of evidence about where she obtained information on the force’s role in the rendition and torture of Maher Arar.

The RCMP had a right to announce the budget leak investigation, said Wiseman, but the timing was suspect.

Wiseman is less bothered about the recording incidents. It’s probably not fair that the Conservative operative misrepresented herself to Raynolds and Leslie, but politicians should be aware that any utterance now is fair game.

“My general point would be people should just watch what they say,” he said. “That applies to what you put on the Internet and it should also apply in your speech.”

That’s especially the case between campaigns. With spending limits strictly proscribed during election periods, parties now are using their war chests to create an image of their opponents well before the writ is dropped. The Conservatives are especially good at this.

“Once upon a time you never ever saw ads outside a campaign period,” said Wiseman. “Now they’re running more and more.”

The Conservatives will have to eat the egg off their faces from the botched recording sting, said Kinsella, and given suspicions about the party’s involvement in the robocall case, campaign finance fiddling à la Dean Del Mastro and the in-and-out election funding affair, they need to avoid further embarrassments.

"They don’t need this kind of stuff happening to them," he said. “It just buttresses the narrative that they’re a bunch of sneaks and they can’t win fair and square.”

The Liberals, of course, have not been without sin in the past, but Kinsella said he hopes they and the NDP won’t try to match tactics with the Conservatives.

But the temptation to colour outside the lines will always be there, especially as technological advances such as tiny cameras and powerful microphones increase the temptation to do so.

"What doesn’t seem to advance is people’s IQ level," said Kinsella. "They still seem to keep doing stupid things and getting themselves into trouble.”