The Crown filed notice Monday that it will seek to lock up Michael Sona for longer than nine months for his role in a robocall that sent hundreds of opposition supporters to the wrong polling station in Guelph, Ont., during the 2011 federal election.
Sona, 26, was convicted in August and sentenced Nov. 19 to nine months in custody plus 12 months of probation for violating the Elections Act by “wilfully preventing or endeavouring to prevent” voters from casting their ballots.
Sona was 22 at the time of the election. He was the director of communications for Conservative candidate Marty Burke during the campaign.
Several former Conservative staffers testified at his trial that he bragged about his role in a scheme to send voters to the wrong polling station, but Sona has maintained his innocence.
He served 13 days of his nine-month sentence before being released while the sentence is appealed.
His appeal lawyer, Howard Krongold, successfully argued at Ontario Court of Appeal in Toronto that Sona should be released on bail because he will have served his whole sentence by the time an appeal is likely to be heard. Sona is expected to eventually also appeal his conviction.
In its notice of the Crown’s appeal file Monday, the the Public Prosecution Service of Canada said that it will argue that “the sentence imposed by the trial judge is demonstrably unfit and fails to reflect the gravity of the offence.”
At a hearing before Justice Harry LaForme in Toronto last month, Krongold and federal prosecutor Nick Devlin agreed that the sentence should be reviewed by an appeal court, because trial judge Gary Hearn had no precedents to guide him.
Sona, who did not speak at his trial or sentencing, made a statement on Facebook last week, suggesting that he is paying an especially high price for refusing to confess to a crime he didn’t do.
“I have been informed that if I just ‘say’ that I am guilty, I can be out in less than six weeks. If I was genuinely guilty, I’d be insane not to take that deal.”
The election day calls used data from the Conservative party’s voter-contact database and were arranged using a disposable phone registered to the now-infamous pseudonym, Pierre Poutine.
Sona claimed he had been scapegoated by the Conservative party.
In delivering his guilty finding, Hearn said there was evidence presented at trial to suggest that Sona did not act alone. He made no finding about who else participated but pointed to evidence related to Guelph Conservative campaign manager Ken Morgan and deputy campaign manager Andrew Prescott.
Prescott was given an immunity deal in exchange for testimony against Sona, his former friend. Hearn dismissed most of Prescott’s testimony as self-serving.
Morgan moved to Kuwait and has never spoken to Elections Canada investigators. Neither has been charged.
In the statement, Sona released on the day he went to jail, he called for a public inquiry into the deceptive calls in the 2011 election.
Yves Côté, the Commissioner of Canada Elections, has closed the investigation into the Guelph calls.
In April, he halted a three-year probe into allegedly fraudulent calls across Canada, concluding that “the evidence gathered in the investigation does not lend support to the existence of a conspiracy or conspiracies to interfere with the voting process.”
Jason MacDonald, the director of communications for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, declined Monday to comment on the Crown’s decision to appeal the sentence.
“Voter suppression is extremely serious and those responsible should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” he said in an email. “But it is up to the courts to decide what those penalties should be.”
With files from Glen McGregor, Ottawa Citizen
Source:: canada.com
