The Charest campaign says it was notified Wednesday afternoon of emails sent to “several people” who falsely suggested they had made financial donations to the hopeful leadership but did not.
“This is an obvious attempt to create chaos.  “Our campaign will not tolerate this,” Charest spokesman Laurence Toth told CTV News.
According to the Canadian press, the Conservative Party of Canada has stated that it is certain that the data of its members have not been violated.  CTV News asked the party for confirmation.
Conservative general and former Erin O’Toole executive Melanie Paradis took to Twitter on Wednesday to warn her colleagues of the alleged breach after receiving an email from an unidentified campaign thanking her for donating $ 120. the candidate.
Apart from that, Paradis said it did not make this donation, as it does not support any candidate for the Conservative leadership.  He said he then contacted the candidate’s campaign manager to investigate.
What they found was that Paradis – and according to her, “hundreds more” – appeared to have completed an online engagement form, using personal information that Paradis suspected of dating from the last leadership race, from an IP address derived from Kyiv.  .
“After an investigation, we discovered that someone had gone to the campaign website and made false promises with IP addresses coming from Ukraine,” Toth confirmed.
Charest’s campaign told CTV News that it had notified those affected by the mistake as well as the Conservative Party (LEOC) Election Organizing Committee and would work with LEOC as they looked into what happened and who might be behind it.
Paradis said that while some may see it as “juvenile trolling intended to interfere with the campaign data”, in its view it was “an attempt to corrupt the process” of the party’s leadership elections.
According to the current rules of the Conservative leadership race, candidates can access the party membership list as well as the old membership files dating from 2019, subject to conditions.  To gain access, candidates must submit 500 signatures from members, pay half of the $ 200,000 party registration fee, and acknowledge that the data is “confidential and the exclusive property of the Conservative Party of Canada.”
For years, privacy advocates have expressed concerns about the lack of transparency about what political parties do with the data they collect and what requirements are in place to inform Canadians of a political party’s database breach. .
As part of a series of electoral law changes made by the Liberals in 2018, the government asked political parties to publish their privacy policies online, but stopped subjecting parties to stricter privacy rules and oversight of information they collect from constituency, rather than calling to do so.