MONTREAL - On a day when mayoral candidate Marcel Côté was deemed to have improperly used robocalls to help his campaign, another top candidate has come out to say that he too used the automated telephone messages to reach voters.
Denis Coderre said Friday that a robocall campaign used by his team was conducted in an entirely legitimate fashion.
Coderre said that his party spent $14,500 to reach 449,289 Montrealers, but all in accordance with electoral law, which obliges the message to name the official agent.
About 37 percent of those reached answered Coderre's phone poll which asked which mayoral candidate they planned to vote for, and whether would vote for a Coderre party council candidate.
Coderre, who polls suggest is the frontrunner in the November 3 election, also said that the tone of his calls was entirely different from that of his rival.
Marcel Côté was scolded Thursday for admittedly breaking electoral rules with a robocall electoral survey of almost 1,000 Montrealers that rivals deemed insulting. It also failed to identify the source of the call. He acknowledged the mistake and immediately apologized.
On Friday, the Quebec Director General of Elections ruled that the party had infringed electoral law.
Côté put an optimistic spin on the affair Friday. “Well, at the end of the day, there has to be some good to it and indeed it shows the Montreal population how our team is weathering a storm,” he told CTV Montreal.
And even Projet Montreal leader Richard Bergeron, who was livid upon news of the affair Thursday, appeared ready to move on.
“What I ask him is, from now on, for the next three weeks remaining in this campaign, do not do that again. We want a clean campaign,” said Bergeron.
-With a file from The Canadian Press
