One Young Staffer is Not Enough

Conservative operative Michael Sona, is taking the fall for the voter suppression scandal and has resigned as a staffer.  What the conservatives would like us to believe is that he acted alone.  Give me a break.

Sona, in the background during Ezra Levant's sponsorship of Ann Coulter, is a product of the Manning Centre for Destroying Democracy, fashioned after Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute. 

Voter suppression is one of the courses taught.

Journalist Jeff Horwitz signed up for a weekend seminar and wrote an excellent article on the subject.

The students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson -- that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver -- doesn't sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from South Dakota and the treasurer of the College Republican National Committee, assures them: "This is not anti-democracy. This is not shady. Just put [the polling place] somewhere where you might have to put a little bit of effort into voting." The rest, Gourley explains, is just a matter of turnout.

Just a matter of turnout".

Sona was the young man who tried to steal the ballot box at the University of Guelph, forcing the rules to be changed, ending the practice of making it easier for students to vote.  Harper knew that he'd lost the youth vote, so had to make sure they didn't vote at all.

These are the kinds of things these young operatives are taught.  They don't dream them up on their own.

So how much is Sona's "resignation" going to cost the Canadian taxpayer?  Two decades ago, Ezra Levant and Jason Kenney claimed that $40,000 would buy a lot of silence, when they paid off Matthew Johnston.
 
In 2011, Christiane Ouimet, the Harper appointed ethics czar was given $500,000, when she promised to head to Florida so as not to explain why she ignored more than 50 ethics complaints against the government.
 
So what's the going rate for silence in 2012?  Enough for Sona to start his own firm, I'll wager.
 
Sigh!"