For Immediate Release - September 12 2019

Fair Vote Guelph is hosting the premiere of “Election Day in Canada: When Voter Suppression Came Calling” at the Bookshelf Cinema at 2 pm. A reception will follow in the eBar.

“Election Day in Canada” takes you behind the headlines, revealing the painstaking efforts of everyday Canadians to expose the scale of the robocall fraud and bring the perpetrators to justice.

The film includes extensive interviews with Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor, then Postmedia journalists, who won multiple awards for their reporting on the robocalls. Smoczynski also shines a light on a young Toronto entrepreneur who he calls “the unsung hero of the story”.

The documentary traces the origins of robocall fraud in Canada back to the unsolved 2008 case in Saanich-Gulf-Islands and meticulously assembles the pieces of a nationwide puzzle to clearly reveal what Green Party Leader Elizabeth May calls, “Election fraud…on an industrial scale.”

Several Guelphites feature prominently in the film. Most famous of all is Michael Sona, the only person ever convicted of the crime.

“As far as I know, there is no other existing film or book which captures the big picture of what actually happened in 2011,” says one of the event organizers, Susan Watson. “Peter’s film is a timeless cautionary tale – an instructive gift both to history and to Canadian democracy. Of all places, it’s fitting that it will have its premiere in Guelph.”

In all, some 600 Canadians who had a direct connection to the robocalls scandal were contacted. Smoczynski pre-interviewed 240 people, filming interviews with 80 of them. Selective editing meant some of the interviews had to remain on the cutting room floor. 

 

Election Day in Canada

A Peter Smoczynski film

September 28th, 2019

2:00 pm. Reception to follow in the eBar

Bookshelf Cinema, 41 Quebec St. Guelph

Tickets are available for $15 via Eventbrite 

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