PARLIAMENT HILL—The Conservatives got some relief from the robocall scandal Monday when a Liberal staffer resigned over Twitter attacks aimed at Public Safety Minister Vic Toews under the username Vikileaks30.
Liberal leader Bob Rae apologized to the House of Commons for the actions of Liberal researcher Adam Carroll.
Toews accepted Rae’s apology as “heartfelt” but asked House Speaker Andrew Scheer to look into what direction the staffer may have had to create and post comments to the Twitter account.
“There were members of the Liberal Party who actively encouraged the use of Vikileaks30 website and continuously promoted the use of that website,” said Toews.
Carroll is to appear before Parliament’s access to information, privacy and ethics committee over the tweets next week. Rae said Wednesday the Conservatives are using Carroll to distract people from robocall allegations.
“These guys are going to try to come up with an initiative every day to try and change the subject, to try to change the page,” he told reporters Wednesday.
Rae said Monday that Carroll was upset by comments made by some Conservative MPs, including Toews, in defence of Bill C-30, which will grant police increased powers for online surveillance and the authority to compel Internet service providers to provide personally identifiable user information without a warrant.
Rae said Carroll was “extremely apologetic,” for the tweets and showed a “real error in judgment.”
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird had to retract comments denouncing the NDP for the attacks after Rae’s apology. Baird based his allegation on an Ottawa Citizen report that connected a partial IP address associated with the Twitter account to another address that made pro-NDP edits to Wikipedia articles.
The partial IP address was to a Parliament Hill router which connects to possibly hundreds of other computers.
At the time, Baird said the NDP was caught “in a nasty, dirty Internet trick.”
“Not only has it stooped to the lowest of the lows, but it has been running this nasty Internet dirty trick campaign with taxpayers’ money,” said Baird during question period on Feb. 17.
Carroll was uncovered by an investigation by Andrew Scheer, the Speaker of the House.
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