Calgary, August 23: Danielle Smith says recordings posted to social media this weekend in which someone claiming to be from her campaign berates a Calgarian are “fake.”
Twitter user Cassandra Raugust posted audio of the phone calls to her Twitter account on Sunday evening.
In one, a woman identifying herself as “Dale from the Danielle Smith campaign” thanks her for her recent donation and invites her to a “donor appreciation dinner” on Monday.
In response, Raugust can be heard saying she would never vote for Smith.
Ok Twitter – here is the voicemail left by @ABDanielleSmith campaign callers #ableg this was 3 minutes ago @LeelaAheer @MichelletypoQ welcome to your local evening harassment pic.twitter.com/raAwg7qBLa
— 𝘾𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙧𝙖 𝙍𝙖𝙪𝙜𝙪𝙨𝙩🇨🇦 (@ThisIsMeCassie) August 22, 2022
In the message, the caller, who again identifies themself as “Dale from the Danielle Smith campaign,” says they will remove Raugust’s phone number from their list
“And actually, as it turns out, communists are not allowed at the event tomorrow night so please don’t come as nobody will want to see you there,” she says. “They also don’t want no vaccine.
“Hope you have a wonderful evening and please don’t ruin the lives of any other people.”
.@ABDanielleSmith on phone calls alleged to have come from her campaign: “This is clearly a malicious prank from someone trying to pretend to be on our campaign. This is fake. Our call centre uses a publicly accessible campaign number, not a private number. (1/2)
— Tyson Fedor (@TysonFedorTV) August 22, 2022
She adds that her staff are assessing next steps and will meet tomorrow on whether they will file a complaint with Elections Alberta or not.
Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt says when he initially heard the calls, he thought they sounded legitimate.
“I’m looking at this and I’m thinking there’s only a handful of possibilities: either the Smith team did this, (or) maybe one of the other UCP campaigns did that to try to embarrass the Smith campaign,” said Bratt.
