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“Liberals made a mess of Canada with drug legalization. NDP brought you child-care subsidy and the dental plan,” it continued. “If you’re a liberal and want real change vote NDP.” Things get odder still when you looked at the page began running in early April, inviting its audience to “join the movement” for Ali Bahman, the first time NDP candidate for Vaughan-Woodbridge.听

That’s because the alleged backer of the ad 鈥� and the page 鈥� is a former local political operative for the Conservatives.

This story is a tale of two Facebook groups that serve the town of Vaughan. The first is听called , a conservative-minded feed which uses the thinking emoji as a profile photo and takes aim at the Liberals for being “the party of ,” and refers to the new leader as “Hands-in-Pocket .” The second is the aforementioned , the supposed NDP fan account, with a banner image of party leader Jagmeet Singh smiling at a baby.听

But despite their divergent views, information about the ads purchased 鈥� which is publicly available for political advertising 鈥� connects the two pages. Among other things, the ads on both pages list the same phone number, and when the Star called it, a man called Tony Di Battista picked up.

Until last year, Di Battista was the president of the Vaughan-Woodbridge Conservative electoral district association. But his political interests didn’t end there. He gave the association the maximum donation, or close to it, every year for the last four years Elections Canada data is available. He confirmed to the Star that he’s now behind What’s Interesting Vaughan, the pro-Conservative Facebook page, and registered as a third-party advertiser using the same name at the end of March, allowing him to spend money advocating for candidates or political positions under election rules.听

“We have political beliefs and I’m using my platform to promote my political beliefs,” he said.听

But when asked about the second, pro-NDP Facebook page, Di Battista first said he didn’t know anything about it, and when pressed offered up a “no comment.” However, according to information available in Meta’s ad library, the What’s Interesting Vaughn page is shown as the purchaser of the pro-NDP ad running on vaughandemocrats. It suggests the two pages are controlled by the same person, said Philip Mai, one of the co-founders of the Social Media Lab at 海角社区官网Metropolitan University, whose team first noticed the connection and raised concerns that the pro-NDP page might not be what it appears.

“The concern for us is that a casual user of Facebook might run into this page and think it鈥檚 something put out by the NDP,” he said. “It could mislead them.”

The dual Facebook pages raise other questions. Is this permissible under Elections Canada law? And is this an isolated incident or something more widespread?听

According to Elections Canada, a person is not permitted to publish material that claims to be made by a particular party if it was not authorized by that party. It’s unclear if the vaughandemocrats page meets that threshold.听

A spokesperson for Elections Canada said they are not able to confirm whether a group has broken the rules or not, as specific concerns would have to go to the commissioner for a ruling. Third party groups are also not able to “collude with a candidate or a person associated with a candidate’s campaign” in order to get around spending limits or influence the third party’s actions.听

The Conservative party war room said they have no knowledge of Di Battista’s role with the Tory-friendly Facebook page or his alleged involvement with the NDP-linked page.

“This individual has no role on our campaign, and we had no awareness of the third-party advertising until receiving your inquiry,鈥� said Sam Lilly, a Conservative party spokesperson, who emphasized Di Battista was a former riding association president.听

The extent of this type of gambit, either during the campaign or prior to it, is also unknown. There is no official body that assesses individual political Facebook pages.

The Facebook group comes as the federal Conservatives and Liberals battle for ridings in and around Toronto, like Vaughan-Woodbridge, which could decide which party wins power. The Liberals are ahead in Ontario in almost all national polls, fuelled in part by a decline in Conservative support, but also aided by a big drop-off in NDP support.

The What’s Interesting Vaughan page has history with the Vaughan-Woodbridge riding association, having posted ads for the group including the group’s year end recap video for 2022.听

It’s in stark contrast to the vaughandemocrats page which, at first glance, presents as a boilerplate NDP page; the feed a steady stream of NDP signs and talking points. But it seems to add its own captions to clips of Singh doing interviews and images of Bahman, the local candidate, which adopt a tone that is notably critical of the Liberals. In comparison, while Singh’s own Facebook page encourages followers to vote for his party, it takes jabs at both the Liberals and Conservatives, both of whom, his posts say, are guilty of being against ” on grocery essentials” and to favour “greedy corporations.”

In a video posted to the What’s Interesting Vaughn page听a week before the election, Singh tells an interviewer he wants “as many New Democrats elected as possible.” But the caption, written by whoever runs the page, adopts a harder edge: “If you’re second guessing the Liberal party policy for creating oligarchies. Vote NDP,” it said.

In another clip, Singh urges voters to “not put your eggs in one basket” and cast a vote for the NDP instead. The extends the metaphor but less gently: “The Liberal basket’s full of bad overpriced eggs.”听

In a quick phone call while out canvassing, Francesco Sorbara, the Liberal candidate for the riding who was first elected in 2015, said the page seemed like an “attempt to mislead voters” and stressed that his focus was on the needs of the riding.听

Di Battista declined to confirm that he was posting on the pro-NDP site. But as Canada heads to an election, the Conservatives would benefit from convincing NDP voters to stick with their own party: “The Conservatives need the vote to split on the progressive side,” said Lori Turnbull, a political science professor at Dalhousie University.

Neither of the two Vaughan pages are particularly popular, and the one ad purchased by the NDP-boosting page got minimal traction. According to the Meta ad library, the ad, which features a video of smiling people and orange campaign signs while a voice encourages viewers to volunteer for the NDP, cost less than $300 and got somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 impressions since its purchase in early April. In an email, Bahman, the real candidate, declined to comment except to say that he was aware of the page but had thought it was run by NDP volunteers.听听

Some of Canada’s vocal advocacy groups have registered as third parties. That includes groups like the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Dairy Farmers of Canada, plus the country’s largest unions and some business groups. There are also some third-party groups microtargeting individual ridings. In Peterborough, there is even a group dedicated solely to booting out Conservative candidate Michelle Ferreri, called No More MP Ferreri.

When reached by the Star, Di Battista said he was not familiar with Elections Canada’s rule regarding not aligning his third-party group with a party or candidate, but he insisted regardless that he is not colluding with local Conservatives in any way. “I never heard of that, about the third party groups being separate, that鈥檚 the first I heard about that,” he said.听

Regardless of whether or not rules were broken, Turnbull said the move hints at the data-driven ‘win at all costs’ flavour of some modern politics, in which strategy trumps the public interest.

“At the end of the day, if this is what campaigns are all about, if it’s all strategy, it’s trying to maximize your chance of winning, no matter what,” she said. “It just ends up being not very rewarding to the voter. The voter feels manipulated.”