The Progressive Conservative Party (PC) has issued an apology after coming under fire for sending out campaign donations requests to Ontario residents designed to look like invoices.
The statement released late Thursday morning says the party “regrets” that the correspondence was sent out.
“At no time was it our intention to mislead our valued supporters. We regret that this correspondence was sent to a limited group of supporters by one of our vendors and will not happen again. We apologize for any confusion or frustration this may have caused,” the party said in the brief statement.
Premier Doug Ford has not released a public statement regarding the fundraising documents.
The vendor mentioned by the PCs is a Toronto-based marketing company called The Responsive Marketing Group (TRMG), which shares the same address as the return address on the fake invoices.
CTV News Toronto has reached out to The Responsive Marketing Group for a statement but has yet to receive a response.
Upon receiving the fake invoices, some Ontario residents took to social media to share their frustrations. Kingston resident Greg Gies received one such letter, instructing him that he owed $800 to the party.
“Just above the address box window, in red letters, it says ‘Important Invoice Enclosed,’ right under the Ontario PC identification on the upper left-hand side,” Gies told CTV News Toronto on Wednesday.
While Gies understood that the invoice was fake, he noted that “[The body of the letter] mentions the word ‘invoice’ three times.”
York University Professor Dr. Dennis Pilon, whose area of study is political science and elections, said the strategy, while in a legal gray area, is “in very poor taste.”
“It's just ethically abhorrent because we know that there will be people, whose knowledge of things is greater or lesser and there are certainly vulnerable people who might see this and suddenly feel that they need to get this money in,” Pilon told CTV News Toronto Wednesday.
“An invoice is understood to mean you have to pay. It's not like, ‘Would you like to pay?’ or ‘We would like you to give us this money.’ It's saying, ‘You owe us money.’”
Both the Liberal Party of Ontario and the Ontario NDP have criticized the PCs for the move, calling for an investigation from Elections Ontario.
“The misleading document, which includes the word "invoice" in large text at the top, is similar to those used in "false billing scams" that aim to defraud vulnerable individuals. Scamming donors is straight out of the Donald Trump playbook,” a statement from the Ontario Liberal Party president Brian Johns said.
NDP leader Andrea Horwath echoed those statements, adding that the fake invoices “look like mail scam” and called for an investigation.
The Ontario election will be held on or before June 2, 2022.
