The newly elected mayor of Squamish is taking Internet domain name firm Go Daddy Domains Canada Inc. to court to unmask the owner of a website behind an alleged smear campaign in the run-up to the 2022 municipal elections.
In a petition filed in BC Supreme Court on Oct. 3, then Squamish councillor and mayoral candidate Armand Hurford asked Go Daddy Domains Canada to disclose any identifying information, including the name and mailing address of the registrant behind the website squamishvoices.ca.
The petition said Hurford wants to use the information to identify the website’s owner and hand it over to both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Elections BC.
According to the petition, Hurford’s contact email for his campaign received an email in September 2022 from a squamishvoices.ca account that threatened to go public with lurid allegations, urging him to “immediately step down from his campaign for mayor.” After getting the email, Hurford claims the Squamish Voices Facebook page shared a post to its 3,100 followers claiming that a pair of women had “reached out to us with sexual assault claims against a sitting counsellor [sic] who is now running for mayor.” The post invited followers to share “tips on this individual” through the account that sent the original “threatening email.”
In an affidavit filed with the court, Hurford claims the allegations in the post are “completely untrue.”
“Given the incredibly serious nature of the allegations in the lead-up to the local elections, he is concerned that the false allegations will have a significant impact on his campaign,” Hurford’s affidavit states. He claims he doesn’t know who is behind the website and its Facebook page, and says he’s reported Squamish Voices to both the RCMP and Elections BC. However, neither has told him who is responsible for the “attack on his reputation.”
Hurford said he wants Go Daddy to hand over the information because he has a “bona fide claim for the tort of defamation against the author of the Facebook page and website.” Moreover, Hurford claims he hasn’t gone public with the story in the media, fearing that speaking out would have the “unintended effect of more widely disseminating the outrageous false allegations and unfairly damage his reputation prior to the election.”
However, the petition does not mention recent media coverage of Squamish Voices by several online news sites, including the Tyee, the Breach and the National Observer, which revealed the website has spent thousands on social media attack ads, with ties to prominent Conservative political strategist Jeff Ballingall and the right-wing, developer-funded online network behind Ontario and B.C. Proud.
“This is not small town politics,” Hurford told the Tyee before the election. “This is a well-funded, outside sources trying to manipulate politics in our small town.”
