Angry in the Great White North

Update: Further evidence confirming the true ownership of the domain, independent of registration information.

Update: Jim Harris of the Green Party agrees that an ex-Green made the website, and has issued an apology..

With the help of National Newswatch, we have more interesting information on adrianecarr.ca, the website that is currently hosting a message stating that Green Party candidate for Vancouver Centre Adriane Carr is endorsing her likely opponent in any upcoming election, Liberal Party incumbent Hedy Fry.

First, adrianecarr.ca is an old domain name, going back to April 2003. From April 2003 until September 2005, the domain hosted the official website BC Green Party Leader Adriane Carr.

Everything looks fine. Her official site was designed and hosted by Webtide Internet Solutions, Jayun McDowell's employer.

Jayun McDowell is the registrant of the domain hosting this gag website endorsing Hedy Fry. In my previous post, I showed that Jayun McDowell is a former supporter of Adriane Carr. Indeed, Adriane Carr's Free Your Vote initiative ran through 2002 and 2003, right when the Adriane Carr website was created and when we know Jayun McDowell was working on Adriane Carr's initiative.

In September 2005, the site changed to display the home page of Webtide Internet Solutions. In 2005, there was a provincial election in British Columbia that saw the Liberals surge in seats. The Green Party dropped from 12% of the vote in 2001 to 9% in 2005. More controversial, though, was her opposition to the Single Transferable Vote referendum in British Columbia that year. Though not pure proportional representation, many in the Green Party felt that it was an improvement over the traditional first-past-the-post system still in use today, and would have opened the door to further reforms.

Though she remained the BC Green Party leader, her powers were curtailed as a result of the dissatisfaction over this strategy. Perhaps not surprisingly her website came down at this time and was taken over by Webtide. Perhaps the bill to support the website was not paid.

The archives present the Webtide homepage on adrianecarr.ca through May 2006, when the record ends.

So it looks like someone has taken this dormant domain and recast it as the endorsement of Liberal Hedy Fry. But eveything points to the domain being in the control of Jayun McDowell's Webtide Internet Solutions right from its inception in 2003. The domain registration still shows that to be true.

That would mean that it is most likely that the domain registration, if altered, could only have been altered from within Webtide by someone with authority over Webtide registration accounts. Short of hacking (and why would someone hack this obscure politician's dormant website?) it would look like that the answer to who made this website lies in Webtide Internet Solutions, Jayun McDowell's current employer.