Just when you thought that politics might be returning to civility, at least in the Airdrie-Cochrane riding, comes an attack ad through a robocall aimed at one of the United Conservative Party's potential nominees.

Morgan Nagel says a call that he received personally and believes went to every member of the UCP in the Airdrie-Cochrane riding, made accusations against him, saying he was dishonest and shouldn't be able to run in the nomination race.

The call came when Nagel was at a friend's house working on his campaign the night before the first nomination meeting at the Golden Rod Hall.

"My phone rang, his phone rang, it was a 1-800 number.  I picked it up and it was a quick survey so I pushed the button to give a response to the survey and all of a sudden it starts spewing back negative information about myself, right in my ear.  So my number was left in the list of everybody who got robo-dialled."

While Nagel can't confirm that the call went to all Airdrie-Cochrane UCP members he says many people contacted him saying they had received the call.

"Myself, my entire family, a large number of my friends who have memberships got the call. When I posted on Facebook about it dozens of people reached out to me and said, 'yeah, we got it too'."

Nagel won't speculate into who would be behind the call but says that the number of people that had access to the membership list in the constituency was limited.

"Whoever did it had access to the United Conservative Party membership.  I'm about 120 percent sure that somebody in the party or a staff member or the board or like a neutral volunteer staff member, there's no way they would have done it, absolutely not.  So that only leaves a couple of options because whoever did it did have access to the membership list."

Nagel says the other three nominees, Peter Guthrie, Mauri Stiff, and Laura Talsma reached out to him to say that they weren't behind the calls.   

"I don't know what to make of the whole situation because, like I said, whoever sent this out had access to the membership list and the people who have access are the party, our President, the Vice President of Membership, and the candidates and I am 100 percent confident that the party and the board executives never would have done something like this."

Nagel says he's extremely disappointed that something like this would happen since, in his mind, in all situations, the party comes first. 

"I think these robo-dialled attacks aside, the absolutely most important thing at the end of all this is that everyone involved gets behind whoever gets nominated, whether or not it's myself, and we remain united.  I actually worked full time on Jason Kenney's team when we built the party and I know how hard it was to bring the Wildrose and the PCs together.  These little feuds on a local level are the beginning of the undermining of our unity." 

The second, and final, nomination contest is planned for tomorrow (October 20) at the Cochrane RancheHouse.  The polls are open for members of the UCP in Airdrie-Cochrane from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.