Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 4th, 2008

[Karen Redman, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

I thought he had nodded off.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[An hon. member]

He's just refreshing himself.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Chat amongst yourselves.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Mr. Preston, please.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Even your colleagues had to laugh. It was funny.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I love it when my colleagues laugh at me.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

With you.

[Karen Redman, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Joe, we are listening.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Order.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Yes, “with me”. That's true. Thank you, Mr. Dewar. You're absolutely right.

Never mind. I won't go there. You don't use the word “right”.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Please get back on track.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

So here we are, being brought back again to where I was. You had ruled that the motion was out of order and that we should carry on working on Bill C-6 at that time. It was Bill C-6. It's Bill C-6 still now, and again you've ruled that the motion we're trying to talk about is out of order. Yet the gang of six has come together and overruled you again.

Have they overruled you so that the country will move forward? Have they overruled you so that legislation gets done? Have they overruled you so that Canada becomes a better place? No, clearly not. They've overruled you because it suits their partisan interests to do an investigation on an election that took place, now, clearly two years ago.

We've talked a lot about this in-and-out scheme, or the election financing piece on which they would like to do the investigation. As a matter of fact, through the conversations in this committee, we may have done a great deal of the investigation that this committee would do.

We've brought forward all of the affidavits that have been placed before the courts—where they'll get a proper airing, because it's a court of law rather than a committee of partisan members trying to sling mud—and we've discussed many of them.

We've discussed many examples of the similarity between the election procedures used by all four parties in the last election. We truly have found the exact same activities that the Conservative Party used being used by members of the Liberal Party, the Bloc Party, and the NDP. We found that there weren't any differences. We've certainly shown that the type of financing, the financing from the national party down to riding associations, from EDAs to campaign teams, from campaign teams back to national--that there was a flow of funds in every party's case from one side to the other. It's happened with all of us.

We have also discussed at this committee that the type of advertising that they're trying to find fault with has happened by all parties, that the “group buy”, if you will, the regionalization of advertising, has happened not only in the Conservative Party, but in the Liberal Party, in the Bloc Quebecois, and in the NDP. We saw it in many cases, whether it was in the city of Edmonton or.... I believe there was a group of members.... I'm sorry, you'll have to forgive me, I don't even remember which party it was in New Brunswick where a group of candidates bought a bunch of advertising together that truly talked about their party's performance and talked about things on a much more national scope. They each put their name at the bottom of it, or when it was shown or heard on the radio in each of their own little pieces of the province, it said who had paid for what portion of it, by listing, as we do in elections, that this ad was brought to you by the financial agent of whatever candidate it was.

We've shown instances of how the same type of financing and the same type of advertising happens by all parties. I'm not certain of the investigative need of the rest. I leave that to the will of Elections Canada. They're doing it, and through the courts that we've sent affidavits to, they certainly will do it. They talk about this being some dire need by this committee to actually get to work and do that. I don't get it. I'm not there; I'm lost on the reasons why, when in fact this committee, for the life of itself, has always dealt with legislation when there was legislation.

We actually have a piece of legislation we should be dealing with--it's sitting there waiting--and we're not dealing with it.

I guess what we need to do is look back on what else can be done to break this logjam. We've tried, Chair, but you've been overruled again on making a ruling to move to legislation. I think, rightfully so, the chair of this committee has tried to move Procedure and House Affairs towards actually dealing with legislation.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

That's repetition; he's made that point several times.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Mr. Chair, can I ask for a point of clarification?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

A point of clarification is allowed, yes.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

My colleague and I have also made reference to the fact that we had agreement among all parties that legislation should supersede all other discussions. Has that ever been a matter of record? Have we had that as something we agreed to formally, or was that an informal agreement?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

There is no formal agreement, but it is the precedent of many committees that legislation takes precedence over other options.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

The matters a committee deals with are up to the committee itself; they're the masters of their own domain, and these members here are the masters of this domain.

Mr. Preston, you may continue.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

That's so true, Chair. We are masters of our own domain. Wasn't that a Seinfeld episode? Sorry, I lost myself there for a second.

The point I was making before, Chair, about how other committees.... I know we've asked for other things to be looked at. Certainly legislation takes precedence, so let's do it, and if there's a study to be done after the fact or in between times of legislation, this committee has jumped and gone ahead and done different studies.

There are other committees out there certainly looking at other areas. Take, for example, the ethics committee, which passed a motion to investigate a Liberal fundraising practice. I believe the fundraiser was called “the sky is the limit”. If I can remember right, it happened around Valentine's day, and there was to be an auction. The whole fundraising piece was an auction of time and services of certain members of Parliament. The sky was the limit on what you could pay. Apparently, according to their fundraiser, originally even for corporations, the sky was the limit they could pay in order to spend time with prominent members of the official opposition. Well, they could maybe make a couple of bucks by spending time with them in the House of Commons, because it's not a common place to find them any more. I don't know how much someone would pay. Maybe a corporation would pay a lot for that too.

But let's get back to their real fundraiser. Their real fundraiser was based around...I don't know whether it was playing tennis with the Rae brothers or golfing with Paul Martin, and the other one was that you got to go to a hockey game with Ken Dryden. Now that would be an incredible piece.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Excuse me, I am having some difficulty with the relevance. I've been giving you some leeway, Mr. Preston, because sometimes when I listen a little longer, you bring it around.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I'm going to get there because this was the ethics committee that was asked to look at this fundraiser. I thought it would be very relevant for this committee to hear what that fundraiser was about, because it is truly about election financing, because even if it's fundraising in the off-term, this money will eventually be used for an election, I would think.

So I'm starting to close that circle, Chair, but it may take me a while to get around the arc.

So the ethics committee, which we know has been certainly talking about many, many things lately, was asked, “What about this sky-is-the-limit fundraiser?” I guess it was the ethics committee, so I guess it was being asked, “Was it unethical?” I don't want to say “ illegal”; I'll just say “unethical” at the moment. The investigation would obviously prove whether it was illegal or not.

The Liberal chair of that committee, because that is an opposition-chaired committee, Chair—not as aptly chaired as our committee, perhaps—ruled that motion out of order. I don't think he did it in a partisan way. I would guess that he didn't--nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Because it was about a Liberal fundraiser, he ruled it out of order. The committee challenged his ruling and got his ruling overturned. I guess that's commonplace around here, right?

Then he argued that the procedure and House affairs committee should be the committee that conducts an investigation. That was their chair's argument. It should come here, because the sky's-the-limit fundraiser that they wanted to have, where, regardless of Elections Canada rules that have been set now for a number of years about corporations not being able to be involved in the fundraising aspects, even off-term--not during a campaign but even in the mid-term here--where we're fundraising to put together riding association funds....

I believe it was eight Ottawa riding associations that were pooling their resources, if you will, or pooling their unethical behaviour to put this sky's-the-limit fundraiser together. I guess regardless of what was bid on the auction items, this money was going to be split between these riding associations to run the next elections.

There is a cost saving here, because if you have the cost saving of splitting among eight ridings, an unethical auctioning of people services, it saves you the cost of the brown envelopes they used to have to put the money in, in order to hand it out to their riding association. So there's a bit of a cost saving there. I will say it's maybe even environmental. They're saving the cost of the brown envelopes.

It's hypocritical, Chair, I'll put through you, in a very partisan way, to want to examine the books of an election campaign that took place two years ago, that absolutely followed all of the rules, as we've stated. I know Mr. Reid talked very thoroughly in his last conversation to this committee about how even the memos to the handbooks for riding association presidents or riding association CFOs and candidates clearly stated that all of these things were passable. You could share money, north and south, from a national party through a riding association, or vice-versa. Those transfers of funds were allowable. You could do it. The same candidate handbook stated very clearly that you could do advertising buys that included groups of people. I believe the wording either talked about the candidate themselves or about an issue or a party that could influence someone's vote during a campaign. This is all in there. Mr. Reid has shared that.

The members, obviously, could go back and look at the records of the last meeting and see that we've read into the record each and every one of those things.

So I think it's a bit hypocritical that in a case where we've already shown you the rules as they were written, and even verbatim.... I know Mr. Reid was even amazed by how they were numbered, so I know he read them in right out of the book as they were written. All of a sudden, we want to investigate that. We want to investigate things that were clearly stated in candidate handbooks.

Yet we've got other unethical practices out there. The government members of this committee have chosen to say they won't investigate that because they've got legislation to do, Chair.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

I have a point of clarification, again, Mr. Chair. I'm just trying to understand my colleague. Through you to my colleague, is he saying that the Liberal chair of the ethics committee had ruled a motion from the ethics committee to investigate the Liberal fundraising scheme out of order because he said it would be more properly dealt with in the procedure and House affairs committee? Yet this committee has refused to open up its books. So I'm not sure if we have a.... Is that basically what's happening here?

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I was about to close that circle on hypocrisy.