Mr. Speaker, there is a very big difference between individual and isolated cases and the one we are dealing with here.
Yes, a candidate for a party can, for example, forget to include the official agent authorization at the end of a brochure or flyer. There are isolated cases.
Here it is a matter of some 60 cases in which the scheme we are now aware of appears to have been used. Even people who worked on the Conservative campaign had concerns right at the time of the election.
If one, two, even five Conservative Party candidates had been investigated by Elections Canada, or had had a dispute with Elections Canada, the hon. member's question would make some sense. But now it is a matter of 60 or so candidates all being investigated for precisely the same thing. There are emails to prove that the entire Conservative Party machinery was aware of the scheme, and that even some employees of some Conservative Party ad agencies had doubts about the legality of what was being done. For example, a woman working for Retail Media had concerns as early as December 6, 2005, about what she saw happening daily.
The case we are dealing with here is not at all the same. This is a scam, rather like the one that came out in the sponsorship scandal. It is not the same, because it looks very much like something that was cooked up in order to get around the Canada Elections Act. In a democracy, this is an extremely serious matter, particularly coming from a party that won the election that followed these irregular expenses.