Thank you for being with us.
Mr. Mayrand, you haven't presented any new information today with regard to the Conservative Party's transactions in the last election. You have provided, however, some new legal positions for Elections Canada. A couple of them come immediately to mind.
One is that on box 6 of your PowerPoint presentation here, you define a candidate expense as something that is “incurred”, a “property or service used directly to promote or oppose a candidate during an election period”. That, of course, contradicts the candidate manual that Elections Canada furnished to candidates across Canada in the last election, because in that manual, under “Election advertising”—this is referring to candidate expenses—it says:
Election advertising means the transmission to the public by any means during an election period of an advertising message that promotes or opposes a registered party or the election of a candidate, including one that takes a position on an issue with which a registered party or a candidate is associated.
You removed “registered party” and therefore applied a new interpretation of the law. That's the first change you've offered today in the legal position of your agency.
The second one is these five factors. I note that in the legal proceedings that are under way, the executive director of political financing and corporate services, Ms. Janice Vézina, did not enumerate these as the five factors making the expenditures national instead of local. She had something different to say.
I'll quote from the Ottawa Citizen on July 5:
Ms Vézina allowed that in certain circumstances a candidate could choose to promote his party leader in his ads and still be allowed to claim the ad as a campaign expense. The key point, she said, was whether the “end result” of the ads was the promotion of a candidate.
“End result” were her words, quoted by the Ottawa Citizen.
What is the difference between promoting a candidate and promoting a party?