This is the 44th meeting of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. The order of the day is pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(h)(vi), a study of the activities of the Conservative Party of Canada during the 2006 election campaign in relation to certain election campaign expenses and the ethical standards of public office holders.
Colleagues, as you know, the committee authorized the chair to arrange to have Elections Canada appear as our first witness. After initial discussions with the Chief Electoral Officer, I wrote to him to outline our discussion and he responded with a draft outline. My letter and the draft outline from the Chief Electoral Officer were duly circulated to all members of the committee. There was some favourable comment back, so I'm sure we are on the right track as a starting point.
There has been some consultation, and I understand there are three sections in Mr. Mayrand's outline. Rather than having questions after each section, he will be presenting all of his report. His presentation to us is going to take about an hour, and then we will go into questions.
Mr. Hiebert raised this point with me in the first instance simply because it's very difficult to separate some of these issues. They seem to flow from one to another very easily. I think our questions will be facilitated by having all of Mr. Mayrand's interventions at the beginning.
I want to specifically thank our researchers from the Library of Parliament for the excellent material they prepared for us. I think you will agree it has been extremely helpful for us to get to where we are today with some of the facts, and I'm sure it was helpful to members in preparing for these meetings.
You will notice that I have put on the notices for both today and tomorrow an item of committee business. It is my intent, before we finish at the end of today, to propose to the committee an outline of how we will approach future witnesses and to have a preliminary indication of proposed meeting dates to deal with them. We will finalize that work at the end of our second day, tomorrow. I'll outline that for the members at the end of the day.
Finally, we have received three motions from Mr. Tilson, which meet the necessary time requirement to be in order. They properly will come before this meeting. It is my intent to deal with them at the end of the day, at the same time we deal with our preliminary discussions on future witness requirements.
If that's acceptable to members, I would like to welcome our witnesses, Mr. Marc Mayrand, Chief Electoral Officer; and someone who is very well known to me through his 25 years of service to the scrutiny of regulations committee, Mr. François Bernier, director of legal services.
Gentlemen, welcome. We thank you kindly for all of your assistance and cooperation.
Mr. Mayrand, the floor is yours.