Mr. Chairman, from listening to Mr. Mayrand's evidence, we're not too sure how officials from the Liberal Party arrived there. He didn't seem to know that. Why were they there at all? Whether it's instantaneous or whether it was two hours, why were they there at all? Why was the media there at all?
Naturally—and I'm thinking politically—I asked the question, which got quite a chuckle from the opposition, about Mr. Mayrand at Elections Canada having the Conservative Party's election plans for the next election. He says it's safe under lock and key. Why did they need to seize that material? Why did they need to seize everything? Why was at least one political party there at all? What did that have to do with it? How did they find out? Who told them? The same goes with the media.
Mr. Chairman, I'm going to quote an article from the Globe and Mail. I took this out quite a while ago and I don't have the date of it. It's written by Robin Sears, who, when Mr. Rae was the Premier of Ontario, was his chief of staff. He's a former NDP campaign director.
There's one paragraph in which he addressed this issue. He said:
Elections Canada's very un-Canadian behaviour is unacceptable in a democracy. Without a better argument and evidence, Elections Canada will lose the legal battle, and then we will all pay the cost politically. The bad blood caused by its storm-trooper tactics has infected the political system. Many Liberals and New Democrats are horrified by all this. They know it could be their turn next.
What caused all this? Why did unauthorized people know about it? What else did they know? Were there other things that they knew? I think the motion by Mr. Reid is appropriate.
Of course, Mr. Mayrand doesn't know the answers to these things; we're going to have to assume they're okay. Well, maybe they're okay, but maybe they're not okay. Quite frankly, I don't feel too comfortable that the Conservative Party's elections plans are under lock and key, particularly after what's been going on and particularly when he doesn't know how these people arrived at his office.
Mr. Chairman, on the proposal that there be an independent investigator, I don't really think Mr. Mayrand, when that question was posed to him—and someone could correct me, but I'm fairly certain one of the members of the committee posed it to him, though I can't recall—would have any strong objections to it. If we're going to do our job on this thing, that's an issue.
I would think this particular issue doesn't just affect what has happened to the Conservative Party. As Mr. Sears said, if we're going to allow Elections Canada to do this, it could happen to any one of you people in the near future. You should all be worried about that. Maybe Elections Canada didn't do anything wrong, but it surely is left up in the air: maybe they did. Given the very fact that it says we think maybe they did do something wrong, we should have some independent person to say that they did something wrong and let's fix it, or that they didn't do anything wrong.
All I can tell you is that if Mr. Sears is correct, then all of you in the opposition should be as worried as we are about how this happened.