Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
As you've indicated, my name is David Campbell, and thank you for the introduction. I'd add that during the time of the 2006 federal election I was the president and chief executive officer of Retail Media. As you've indicated, Marilyn Dixon is the chief operating officer of Retail Media; Andrew Kumpf is the vice-president of broadcast operations for Retail Media; and Malcolm Ruby is our counsel.
We have a brief opening statement.
We look forward to the opportunity today to outline our role in placing media advertising during the 2006 federal campaign. Retail Media is in the business of planning and placing advertising across Canada in all media, including television, radio, and newspaper. Our client, the Conservative Party of Canada, engaged us to place their advertising for the 2006 federal election.
Our relationship with the Conservative Party is purely a business relationship. Our role was to recommend in which medium ads should appear, negotiate with the media for the most effective placement, book the ads, pay the media, and invoice the client. We do not write or produce the ads; others provide those services.
During the campaign, the party approached us to provide media services for the official agents of some party candidates. We insisted on coordinating candidate billings through the party. It was then up to the party to collect money from the candidates.
There were two reasons for our insistence in operating this way. First, the media outlets require cash up front for political party advertising, and there was a short timeframe for cash collections. Second, billing dozens of candidates across the country would have been an administrative nightmare for us. Therefore, the party acted as the contact between Retail Media and the candidates.
This is our preferred operating procedure. It's the same as in the private sector, where we would prefer to bill a single franchisor and not individual franchisees. While we insisted on payment in instructions through the party, we treated the party and the candidates as separate and distinct clients for our purposes of booking media, paying the media outlets, and our own invoicing.
Media budgets were determined by our clients and not by us. The party itself and the party on behalf of the candidates specified the budgets. We then recommended what media to buy in particular markets, booked the media, paid for the time, and invoiced according to the client's instructions. Retail Media bought time at competitive commercial rates. We also provided advice on what media outlets covered what ridings. How the clients chose to divide the cost of a buy was up to them. This is not relevant to us. Our focus was on having the total amount of money available to meet the media outlets' requirement for upfront payment. This is the normal practice in the private sector where, say, franchisors and a group of franchisees determine amongst themselves how much each will contribute to a media buy.
In our role as media buyers, we are not, nor do we claim to be, expert in the federal Elections Act. Our clients provide the budgets; our job is to stay within them. That said, we requested and received confirmation from our client that the candidates' spending was within the allowable budget. We had no reason to doubt our client's interpretation of the Canada Elections Act.
Almost two years after the election, two officials from Elections Canada interviewed us. They showed us an invoice and asked whether we had created it. The format of the invoice shown to us was not the same as the original. However, the media dollar amount for the individual riding was identical to our original invoice, with the GST calculation added.
We've provided the committee with two examples of different invoice formats. Have they been distributed?
