Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think one thing we've seen in the last few years is that advertising is absolutely key and critical in an election campaign. If you're going to run a modern, contemporary election campaign, your advertising buy and the application of that buy is absolutely critical.
Canadians have watched two years of agonizing through the Gomery commission with the sponsorship scandal. Now they're watching us wrestle with this advertising scheme, and they must be shaking their heads and wondering exactly what is up with the potential for abuse of election financing associated with advertising.
Let me lay this out. Here's what we think happened. The Conservatives spent the maximum they were allowed to on their national campaign, so they wanted to get more expenses, they wanted to spend more money, but they had to get it off their own balance sheet. So they transferred it to their ridings that had room in their election spending limits.
Now, it may in and of itself not even be wrong to transfer money. Well, we know it's not wrong to transfer money. To transfer expenses is. You cannot claim something that was incurred as a national expense as a local expense. The transfer agreements that you signed...I don't think you can delegate that authority to somebody else and then claim it as a local expense.
By all means, you could give money to your national campaign and they could spend it on a national advertising buy, but you can't claim it as a local expense. They would have to claim it as a national expense. So that's what went wrong here and that's what is convoluted about the pretzel logic of my colleague Pierre. They're trying to spin it their way. But if there was a widespread conspiracy to defraud Elections Canada by the Conservative Party, we're going to get to the bottom of it and it's not going to be tolerated.
Now, some of you were convinced that it was legal. Elections Canada doesn't think it was. In fact, they looked very closely at every riding in the country, all 308, and they found fault with 67 ridings of the Conservative Party candidates. What's galling to me is that we're here today, and nice people like you who offered to be candidates in election campaigns, I think, have been drawn, wittingly or unwittingly, into what is a conspiracy to defraud the Canada Elections Act and to overspend the national spending limit.
Do you agree it would be an unfair competitive advantage for one party to be able to spend $20 million on advertising when all the others are limited to $18 million?
