Evidence of meeting #48 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was campaign.
A recording is available from Parliament.
As an Individual
If I may, I was the author of that e-mail and not Marilyn. I believe the e-mail you're referring to was from December 8.
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
It was from David Campbell to Andrew Kumpf, copy to Marilyn Dixon. You're right.
As an Individual
In that e-mail I twice state that it is our understanding that the party is trying to legally maximize their advertising expenditures. That phrase is in there twice. As I indicated in our opening statement, we don't pretend to be experts; we rely on our client for that. I believe this e-mail actually documents that we sought confirmation from our clients that the budgets were within allowable limits.
In this exact same e-mail--since you brought it up--I also reiterated that “we need payment from the party only”. So I think that documents our insistence that we receive money from the party and not the candidates.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
I should make it perfectly clear that I don't think anybody around this table thinks that Retail Media did anything wrong in all of this. I hope none of my questions sound like that.
I'm interested in the invoices again, though. I have your invoices from Retail Media, numbers 4 through 32, in my briefing book. None of them correspond to the list you've given us, so I presume this is a whole other set of ridings that were involved in the same affair. Some people felt it was odd that somebody else would take liberties with your letterhead and business name to issue invoices that clearly weren't generated by your company.
Is that the case here? Do you claim ownership of these invoices that were part of the affidavit, numbers 4 through 32, which clearly don't resemble the way you invoiced your clients?
As an Individual
Those are our invoices. We had two sets of candidate invoice types. One was a group type for all of non-Quebec, which is the one you have in front of you. Then we had individual candidate invoices for the Quebec ridings. That was requested by our contact, Susan Kehoe.
As an Individual
They were for the Quebec riding only. Those invoices 4 to 32 were our invoices for Quebec candidates.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Did they give you any reason why they should be treated separately?
As an Individual
No. We had candidate names on those; we did not have candidate names on them for the rest of Canada.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
You also broke down in many of them whether it was radio or television. Did you have anything to do with the production of the advertising, or was it simply the purchase of the advertising?
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
So you had no knowledge about whether their tags were put on the ads you were buying for specific ridings.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Would you have given the client any indication of the degree of penetration or rating points that this ad buy would give them?
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Would you break that down riding by riding? For instance, if they were going to spend $46,700 in the riding of Trinity—Spadina, what kind of saturation and rating points would that give you in a riding of that size?
As an Individual
Offhand I couldn't state it right now, but it was part of the Toronto purchase. I was looking at it as full Toronto. I couldn't tell you offhand how many rating points that would give. I do have the information as part of an overall grid.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
So you'd be able to say that this amount of dollar purchase would give this amount of ratings.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
No, but you told your client. Surely they said, “We have $600,000 to spend. What's that going to buy us in terms of penetration into the market and ratings?”
As an Individual
We had a blocking chart that showed regions and what GRPs and ratings were projected over the course of the campaign.
As an Individual
If I might add to that, as you can appreciate, the coverage area of a television signal or radio signal doesn't neatly conform with where ridings are.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
That's right. That's why Elections Canada views it as a national expense and not a local expense.
As an Individual
But even with a very local radio station, for example, it's quite complicated. I think you're getting at the advice we were.... We were trying to make sure that the ridings were in the appropriate coverage areas of the stations. All we wanted to do was identify that and make sure we had the total amount of money necessary to make what our client considered to be an effective media purchase.