Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you for being here today.
Now that we're discussing advertising, there are a couple of issues I'd like to bring up. The first is just regarding advertising content.
I'm a candidate, I ran in the last election, and it's up to me to decide what advertising content I should run in my riding. It's not up to Elections Canada to determine what should be in my advertising. In my riding, if I decide to do an advertisement on farmers, it's not for Elections Canada to say, “Well, Mr. Lemieux, you can't include farmers in your advertisement.” If I want to put a photo of my family in there, I can do so.
The reason this is important is that if I choose to run an advertisement in my riding with Stephen Harper and the national campaign issues because that's what I as the candidate determine to be the most effective advertising for me and my riding, Elections Canada has no business saying, “Well, Mr. Lemieux, you can't do that.” They have no mandate to do that, they have no responsibility to do so, and they have no mechanism to do so. This has actually been backed up by Jean-Pierre Kingsley, and Jean-Pierre Kingsley was the Chief Electoral Officer during the 2006 election.
To echo what Mr. Goodyear had said, the content of the ad is not what's important; it's the tag line, whose name is at the end of that ad. That is why I'm glad you're here and I'm glad we have your statement in front of us, where you confirm in your letter of January 15 and state very specifically:
I further confirm that:
Appropriate tag lines were used in all advertisements, identifying on whose behalf the advertisement was authorized.
So the tag lines were there, and that is the most important aspect of these advertisements.
The fact that your primary client was the national party I don't think is of surprise to any of the other parties here, because they do the same thing. And I don't think it's of surprise to Canadians, because as you said, time is short and it makes sense to have one client buy as much media as they can buy quickly during a short campaign. Therefore, that you would be dealing with the national party and the national party would then deal with individual candidates, to me, makes perfect sense. Quite frankly, I would be astounded to know that my colleagues disagreed with that. Anyway, I wanted to bring up that point about tag lines.
On this business about the value and that the numbers are different, the opposition seems to be very uncomfortable with that. I'd like to ask a few questions on that, because you said you did provide advice, for example, on which TV stations covered which areas.
Is it possible that different TV stations have different areas of coverage?