Thank you very much, Chair. This is very able quarterbacking with the group we have before us.
We are missing one person here, so in the spirit of invoking the ethics committee in all its glory and so on, I want to quote Mr. Angus, who was interviewed for that Globe and Mail article. I think it will bring a little bit more raison d'être to why we think it's appropriate for this matter to be transferred to the Board of Internal Economy.
Mr. Angus said, when he was asked, that he's not convinced the Liberals are abusing spending rules, which is nice to hear from Mr. Angus, and went on to say, “I am not sure they are using it in a way that would actually contravene rules. It would have to be established that they are turning constituency data over for political purposes. Every political party has a data wing and a constituency wing.”
I think that is the key: the fact that the data itself, as we have learned in other studies, is an important resource. Not only is it an issue whether we use a House device or premises or Hill staff or constituency staff; the fact that the data that is collected in the course of our day-to-day constituency work can be used and turned over to the political party in question for use for election purposes is of deep concern, I think, to any member of this Parliament.
That is why I think Mr. Angus, in his always very insightful way, gets to the heart of the issue. It is that on the one hand, there is the constituency work that we do day to day, the very important contact work and policy work and casework. We all know what we and our staff do every day. That needs to be managed. We each have between 70,000 and 120,000 constituents. I don't know about you, but even though I'm more of a paper person, I need software to handle that work. It's certainly well within the budget of any member to have software, and it makes sense not to have each single member ordering software, because that's expensive. No, you order one software package that works for all members of a group, which in our parliamentary system are caucus groups. That's what we have access to. I'm certainly happy with the service that's provided.
It's a completely different thing when we're talking about election purposes, voter ID purposes, donor purposes and so on. That is precious data, personal data, and we know we deal with people's most personal data when we're talking about immigration files, passports, Revenue Canada and the myriad things we deal with in the course of our constituent duties. That is important, but it should not—never, ever—be mixed with election-purpose data, which is what we do when we're on a campaign, when we're identifying our supporters and we're going out to meet them.
That is the case with our software. We're not so sure it's the case with the privately paid-for software used by the Conservative Party, which is run by Conservative donors with individual links with members and members of the leader's staff.
We have a lot more we can say about that, but in the interest of time I will leave it there and yield the floor to Mr. MacKinnon, I believe.
Thank you.