Thank you.
As I was about to say, Chair, I'm going to give you a couple of examples that I believe are extremely germane to this conversation.
In one of my previous lives I was general manager of the Saskatchewan Party. Prior to that, I was executive director of the Progressive Conservative Party of Saskatchewan. I say that because a lot of my duties in that capacity were to deal with candidates and to deal with election financing. Frankly, we set up a number of regional advertising buys for all of our candidates. This is quite common with respect to provincial as well as federal parties.
The point I'm making is that back in, in believe, the mid-1990s, in Saskatchewan we set out to review and make changes to the Saskatchewan Election Act. What we used as a guide was the federal Elections Act. In other words, in many areas, when we had some doubt as to what we should do to amend the act or update the act, we looked at the federal Elections Act for some guidance. Wherever possible, we actually mirrored the federal Elections Act.
With respect to this regional advertising protocol, we looked at the federal act. That's why I know it fairly well, because I was quite involved with this for several elections in Saskatchewan. We discovered that if candidates wanted to group together, to all throw in some money and collectively buy some advertising--we call it a regional advertising buy--we could gain greater efficiencies. There are volume discounts and that type of thing.
As an example, in Regina the eleven candidates would each throw a couple of thousand dollars into a pool, and the $22,000 would be used to purchase a series of ads for the Regina candidates. The ads would play on a rotational basis, and all of the candidates, wherever the ad that had their name and authorization on it played, would be able to then claim the full portion of their $2,000 as an election expense item.
We cleared this through the Saskatchewan elections office. They assured us that this was absolutely acceptable. They also assured us that this was entirely consistent with the federal Elections Act. Of course, I had already known this, because I was on the committee that sort of redrafted many of the elements of the Saskatchewan Election Act.
So we went forward. And this is quite a common experience.
Now, here's the point that I think is important. The ads that these eleven Regina Saskatchewan Party or Progressive Conservative candidates ran were not individual ads promoting their own candidacy. They were the provincial ads. They were the ads promoting the party, but they had the candidate's tag line on it saying, for instance, “In Regina Rosemont, vote for...”, and authorized by the candidate's official agent.
So in no way, shape, or form did a candidate even attempt to have a local campaign ad promoting his or her candidacy. We didn't even show the face of the candidate in this ad. This was a provincial ad. It was one that had been running the entire election campaign, and yet it was considered as an eligible local campaign expense. The same thing has occurred in the 2006 election.
As I already read into the record, this is fully acceptable under Elections Canada guidelines. Earlier I gave you the exact wording, but I'll paraphrase it now, Mr. Chair. It states that a candidate can choose to run either a local or a national ad. That's fully up to the discretion and determination of the local candidate. That is allowed.
My understanding is that Elections Canada changed those guidelines about a year later, in 2007. Again I stand to be corrected, but my understanding is that in any election in the future it must be a local ad only. You can't run a national ad if you're a local candidate. I may be wrong on that, but in any event, it's a moot point because the guidelines were changed in 2007, well after the 2006 election.