Thank you.
So my point, going back to the protocol that we followed provincially, is that it mirrored the protocol established federally, and as indicated in the guidelines set out by Elections Canada, this is totally appropriate. The guidelines have since been changed, apparently, to that one section about national versus local advertising, but it was not changed until after the 2006 election.
If perhaps—and I don't know this to be true, but hopefully we'll find this out in our court case, and we could have been able to find this out had this committee decided to accept my motion and we could then conduct our own investigation. But perhaps Elections Canada simply erred and said, “Well, we have the guidelines in place now and we'll apply them to 2006.” If in fact that was the case, and I'm not suggesting it was, clearly there was a simple error, because the guidelines were quite clear in 2006 that candidates could determine if they wanted to use advertising that was local or national in content.
In the event that someone used a national ad—and I would suggest that the majority of ads purchased or entered into by all candidates of all political parties would be national in scope—the findings of Elections Canada apparently are that this money, the amount of money that a local candidate paid to run an ad promoting the national party, should be applied to the cap, the national advertising cap. Nowhere in Elections Canada's guidelines does it state that is the case.
In fact, just the opposite, the guidelines quite clearly state that a candidate could choose to run either a locally based ad, an ad promoting their own candidacy, or they could choose to run an ad that is national in context. So if they ran national ads and appropriately identified themselves and all their agents and followed the proper authorization requirements and protocol, then they could do so. That would be their choice—no conflict there; no untoward activity; certainly no violation, in my view, of the Elections Act.
Similarly, there's absolutely nothing that prevents the national party from paying for those ads, as long as they transferred it into the party. In other words, you can't just have the national ad be invoiced from the local candidate and have the national party pay for it directly. They have to transfer funds, after the invoice has been paid, to the local campaign, hence the in and out.
I've spoken of this before. Some people may suggest that's not appropriate, because at the end of the day you would have candidates who were able to receive a rebate for money that they really didn't...well, I guess they spent it, but they didn't really lose. In other words, they netted out revenue neutral, but they still got a nice healthy 60% rebate on that amount.
It would be interesting to find out, in the case of my members opposite, what happened when the candidates received those rebates. Did they then make a donation in the exact amount back to the national party? In that case, the national party wouldn't be out any money.