Now he knows that he has $85 that he can perhaps recover from the Bloc, because it seems they stiffed him, and I don't know why. Nonetheless, Chair, the point is that here is yet another example of the so-called in-and out-transfer, this in-and-out advertising scheme.
Once again, if it was not illegal for Monsieur Lemay to engage in such a practice, why would it be illegal for any other candidate to engage in such a practice? I really don't know, but perhaps we can find out.
There are many other examples, which we'll get into, perhaps in the next few hours, of different advertising. We're talking primarily now about electronic advertising: radio and television ads. But there are many other forms of publicity that are considered to be advertising, of course, that Canada is engaged in. Some may be lawn signs; some may be pamphlets. There are many other forms of media. Some may be putting information on a website and having to pay somebody to perform that task; some may be paying for a speech writer.
In any event, Chair, I would suggest that in all cases the moneys expended would be to benefit the local candidate. Yet if the national party is in effect paying for that expenditure, and if Elections Canada has ruled that because the Conservative Party engaged in that practice the money should be considered national, why is it not the case with other candidates?
The reason, of course, that I'm concentrating primarily on radio and television ads is that I would suggest probably 70% to 80%, if not 90%, of the ads that were run with these candidates would be national in content. In other words, the national party came up with this idea, established the protocol, and did the invoicing. All the invoicing came from the national party, or in some cases from the local EDA association, but they in turn were reimbursed nationally.
So at the root of all this it was the national parties that were coordinating this action. They would invoice, and I'm sure a large percentage of the ads run would be national. In other words, the national party was saying, “I'm going to pay for these ads. You're going to be invoiced, but you're going to be reimbursed. We're going to invoice you, we're going to reimburse you, and we're going to run a national ad. We'll tag your name on it, but we're going to run a national ad.”
That is the argument Elections Canada is making when they say that if you run a national ad and the national party is paying for it indirectly through this in-and-out transfer process, then you should consider that to be part of the national advertising cap. That's their argument.
We disagree with that argument, because quite clearly, based on the information and the testimony I've given this afternoon, candidates and parties were well within their rights to do exactly what we've done. But the argument from Elections Canada is that you can't do that; it has to be considered part of the national cap.
If the argument is true, and if that argument has substance, then why doesn't it hold true in examples for other candidates in other parties? Why? You simply can't answer that, Chair.
Therefore, I contend, Mr. Chair, and I continue to argue, that it's because, I believe, Elections Canada erred. They made perhaps an honest error, but an error nonetheless. That's why I'm simply so anxious to have a fulsome discussion of the advertising practices of not only our own party but all political parties on this very issue. If we did, I think we could find out quite quickly that all parties engaged in similar activities, and, Chair, did so fully within electoral rules. And that's the key here.
If we truly want to have a fulsome examination, we have to take a look at all of the advertising practices, thereby requiring an opening up of the books of all political parties, because part of the case we have advanced is that not only did we do nothing wrong, and not only were we fully in compliance with electoral rules, but we did nothing, Chair, that the other political parties did not do themselves.
I would think that by anyone's standards a full examination and side-by-side comparison of all the parties is the only way to determine whether there were appropriate spending practices by the Conservatives or appropriate spending practices by any of the opposition parties.
If we had that fulsome discussion and complete examination here at the committee level and it were determined that only the Conservative Party had violated the Elections Act and the spending practices as outlined by Elections Canada, I would be the first one to say you are right, and we are wrong, and we will bear the full consequences of our actions.
But I am absolutely confident, Chair, that this is not the case. So confident am I that I brought this motion forward, which states that we will voluntarily bring forward and open up our books and provide to this committee all witnesses whom they wish to speak to. We will do that willingly and voluntarily and will do it immediately, with just one small condition: that the opposition parties do the same.
Yet what do we hear? No, it's not a good idea. We have yet to hear why it's not a good idea; that's something I'm still waiting to hear. And—I mentioned this a little earlier, Chair—the only reason I've heard yet from any member of the opposition as to why they're against this motion is that they say only the Conservative Party has been identified by Elections Canada as being in violation.
That presumes and presupposes that anything Elections Canada rules is correct. If you take that to its logical conclusion, it would mean, if any organization such as the RCMP or a city police force charged an individual with a violation of law, that if they charged him or her saying “it's wrong”, it has to be wrong.
Well, that's not the way society works, Chair. There are recourses to that. Anyone, any citizen of this country, is allowed to defend him or herself, and that's what we are doing in this case. The argument that “the reason we're not allowing our books to be examined is that we weren't found to be at fault by Elections Canada” doesn't hold much water with me. We reject Elections Canada's arguments.
We are prepared to defend our position in Federal Court and we are even more fully prepared to defend our position and to discuss our position and all of our advertising practices here at this committee. We don't have to wait months for a Federal Court case. We can get this on right now.
Whether or not the examination by committee members would be as thorough as that of a judge or lawyers involved in a Federal Court case, I don't know, but at least we would be able to get the examination started now.
I continue to make the point, Chair, that we are the only party that has willingly supported examination of our books. The other parties are saying they'll gladly examine the Tories' books, but no, they don't want anybody looking at their books.
What do they have to hide, for God's sake? I don't think they did anything wrong, so they should have nothing to hide, Chair.
We have a purported or attempted smear campaign going on here, but that doesn't change the facts that in previous elections members of the Bloc Québécois, of the NDP, and of the Liberal Party engaged in exactly the same practices and followed the same protocols as the Conservative Party. Of that there can be no question, absolutely no question.
Let's give another example. This would be of a candidate with whom I am unfamiliar. It's a Liberal Party candidate by the name of Beth Phinney. The Liberal Party invoiced candidate Phinney a total of $5,000 on June 16, 2004. Then they repaid the candidate with a $5,000 cheque, which the candidate deposited on July 8, less than a month later.
In and out; the same thing: they claimed the reimbursement and pocketed the reimbursement, but it didn't really cost them any money. There was a transfer between the federal party and the candidate—back and forth, in and out—exactly the process the Liberals are accusing us of doing and stating that it is illegal.
How can it be illegal? How can we have contravened electoral laws when they are doing exactly the same thing? It just doesn't make any sense.
In politics, Chair, I suppose things don't have to make sense. In a political environment such as this, I suppose all that matters is that the opposition have an opportunity to try to create scandals where no scandal exists. Perhaps the only thing that matters in the minds of the opposition members is that they create opportunities for themselves to discredit the government—not on substantive matters, not on policy matters, but on spurious, made-up, unfounded, baseless allegations, to try to get themselves some political smack, to try to increase their chances in a federal election.
In other words, Chair, there is an old political axiom that says: governments aren't elected; they're defeated. Generally speaking governments, history would prove, were defeated based on two things: one is fiscal and financial mismanagement; the other is scandal.
Well, they can't get us on financial or fiscal mismanagement, Chair, but they certainly could try to create a scandal. In the 2006 election, we didn't have to create anything. There was something called the sponsorship scandal that was right in front of all Canadians to see. There was no creation of that scandal.
But since that time; since the Liberal Party saw how deeply that scandal affected their chances of re-election; since they saw the damaging effects of the sponsorship scandal; once they found out how Canadians reacted to the fact that the Liberal Party was found to be the perpetrators behind the largest political scandal in Canadian history and once they understood that, Chair, they took it upon themselves to try to create scandals for the Conservative Party. They're not scandals that actually exist, but scandals that they are trying to create because they know how damaging a scandal can be to a political party.
They have nothing on the fiscal management side. Canadians, I would suggest, are fairly happy with the more than $60 billion in tax cuts they received last October from this government. They're happy with the direction the Prime Minister and this government are taking this country in. They're happy with the fiscally responsible manner in which this government is taking care of business. So they really can't attack us there, Chair, because it wouldn't get them very much, wouldn't get them very far. They can't score any political points on that, so the only thing they can do is try to create some scandals.
Granted, Elections Canada said that they found fault, and they made a ruling that the Conservative Party violated the Elections Act in the 2006 election by overspending, referring to this national advertising cap again. But the rationale behind their ruling was the one that I keep going back to here. They said that because of this transfer, whereby local candidates receive money from the national party and put forward a national ad, that should be considered part of the national advertising campaign, and not part of a local candidate's campaign.
That is the contention of Elections Canada. I have demonstrated with many examples today, Chair, that other parties have done exactly the same thing, and yet they were not found to be at fault. You can't have it both ways. If one party is in violation for following a protocol that Elections Canada says is wrong, then all parties have to be treated equally, and we haven't seen that.