Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This is something of a novelty in that we actually have a somewhat different motion before us today than the one we had...well, my goodness...from August to February, and what can I say upon the demise of that motion but, “Motion, we hardly knew you.” It was such a long period of time over this same motion. I have to assume that the other side of the table has finally accepted that there were some inappropriate elements to the motion in the way it was worded. I'm referring to the previous motion, of course, but the changes are relevant to the discussion here.
The previous motion had, of course, made a direct presupposition of guilt. It talked about the illegitimate--that was the word that was used--actions of the Conservative Party in the 2006 election. And some of us objected--I'm projecting once for a couple of hours--to the use of the word “illegitimate”, which I thought was, frankly, a word that is meant to convey an impression of guilt without actually stating it in a precise manner.
That could have been dealt with by saying when Elections Canada “asserts” our illegitimate expenses or, better yet, “asserts our expenses that are not in conformity with the law”. Or one could have said, better yet, “election expenses that are in dispute because Elections Canada thinks this kind of expense is okay when the Liberals do it but not when the Conservatives do it”. And I think that raises the fundamental problem that continues to exist with the motion as it is currently worded.
Although it is substantially different in some respects, in its essence it's the same thing. It makes an assumption that we should be hearing about Conservative Party election expenses and not about the election expenses of other parties. It makes the assumption that only the 2006 election expenses should be looked into, not expenses from previous elections, particularly the 2004 election. The important point to be made, of course, in the absence of the 2004 election is that in the 2004 election the Liberal Party of Canada was considerably better financed than it was in 2006. Hence it was better able to engage in practices involving the transfer of money between various local campaigns and also local campaigns to the national campaign in a way that was less feasible in 2006. I think that fact is amply documented in the affidavits that have been submitted in the ongoing court action between the Conservative Party of Canada and Elections Canada, in which a demonstration is made in these documents that these practices--although the Liberals did engage in some and so did the other parties in the 2006 election--were quite widespread in 2004.
I'm going to go on and talk a little bit about some of these things, but I did want to dwell a little bit on these two basic elements still absent--or still present by their absence--in the currently proposed motion. That is to say they focus on a single election and a single party in an effort, Mr. Speaker, to take a snapshot that doesn't tell the whole story.
You may have seen these ads for The Globe and Mail on television, which I think serve as a useful analogy. For example, you see one photo that is of two little boys, kind of cute little boys. The photo has been cropped, and as the camera draws back to the full picture, it's two little boys holding Kalashnikovs. So it gives a kind of different perspective of what's gone on here, and this is, in essence, what's going on here. It is an attempt to crop the photo so as to produce a version of reality--