Indeed, that's exactly the case. This explains the logic of regional or group ad buys. You are trying to seek out and find items that will appeal to voters in multiple ridings. You're also confronted with the same basic realities of how media markets operate.
In very large geographic ridings with thinly spread populations, there are small local media markets that actually can be smaller than the riding. That is not the normal pattern. I have a very large riding that fits that description. As I like to point out to American friends, it's the same size as the state of Connecticut, but they have three million people and I have 115,000. It's large and spread out. We have the The Napanee Beaver, and it gets read in Napanee. The Perth Courier gets read in Perth. The Carleton Place Canadian gets read in Carleton Place. The Record News gets read in Smiths Falls. All of these are within my riding. Smiths Falls overlaps another riding a little bit, but essentially its circulation area is in my riding. The Lanark Era is read in the Lanark highlands, the Frontenac Gazette gets read in south Frontenac, and the Frontenac News in north Frontenac. I could give you some other examples, but I suspect you're probably starting to get the point.
There are, however, media markets, as a rule, in cities, that overlap multiple ridings. The Ottawa Citizen would go into a number of constituencies. To take the more obvious example, the Toronto Star would cover--how many ridings are there in the Toronto Star's circulation area? There must be 50 of them. It not only includes the ridings in metro Toronto and the 905 belt, but I know the Star has circulation boxes extending up into my constituency. Part of my riding is along the Lake Ontario shoreline, and indeed if you go down Highway 7, I know the exact gas station, which is the last one where the Toronto Star is delivered. That's the eastern-most extent of the Toronto Star. It's in Kaladar. If you go up the highway further east to Sharbot Lake, it's the Ottawa Citizen. That's sort of where the two of them butt heads. It's also more or less where the dividing line is between the Ottawa Senators' fans and the Toronto Maple Leafs' fans, which is a divide, I can tell you, Mr. Chairman, that we MPs have to take very seriously if we know what's good for us.
I could go on about that, but I suspect there might be a relevance problem with it, so I won't do that.
Media markets extend beyond individual ridings, so grouping ads is a necessary thing. If you're grouping ads, and all parties do, and all parties have done this for a very long time--not just for newspapers, or even especially for newspapers, but also for radio ads and television ads--because these media markets extend out beyond individual riding boundaries, you're faced with some fundamental problems.
Giving a list of candidates and saying, as we would have had to do if we were doing something for eastern Ontario--Scott Reid, Gordon O'Connor, Pierre Lemieux, Dean Del Mastro, John Baird, Pierre Poilievre, Cheryl Gallant, Daryl Kramp, Blair MacLean, Royal Galipeau, and Gord Brown are all great guys--is just giving a laundry list. I think I've just demonstrated that. It doesn't mean anything. It's just this long list of names. It's not going to cause anybody to switch their vote, which is the point of election advertising. Trying to list the accomplishments of these people is difficult. Some of them are candidates who haven't yet been elected, as my colleague, Pierre, was in the last election. Some of us are grizzled veterans with years of experience and many battle scars, as I am. It was hard to package us as a single entity, so the tendency was to promote the party or to promote the leader, or some combination of both. It kind of depends whether your party brand is higher than your leader's brand is. I think that explains why the Elections Act actually states that you are allowed to promote in local advertising, in any advertising, the party, the leader, the brand, and the policies.
I hope I have a copy of the Elections Act here with me. No, I think I left it in my office, so I'll have to ask my assistant to trot upstairs and get me a copy of the Elections Act.
I'll carry on with the general argument and come back to it when she has the Elections Act for me.
I want to make a point about the Elections Act in this regard. The Elections Act is actually quite specific in saying that you're allowed to promote the party, the leader, and so on. There's no other way of interpreting it.
While I'm waiting, I do want to draw people's attention to the constitutional principle I referred to earlier of not being guilty of something that wasn't an offence at the time the person engaged in that action. I mentioned the American example, the Bill of Rights, no ex post facto laws.
The Canadian Charter of Rights, section 11, deals with legal rights. It's one of a number of sections dealing with legal rights. Paragraph 11(g) states:
11. Any person charged with an offence has the right
(g) not to be found guilty on account of any act or omission unless, at the time of the act or omission, it constituted an offence under Canadian or international law or was criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations;
The reason that those bits about international law, “the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations”, are in there is that we're trying to deal with war crimes. That's what it's about.
I don't think any party in this dispute is saying that this principle of our Constitution has any relevance to what's going on here. There are no war crimes under way.
Certainly you can't be found guilty on account of any act or omission to act unless at the time of the act or omission it constituted an offence under Canadian law. That applies to prosecution under the law.
Some people suffer from the misapprehension that what is not permitted by law can be done by regulation or by an administrative act. This is absolutely false. The fact that regulations are enacted more informally does not change that they're enacted under provisions of the law.
Normally a bill on, say, prohibited substances, drugs, will have a long list of items, and then it says, “and any others that are placed on this list by the relevant minister by means of ministerial order or by the Governor in Council”. These are effectively parts of the law that are being administered by those charged with administering the law, and they are subject to the very same restrictions of constitutionality that is found under the law.
Likewise, the Chief Electoral Officer doesn't have regulatory powers per se. In fact, there are no regulations under the Elections Act. He has administrative roles. He has the capacity to make up a kind of regulation in his administrative actions and through his interpretations by saying that he is going to pursue what he regards as an offence under the relevant section of the law or he's not. So he has some powers there.
But those, too, are governed by the basic principles of the rule of law and by the Constitution--all of the Constitution, including paragraph 11(g). There's no escaping that.
That includes, and prohibits, of course, the practice for which there is an attempted justification in the disclaimers for all these interpretation bulletins. It certainly precludes the practice that he undertook of passing an interpretation after an election and then applying it retrospectively. There's just no way of escaping that.
The other thing that I think is worth mentioning with regard to the charter is that there is actually a requirement under the charter, subsection 15(1), that the law be applied impartially. Laws must be of general application. You can't have a law that is applied differently for different people, on any basis.
Everybody knows that there are restrictions on the government acting to apply its laws differently based on the enumerated elements in section 15. I may not remember them all--age, race, sex, religion, ethnicity. As well, the application of the law differently for one party versus another by someone who is given the specific obligation in the law to apply it equally would be unconstitutional. It would also be illegal under the Canada Elections Act. It's certainly unlawful under the Canada Elections Act, but it's definitely not permitted under subsection 15(1) of the charter.
I'll turn back to what the law actually says. Subsection 407(1) of the Canada Elections Act says the following, and I'll read it. It's a little confusing the way it's put here:
An election expense includes any cost incurred, or non-monetary contribution received, by a registered party or a candidate, to the extent that the property or service for which the cost was incurred, or the non-monetary contribution received, is used to directly promote or oppose a registered party, its leader or a candidate during an election period.
Of course, nobody disputes these words about an expense made during an election period. Similarly, nobody disputes the part about promoting candidates. So it's really about promoting a party or a leader.
You'll notice that there's nothing in this section, or indeed in the other section, that deals with distinguishing expenses incurred by a local campaign, a national campaign, and so on.
We, of course, have established spending limits for local campaigns and national campaigns. But we did not—and when I say “we”, I mean Parliament—rewrite this part of the law dealing with allowable uses of election expenses to exclude these things. And there would be a fundamental problem if we had, Mr. Chairman.
I just wonder, Mr. Chairman, actually, if I might.... Can you call a point of order on yourself? I'm just finding it hard to concentrate with all the background noise, and I wonder if you could maybe quiet people down.