Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
There are a number of things that Mr. LeBlanc said that I think are factually incorrect, although I won't cast aspersions on him as to why he said them. But I do want to point out his use of excessive language, which I think is the underlying problem here, and this is the reason I proposed this amendment. He used the term “laundromat”, for example. I won't assume his intention. I'll say what I think the practical implications are of using value-laden or hyperbolic language.
Laundromat. Money laundering. I assume that some people out there might get the implication from the overheated rhetoric being tossed around this room by Mr. LeBlanc and others that something of that nature is going on. Let's understand what money laundering is. Money laundering is the activity of going out and creating imaginary activities, such as gambling winnings, in order to hide money that came from some illegal original source, such as buying and selling drugs, by way of example, or something of that nature. This is so far removed from what's going on here that even they aren't actually prepared to say it here, where they're protected by parliamentary privilege and all that sort of thing, because it's outrageous. But in terms of just putting out the rhetoric in the hope that it gets picked up and misunderstood, well, there's no problem doing that, Mr. Chairman.
What is going on is in fact--and when Mr. LeBlanc described it, he had to actually point this out in his remarks--that Elections Canada, which is not an adjudicative body but a body that interprets the act and tends to apply it and then has to, when its interpretation comes into conflict with other interpretations, refer it to a higher authority, provided an interpretation, and as he said, they have referred it to the Commissioner of Canada Elections. They've sent it to a higher authority who has some adjudicative power, although ultimately he too has to go to the courts.
So Elections Canada is not really one step away from actually being an adjudicative body, it's actually two steps away. It doesn't actually conduct legal proceedings before the courts. That's done by the Commissioner of Canada Elections. So here we are with the accusation. Well, it's all over; Elections Canada has made the ruling; let's not wait for those silly courts. I mean, let's get into the serious business of trying to impose some kind of double jeopardy here in this chamber and come up with a court that we hope will spin this issue in the short run as being some kind of horrible thing.
Of course, in the end, the courts will go along and they'll rule. They'll either rule, Mr. Chairman, that the Conservative Party and its various official agents were acting within the terms of the Canada Elections Act by spending money in a way that was legitimate...perhaps not a way that the Liberals had anticipated, or that they had the cash to do themselves in 2006, because in 2006, unlike in 2004, they were short of cash, as Mr. LeBlanc points out.
The thing that is relevant here is that Elections Canada will either have its interpretation upheld or not upheld. If it's not upheld, then they will actually owe money to the Conservative Party of Canada for legitimate expenses incurred by the Conservative Party of Canada. On the other hand, there's always the possibility--although I personally must say, based on a mature examination of the facts, that I think in this case Elections Canada is incorrect--that their interpretation of the law is in fact the one the courts uphold. If the courts do uphold this particular interpretation of the law, then what would happen is that there would be certain limited consequences under the law.
But we're not talking about anything as radical or extreme as what Mr. LeBlanc's words would imply. The word “illegitimate” is inappropriate, and the implications of something much, much deeper and more devious than that are just out of place. The only reason they can get away with saying them here is that this is a body that doesn't have the restraints that exist in the court system, which, Mr. Chairman, is why we don't actually adjudicate cases in the House of Commons or its committees. Indeed, Mr. Chairman, it is why we make a policy of not trying to have findings of fact at all in these bodies. It's simply inappropriate for this purpose. Our goal is to try to work on policy and to make sure that policy is enforced.
Mr. Chairman, I want to mention something else with regard to Elections Canada's interpretation of this. You would think, based on the comments of Mr. LeBlanc and some of the other Liberal members here, that getting an interpretation of the law from Elections Canada is kind of akin in its level of authority to going up Mount Sinai and speaking to the burning bush. You would think that we ought to be treating these interpretations with the same respect that would be shown to Moses as he came down the mountain with the Ten Commandments under his arm. This is the same group of people who were attacking and ridiculing the Chief Electoral Officer for his ruling on veiled voting, his interpretation of the law on veiled voting. So I don't know, is it their position that this is a guy who can't interpret the law at all, who just doesn't understand the law, or is it their position that the Chief Electoral Officer's interpretation of the law is a holy writ, notwithstanding the fact that the law itself says that his interpretation is meant to go through a process--two processes, actually, going to the Commissioner of Elections, who then makes his decision, and then off to the court system--before we get a ruling, because he's fallible.
They want to have their cake and eat it too, of course, and we suspect that they want to have their cake in the 2004 election, and then, when somebody else does the same thing in the 2006 election, say, “Oh, no, that's not legitimate.” This is part of the reason--not the whole reason, but it's certainly part of the reason--why the Liberals absolutely don't want the 2004 election discussed at all. There was a time, Mr. Chairman—I remember this very well, I was in Parliament at the time—when the Liberal Party was awash in cash and everybody else wasn't. They were engaged in actions, some of them completely legal, that were parallel to this action, and some of them, quite frankly, completely illegal. I don't just mean in violation of the Elections Act. I mean in violation of the law, period: the transfer of funds in envelopes--envelopes of cash--to 21 Quebec ridings by the Liberal Party.
Mr. Godin was quite correct when he said it is legitimate to transfer funds to ridings, but it's legitimate to transfer it when you record the amounts and when you keep them under a certain amount and when they are receipted. It is not legitimate to have envelopes stuffed with cash, any more than it was legitimate for all those Liberal operatives to turn up and have those envelopes of cash that the Gomery commission was looking into in that particular Liberal scandal.
To say that Mr. LeBlanc's comments miss the point would be an understatement, Mr. Chairman.
I can think of three good, solid reasons why they don't want to allow this motion to be amended to include their expenses along with our expenses and to examine 2004 plus 2006. They want it focused just on 2006, just on the Conservative Party, but there are four reasons, Mr. Chairman. As far as I can see, they are the following.
One, it would soon become apparent that the Liberals have done the very same thing themselves, which is okay because it's legitimate. But this is a pattern you see with these guys. Do you remember the Rosh Hashanah crisis? That was when it turned out that somebody had received a Rosh Hashanah card from the Prime Minister or from a Conservative MP. Anyway, this was a great scandal, and the member for Thornhill, who is a Liberal, was up. It was a crisis. Where did this come from? What nefarious means were used to get the name of this individual and send them a Rosh Hashanah card? Then it turned out that the very same member had been sending Rosh Hashanah cards to people who had not provided her with any of the information that she found to be so mysterious.
Mr. Chairman, what you see going on is that something that's acceptable when Liberals do it is a scandal when somebody else does it. Then when people notice that actually Liberals were doing it as well as those dastardly Conservatives, suddenly it's not an issue anymore and it just drops right off the agenda, and we just won't discuss it anymore. It's just their way of operating in this Parliament.
In the absence of any actual scandals to point to, they'll invent some, just dig into their own bag, find the acts that they've been engaged in themselves that weren't actually illegal, and then say those other guys are doing these things too. We'll just hope nobody notices we were doing it, and we'll accuse them of doing things that are illegitimate, present it as if “illegitimate” and “illegal” are the same thing, and then we can engage in a parallel system to whatever court proceedings are going on.
I'm sure we could embarrass anybody in this room if we said we're going to have this committee investigate the contents of their sock and underwear drawers. I think if we all had our sock and underwear drawers investigated, we would be equally embarrassed, so let's just focus on one guy's sock and underwear drawer and not on anybody else's and hope we can embarrass him. But the fact is that having unsorted socks in your sock drawer isn't necessarily against the rules. There are a whole bunch of other things that are, but having household messes and whatever are not illegal and they're not illegitimate. This isn't illegal, and this isn't illegitimate, but if we can focus on one particular party's actions, decontextualize them, then we think maybe we'll get some media pick-up. That's reason number one.
Reason number two, that the Liberals want to discuss 2006 and not 2004, is that they were awash in cash themselves in 2004. In 2006 they were short of cash, and things had changed. The Conservative Party, which is much better at raising money, apparently, than the Liberal Party is--at least raising money legally....
I hear one of my opponents commenting on this. I don't think anybody would dispute that the returns we got in just recently, which showed that the Conservative Party had raised about $3 million, as it reported to Elections Canada...was not all raised legally, and that the, I think, $800,000 the Liberals raised was not raised legally. The point is we're getting about four times as much cash as they are. And this is a phenomenon that's been going on for some time.
The Liberals were short of cash. They didn't have the option of doing certain things. So once they can't do something, then it changes from being a legitimate action to an illegitimate action. It's only good when the Liberals can do it. When, over time, circumstances change as well, that crisis, brought on by the fact that nobody wants to give the Liberal Party money because nobody trusts them to govern the country, becomes grounds for the actions of anybody else who is raising money and spending it legally, and it is now seen as an illegitimate action. But to make sure that the embarrassment that occurred when Susan Kadis was shown as having given out Rosh Hashanah cards, after accusing others of being nefarious for doing the same thing, is prevented from happening, we have to word this so that we exclude the period when we ourselves were engaged in these kinds of activities, because we ourselves had more substantial money at our disposal.
That's reason number two of the four reasons.
Reason number three, Mr. Chairman, is that the Liberals are not anxious to go into the past and potentially further into the past. You may recall that when this issue came up in early September, and we were having meetings of this committee at that time, proposals were made to amend a similar Liberal motion to go back further to elections, not just in 2004 but further back--these were the elections in which the envelopes of cash were flying around, these are the ones that are actually beyond the statute of limitations that's written into the Canada Elections Act—and to investigate all of those practices that occurred during the era of the sponsorship scandal, following the 1995 referendum.
We wouldn't want to get into that, Mr. Chairman, would we now, because there were things that were genuinely illegitimate, genuinely illegal, going on, and they were all by the Liberal Party. It wasn't the Bloc; it wasn't the NDP; it wasn't the Conservatives or the predecessor parties of the Conservatives. It was the Liberal Party of Canada in there doing things that are, by anybody's measure, and certainly by the measure of the courts, illegal acts with regard to campaign funding. So they don't want to get that done.
And I stress again, 21 Quebec ridings received envelopes of cash. We don't know which ones, because when former Prime Minister Martin drafted the mandate of the Gomery commission he made sure it had a mandate to investigate only certain aspects of the sponsorship program and not the parts that would have implicated the Liberal Party itself. The Auditor General had drawn attention to a range of different activities, and one of the chapters--I think it was chapter 7 of her report--was specifically excluded from the mandate of the Gomery commission. So Mr. Justice Gomery could look into certain things and just had to halt his mandate at a certain point.
That's a can of worms, Mr. Chairman, that the Liberals really and truly do not want opened again. Thus the need to ensure that it's 2006 and nothing else. We don't want a temporal context there, we don't want a multi-party context; we want decontextualized information. And we also don't want anything that involves those annoying little courts, which actually have to base their findings on what the law says, involved in this either, because our goal here is--
