We are the only party that can say that. The Liberals, the Bloc, and the NDP all voted against having their finances scrutinized. I wondered why that was the case, Mr. Chair, and today I found out why. The reason, as we learned and as the courts have learned through an affidavit, is that every single party has engaged in exactly the same practices for which Elections Canada has singled out the Conservative Party—every single party. They have all decided how to spend their own money, and their own candidates have decided how to make their own expenditures.
What is really at stake here is that the Conservative candidates spent Conservative funds on Conservative advertising. It's shocking, really, that in a democracy a political party or one of its candidates might advertise for itself, and that it might decide without encroachment from a federal agency on what content it inserts into that advertising. That is really the extent of the accusation: Elections Canada has said that the Conservative Party and its candidates cannot decide what goes into their advertising.
A Conservative candidate, according to Elections Canada, must advertise exclusively on local issues in order for the advertising to be considered a local expense. Quite frankly--and I hope this message gets back to Elections Canada--we are not going to have a federal agency tell us how we can do our advertising, and we are not going to have them determine what content is going to be in our ads, because we live in a free country where agencies that might wish to augment their powers do not have the ability to dictate to us what we put in our ads. This is the extent of the accusation. Elections Canada is not suggesting that on the whole the Conservative Party or its local campaigns spent too much. It is alleging that local campaigns must have certain kinds of content in order for their expenses to be accounted for as local expenses.
I've run for Parliament, Mr. Chair, and so have other members in this room, and we have a God-given right in this country, as local candidates, to speak freely in our efforts to convince local voters. I am not going to have some national agency tell me what I can and cannot put in my advertising, because there's a thing--for which our veterans died--called free speech. It's something that we're not willing to surrender because a powerful government agency has decided that it wants to control what local campaigns say in their advertising. Elections Canada will have to get used to that, because it's not going to change.
That is why we are taking Elections Canada to court. The Conservative Party and its members are the plaintiffs. We are the ones with a grievance against Elections Canada, and Elections Canada has to explain its actions in defence. Not only are we unafraid of having our conduct examined, but we're the ones who made public issue of our conduct. We're the ones who brought it before the courts; we're the ones who asked that an independent judiciary examine our conduct; and further than that, we are the ones who appeared before a public committee, which is televised, and asked that our conduct be further scrutinized by members of all political parties. The only thing we've asked for is that if we are willing to subject ourselves to that sort of scrutiny, all parties do the same. That has been our request from the very beginning. It has not changed.
So we wait with some anticipation to find out if the opposition parties will come clean, whether the Liberals, the Bloc and the NDP will come clean and will accept the same scrutiny we have proposed for ourselves, or whether they will continue to cover up their practices and continue to hide their conduct in a coalition of shame—three parties united in their shame of their own practices.
And for the benefit of our viewers who cannot see them right now, they do look ashamed.