Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, I've just been going through the motion. The way it's worded here in the Minutes of Proceedings as drawn up by the clerk is that, as amended, it would now read as follows:
That the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs investigate the actions of the Conservative Party of Canada during the 2004 and 2006 federal elections in relation and in comparison to the election campaign expenses of the Liberal Party of Canada, and where Elections Canada has refused to reimburse some Conservative candidates for election campaign expenses.
As you can see, this is a fair-minded and equitable motion as it is currently worded. It permits us to examine the behaviour of--and when I say this, I'm hoping I won't induce Mr. Angus to make a point of order--the two major parties, which is to say the two parties that have won the most seats. I mean that in a very non-judgmental way that is effusively respectful of the NDP's major status and that of the Bloc.
But the point is to turn this from what, frankly, as introduced, I felt was a motion designed for the purpose of presupposing guilt, of asserting that a wrong had been done and then finding the facts to allow what will pass as a demonstration that this wrong had been done, notwithstanding important considerations like context. In a sense, it's like looking for a frame out of a film. With one frame you can give a snapshot that is very different from the full picture that you would want to work with in order to get a proper understanding. A full picture is obtained by watching the entire film. A frame may be at a moment when the camera has zeroed in on one of the actors in the great drama that is afoot. It's at one point in time. It may be that the camera has zoomed right in for the close-up, so all kinds of contextual information at a broader level is excluded. All temporal considerations are also excluded--what came before, what came after, and what was going on in parallel.
This was the point of trying to expand it to include the Liberal Party of Canada, and it was also the purpose of expanding it to include not only the 2006 election but also the 2004 election.
As I understand the comments raised by Mr. Lemieux when he presented his amendment to the motion, his concern was to go back in time but to keep it in context, that is to say, to go back in time to the 2004 election, which took place after amendments had been made to the Canada Elections Act that relate to financing.
I should mention, though, as I point that out--and I think that was a good move--in theory we could go back and look at the elections of 2000,1997, 1993, and so on, if we wanted to, but there are a number of basic problems with them. One problem is simply that if a contravention of the Elections Act were found on the part of either of the two parties that this motion contemplates investigating, nothing could be done even if it became clear that there was some evidence of some inappropriate actions in violation of the Elections Act, and that's because the statute of limitations for the pursuit of such infractions of the law was changed by the legislation that was introduced in this house and passed in 2003. Effectively, that extended the period of prosecutions.
Anything before the 2003 amendments to the Elections Act is now at least seven years in the past, and the statute of limitations has expired. This would include, of course, all those elections in which envelopes of cash were presented to Liberal candidates in assorted ridings. We're told that in 21 ridings in the province of Quebec--we don't know which 21, unfortunately--Liberal candidates were actually given envelopes of cash. They could not have been spent without violating a number of aspects of the Elections Act.
Clearly, the reporting requirements....
I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, I just lost my track there for a second because you were chatting with another member.
That period would have been of great interest to us. I believe there is pretty extensive evidence--I would say overwhelming evidence--that the Liberal Party of Canada was violating the Elections Act in its reporting requirements. I think there were some other laws being violated too, Mr. Chairman. The Elections Act was being violated in 1997, and perhaps as well in 2000 by the distribution of this cash. This is evidence that came forward in the Gomery commission.
Specifically, it would have taken place in the form of these amounts being given and then not recorded on the filings submitted by those local campaigns. So there would be a very clear infraction of the law as it stood at the time, actually. The law was not different in that respect. You couldn't collect money from an anonymous source and spend it without recording where it came in and where it went out. So either the books had to be laundered to come up with legitimate-looking sources of information for the Liberal candidates in these ridings or, alternatively, the expenses weren't recorded.
These are elements that are not, to be sure, directly parallel to what is being alleged here by the Liberals, to what they claim are illegitimate practices of my party. They're a good deal more serious than what the Liberals are alleging with regard to my party. So that would be something, I think, essentially beyond the scope, not merely because the statute of limitations has expired, but also because the severity of the offences committed by the Liberal Party was so much greater than anything that even the Liberals have had the nerve to propose with regard to my party.
To make that point, Mr. Chairman, I want to go back to the original wording of Ms. Redman's motion, because I think how it's worded is interesting. It actually makes no claim at any point that unlawful or illegal activities were undertaken. This is very much in contrast to what the Gomery commission revealed with regard to Liberal Party financial activities in the elections that preceded the proposed ambit of the review under this motion.
Instead, because they know they can't say “illegal”, because nothing illegal took place, they use the much fuzzier word “illegitimate”. The original wording says “illegitimate election campaign expenses”. In other words, there were campaign expenses that might or might not have been legal--perhaps they were all legal--but that, in some way that we aren't going to inform you of, violated what we regard as being an unwritten code of conduct, not the one that's written into the ethics code but another one that we've kind of invented on the fly. Mr. Chairman, that's essentially coming to a judgment in the very wording of the motion. So that is one of the things that Mr. Lemieux's motion corrects.
You'll notice the way the motion is now worded. Although it's bringing both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party within its ambit, it makes no reference whatsoever to illegitimate action. One of the contentions that I think can be made--and the facts overwhelmingly now demonstrate this--is that these activities have been engaged in by both parties because they are completely legal. The activities I'm referring to--I'll get to those in a second--are completely legal. They're completely within the scope and spirit of the Elections Act. They are a common practice. They're a common practice pursued not merely by the Conservatives and the Liberal Party, but actually also by the other two parties represented in the House of Commons.
The practices I'm referring to are those of having regional ad buys for media. The Liberals want to argue these are illegitimate. A regional ad buy is where a group of candidates pool some resources and purchase ads covering more than one riding in a certain region. A region would typically be a media market, the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, for example, or the area surrounding the city of Ottawa covered by the circulation of the Ottawa Citizen, and the reach of the various television and radio stations emanating from the city centre. It's that kind of thing. The Toronto market would be another example. We could go on and on; there are a number of these, and they're fairly obvious examples. They tend to focus on an urban area and spread out from there. A regional ad buy serves the purpose of trying to promote the party in a region.
The argument that this is somehow illegitimate has always escaped me. The argument that it's unique to the Conservative Party is simply counter-factual. All parties do this—and they do it for a good reason. It's an effective way of promoting candidates. If one party were to be hobbled in so doing while others were permitted to continue, or worse yet, if one party were to be hobbled in doing this while others were permitted to continue it in the same election against that party, it would truly be a preposterous situation, Mr. Chairman.
As far as I can tell, that is the situation the Liberals seem to think actually should obtain, that effectively they can engage in regional media buys in the very same media market as the Conservatives. They can do it, they can claim the expenses, they can be reimbursed by the taxpayers of Canada, but at that very same moment, the Conservative candidates in the same market should be forbidden from doing it and be prohibited from receiving payment of the reimbursements to which they are legally entitled. I guess, as well, they should be hauled before a court of star chambers, such as the one the Liberals propose to set up, so as to be attacked and vilified entirely out of context, as if they were somehow engaged in an illegal activity. But it's not an illegal activity, of course. They use the fuzzy word “illegitimate”, so they can define it however they want.
Mr. Chairman, this is the standard pattern of the Liberal Party. You know, we Liberals do something and it's okay; you guys did it, and it wasn't okay. What's the reason? Well, it was a Tuesday or it was a month that ended in the letter y, or it was the full moon, or it was a leap year. There's always a reason, but there's one set of rules for them—which is a very, very expensive set of rules, may I say—and there's another set of rules for everybody else, particularly for anybody else who has a serious electoral prospect of replacing them in government. That's their concern. Their concern is simply to ensure that the rules are applied differently, at different times and different places, or maybe even in the same time and place with different actors, so as to achieve an outcome that ensures the Liberal Party wins every election.
The endlessly moving goal posts they propose should not be permitted. That's the reason for proposing a motion that deals with both parties, and in a way that permits—returning to my original metaphor—the motion picture to be examined, the whole thing,and not just a few stills of the choosing of the Liberals.
I pointed out in an intervention two weeks ago, when we were last seized with this topic, Mr. Chairman, that there were some additional considerations as well. This is not, in my opinion, a body well suited to producing findings of evidence. That's normally done before courts, and there are good reasons for it. We're just not structured the right way for that sort of thing.
Given my preferences, given my druthers, I would prefer to see this subject matter dropped entirely for that reason, because there are better ways of examining this.
There are court proceedings under way right now, as you know. What the court proceedings involve, of course—and this is something I have to stress over and over again, Mr. Chairman—is that the riding associations that have not been paid rebates by the Chief Electoral Officer for expenses they regard as being legitimate are then going after the Chief Electoral Officer and saying, “You owe us some money to which we are legally entitled, and you owe it to us because the activity we engaged in is an activity in which parties engage frequently, indeed, as a matter of course ”. The idea that you can't engage in these things unless you are a Liberal is clearly inappropriate and should not, in my view, be pursued.
This is the purpose of the amendment.
Mr. Chairman, I could go on at some length about this, but I'm worried that others who may have been swayed by my comments would be unable to take the floor and express their opinions, so at this point I will cede the floor to the next speaker.