Mr. Speaker, I am quite pleased to take part in this adjournment debate. On October 18, 2007, I asked the government the following question:
--Elections Canada investigated this $1.2 million Conservative Party laundering scam.
There is no evidence these expenses were incurred by their candidates. Some of their candidates said they did not even know about them. Others said they were pressured to contribute to the national advertising.
Elections Canada says that the Conservative Party used local campaigns to hide the fact that they spent more than they were allowed to and then they had the gall to claim bogus rebates.
Ordinary Canadians may be listening to this and wondering what the importance is of it.
On pages 188 and 189 of Tom Flanagan's book, he states quite clearly in the third paragraph, the second sentence:
Even though there is a cap on national campaign spending, it is easy and legal to exceed it by transferring expenditures to local campaigns that are not able to spend up to their own legal limits.
That may be the case. The problem exists when those moneys that are transferred into local campaigns during an election are used to purchase national advertising, not local advertising for the local candidate, and then allows the candidate to claim a rebate for expenditures that did not directly benefit that candidate.
We may ask ourselves why that is important. One of the Conservative parliamentary secretaries, who is the member for Beauport—Limoilou, listed, in her electoral expenses to Elections Canada 2006, the amount of $37,454.69 for several ad expenses. In fact, her campaign received a transfer from the national of the Conservative Party of $43,174.69. She then, through her official agent, went on and claimed a rebate of that $37,000, a 60% rebate on the $37,454.69. In fact, that amount represented 81.35% of her total campaign expenses.
However, when one looks at the ads that were bought, those ads do not show her name anywhere, do not show the name of her riding and were not posters in her riding or radio campaigns in her riding or television spots that played giving her name, showing her picture or giving the name of her riding.
Elections Canada has clearly stated that--