Mr. Speaker, I endorse the comments that have been made by the member for Burnaby—Douglas about Elections Canada.
I want to raise one issue. Earlier in the House the parliamentary secretary singled out my riding of East Vancouver as though it and other ridings were involved in the same kind of scam and scheme that the Conservative Party tried to pull off. This deserves an answer and a correction of the information, which has been erroneously put out by the Conservatives.
The fact is the Conservative Party was trying to get around the ceiling it had for its national ad buy and it used ridings like East Vancouver, which it had no hope of winning. In some cases it slipped in tens of thousands of dollars in what were supposedly local ads, but were truly national ads. The Conservatives did this by using a very low local ceiling.
In the case of the NDP, its national party bought an ad buy for local candidates, and we participated in that. The riding of the member for Burnaby—Douglas also participated. Because it was organized by the national campaign and was an ad buy, we all paid our share of it. Because it was a local ad, it went under the local ceiling. It was something completely—