Mr. Speaker, if you would look at my statement on this question of privilege, I said that I had no problem with people engaging in voter identification. I said I understood the practice of outreach. I said I understood that political parties, including ours, engage in issues of voter identification.
The issue is not that because of the calls themselves my work was impeded, calls regarding voter identification and the like. It was that in the course of those calls, my work became impeded by the false and misleading information contained in those calls. That is something very different.
The constituents were not asked, “Do you support or would you support the Conservative Party in a general election?” I could understand that, even though we just had a general election six months ago, but in the realm of political discourse, I could understand voter outreach being done all the time. That is fine. However, that is not how it was put.
My constituents were asked, “Will you support the Conservative Party in the pending or imminent byelection?” There is a fundamental difference. This is not normal political discourse, as the hon. member said. Clearly, this is false and misleading information because there is no pending or imminent byelection. When my constituents replied, “What byelection? We don't know of any byelection”, they were told that the member for Mount Royal had resigned or is about to resign.
That clearly comes within the breach of privilege of sowing confusion in the minds of the voters. It clearly comes within the breach of privilege with respect to prejudicing my standing with the electorate and not only causing confusion, but impeding my work because of the flood of phone calls and emails, et cetera, that my office received. People are asking about this pending byelection and when this imminent byelection was to take place. They are saying, “We didn't know that the member for Mount Royal was stepping down,” or, “We didn't know that he has already stepped down”. That is fundamentally different.
The fact is there may have been rumours, but after 12 years I am still here. In that article he quoted, I said that those rumours have been going on for 12 years. The fact that it emanates very often from the members opposite is something else. They are rumours. Rumours are rumours. I will just say that people can repeat rumours, but it is fundamentally different from a rumour to call constituents in a systematic way and specifically target those constituents, with the effect of sowing confusion in the minds of the electorate, impeding the member in the performance of his functions, and causing prejudice to his standing within the riding. These calls have not abated.
It is important that such a practice cease and desist. I do not think any member of this House should be subjected to those kinds of calls. It is not a matter of the party, although I will say that the former candidate in the riding of Mount Royal when asked if he was involved with this, said, “No, I had nothing to do with it. It was the party. It was the Conservative Party”. The Conservative candidate identified the Conservative Party as being involved. I believed him when he said he was not involved. I equally believed him when he said that the Conservative Party was involved. He identified the party.
Leaving that aside, the whole point here is that this was not in the course of normal outreach. This was a form of prejudicial misrepresentation of false and misleading information. As I said, it falls squarely within the criteria, and we quoted principles and precedents, as to what constitutes a breach of privilege. This is not chilling political discourse for you to rule, Mr. Speaker, that it was a breach of privilege; this will chill false and misleading information that tends to corrupt the political process.
That kind of constraint should be placed so that no member in the House should be subjected to false and misleading information. Again, it was not held out as a rumour. It was stated as a fact, a false fact, but it was held that the member had resigned or was about to resign.
There is not a byelection to be held at some point, as I said, let alone a general election. They were talking about a byelection. They said that a byelection is pending; a byelection is imminent. There was a series of ongoing false, misleading, prejudicial misrepresentations.
I think the Speaker should rule that it is a breach of privilege, not simply in my case, but to protect all members of the House from such false and misleading statements and innuendoes that should not be made inside or outside the House which could prejudicially affect members of Parliament.