Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with our excellent hon. member for Châteauguay—Saint-Constant.
Before question period, I was talking about the motion moved by the Liberals. I will reread part of it:
That, in the opinion of the House, the Conservative Party of Canada’s “in and out” electoral financing scheme was an act of electoral fraud and represents an assault on the democratic principles upon which Parliament and our electoral system are based...
This is important. During question period, we heard all sorts of claims coming out of the mouth of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister. For weeks now he has been claiming that the Conservative Party provided the Chief Electoral Officer with all the documents. That is not true and he knows it. The RCMP had to search the offices of the Conservative Party to obtain the information, and that is serious. It is clear, under the law, that the national party has the right to spend a certain amount of money. In 2006, it was $18 million. What is more, the ridings had the right to spend a certain amount of money per riding. The total for all the ridings is roughly the same amount, $18 million.
However, expenses are different. I am the chief organizer for the Bloc Québécois. The party is entitled to its expenses at the national level. Usually, ads represent the biggest part of the expenses to which we are entitled and in which we invest during an election campaign. In Quebec, for the next election, it will be roughly $6 million nationally. The party will have a budget and will spend a certain amount of money for its national ads. The ridings have their own budgets and are entitled to local advertising.
In the 2005-06 election, the Conservative Party was moving up in the polls. That is how the Conservatives have always governed. They were experiencing some popularity and the money started to come in. The ridings did not have their own fundraising campaigns and were having a lot of trouble raising money. I should point out that a right-wing party was not very popular, at least not in Quebec. I cannot speak for the rest of Canada, but in Quebec, it was not. The party had reached its $18 million limit at the national level. It saw the potential for a majority and needed to spend money on national advertisements. Since money was pouring in, it sent money to local ridings and asked them to spend that money on national advertisements, which is in violation of the act. That is why only Conservative Party offices were searched by the RCMP and Elections Canada. In fact, when the returns came in, Elections Canada realized that the expenses were not for local advertisements. In my riding of Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, there are 13 local weekly newspapers. With my budget, I purchase advertisements in the weekly newspapers. That is not national advertising. The national Bloc Québécois party, for which I am the chief organizer, pays for national advertisements on television and radios and in the major national media, but each riding is responsible for local advertising.
It is not surprising for this to happen when a political party does not have enough money for advertising, and the Conservatives know that. It is always about the money, and advertising is the biggest expense a party makes to try and sway the public, which is often very lazy and does not follow election campaigns, aside from catching a few one-minute clips on The National or another national news program. The way to sway the public is to blanket the radio and television airwaves with advertisements showing the party leader, while in the ridings, the focus is on showing the candidates.
Elections Canada very clearly understood the scheme. I am a member of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, and I have informed the Conservative members opposite that they are going to lose their appeal before the Supreme Court. A party should not be able to influence the outcome of a national campaign by sending money to ridings so that they can send it right back to the national party to cover the cost of national advertising. This will have to be monitored in future. The Conservatives are not raising any more money than before at the local level. They are collecting it at the national level, particularly in Quebec.
What was done differently in 2006 and what will happen during the next election campaign? They have had time to send money before the election. If I look at the list of Conservative Party donors in Quebec ridings, I see that often those donors do not live in the ridings to which they are contributing. That is legal. However, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and representatives of the Chief Electoral Officer are analyzing this practice and trying to abolish it. In theory, a riding that wants to run a local election campaign with its local candidate must be able to raise the money to do so on its own.
The current act allows money to be sent to the ridings before the election campaign. This practice must be reviewed. However, there is one other thing that is not legal under the act during an election campaign. When the Conservatives reached their $18 million spending limit, they noticed that some ridings had not raised any money and were broke. They told those ridings that they would send them money, not for local advertising, but for national advertising. The Conservatives needed national advertising to win a majority. This is what the Chief Electoral Officer condemned, and he was completely right. There is a reason Elections Canada won its appeal and will win—