Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the opposition day motion that reads, in part:
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....
It goes on to name some consequences.
As others have said before me, this is about the in and out scheme of the Conservative Party of Canada that occurred in the 2006 election campaign which fraudulently took money and transferred it around. I will get into more detail on that later.
From a high of $49,999 to one riding to slightly over $2,000 in another, and some 67 ridings in all, it was a major scheme to get around the national advertising rules. The plan was simple enough. It was to send money to individual ridings for the purpose of buying advertising, only the advertising being purchased was for the national not the local campaign.
In an article today in the Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson summed this up probably better than anyone. He backgrounds it in about half of the article and I will quote what he had to say in looking back at that election campaign. He says:
Yes, the Liberals were wounded, but they weren't done. They were running their own nasty TV ads warning darkly of Mr. Harper's hidden agenda.
We certainly know that is true. There is certainly one of those.