My apologies, Madam Speaker.
Mr. Simpson goes on to say:
On TV and on platforms, the two parties were battling, ad for ad, charge for charge. But as the campaign wore on, the Conservatives were running out of money, or at least money they could spend under election financing rules. They needed every dollar they could find to buy more ads.
What did they do? They had to find a scheme to get money. They had overspent in the first few weeks of the campaign. They had a week left to go so they had to find a scheme by which to get around the election rules.
Jeffrey Simpson went on to say:
It was, as the appeal court said, a “scheme.” Now the director of public prosecutions has charged four Conservatives, including two senators, with having organized the scheme.
I think Mr. Simpson sums it up pretty well in the Globe and Mail article.
The CBC also reported:
The plan was apparently hatched in the midst of the campaign as the national Conservative Party was reaching its legal spending limit of about $18 million, but wanted to spend more on advertising.
The CBC report went on to provide a brief example of how the scam, this money-laundering scheme, worked. It said:
Individual Conservative candidates had their own legal election expense limit of about $80,000, and lots of them weren't planning to spend anything close to that amount.
We all know that a lot of candidates do not spend close to their amount.
To understand what happened next, I will take the case of one Ontario Conservative candidate. Her campaign had not spent anything near the allowable $80,000 limit for the riding. The party sent her campaign $29,999 on the strict condition her campaign immediately transfer the same amount of money back to the national party. In return, the party issued an invoice showing her campaign had just bought local advertising worth $29,999. The party used the money to continue its mostly national advertising blitz, while the local candidate later got to claim a 60% rebate on her expenses from the government. In her case, that meant a cheque for $18,000 from taxpayers for local advertising that never happened.
This was achieved by sending the money to the riding, having the candidate or duly appointed officer sign off on the receipt of the money and then immediately send the money back to the national campaign. By doing this, the Conservatives were able to exceed the legally mandated spending ceiling under the Elections Canada Act in their attempt to buy the election. However, even worse, through that they were able to fill the coffers of some of the local riding associations with funds being returned for expenses at the local level that never happened. There is no question about it. The fact is that this is plainly illegal. It is election fraud, short and simple. The Conservative Party has been up to election fraud.
What do the Conservatives do now? As they usually do, they try to change the subject. They organize a public relations campaign claiming that this was an administrative error, an accounting error, and nothing more. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is no accounting error. This is no administrative error. This is electoral fraud. All we need to do is walk down that hall and we will see two of the people who have been rewarded for coming up with this scheme and have been able to buy that national advertising during the last week of the campaign. We will find down that hall two senators who were involved in this scheme. We will find two others at the senior levels of the Conservative Party who were involved in this scheme of electoral fraud.
For the Prime Minister to stand and talk about law and order, it is not about laws for everybody else and different laws for him and his party. Everybody should have to respect the Elections Canada Act and that party obviously did not and they have been charged as such.
The Conservatives claimed, as did the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, that the party had every right to send money to local campaigns. It is interesting how he fails to mention that the requirement for the ridings getting the money was that they were obligated to kick it back to the centre. I wonder why? I wonder why the parliamentary secretary forgot to place this part of the transaction on the record in the House that they were obligated to kick it back. That is the catch. It was certainly a scheme that was cooked up by the party in order to raise money for its election campaign.
We need to bear in mind that the Prime Minister, long before he was elected, attempted to challenge the manner in which campaigns had been financed. He has never been one who has accepted the rules that the rest of the country live by. As president of the NCC, he found himself on the wrong side of a Supreme Court ruling which found against his efforts to undermine our election financing laws.
It is apparent that we have a Prime Minister who believes that if he does not consider the laws legitimate he can ignore them. However, he and the party are devious enough to attempt to hide it. There is a lack of moral courage at the very core of that party, not to mention integrity.
Let us consider for a moment two things. The first is that the Conservatives have, by practising this fraud, bought themselves an election. The Federal Court of Appeal has ruled unanimously with three judges against the government and its lunatic scheme that this is an administrative matter.
In closing, I will make on last point. The Chief Electoral Officer, the Commissioner of Elections, the director of Public Prosecutions and an entire three judge panel of the Federal Court of Appeal have now taken action against the Conservatives in this election fraud.
It is time for the Government of Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada, to own up to the wrong it has done, to stop playing Pro games here and to kick out those two senators down the hall, fire those two Conservatives and let us get on with integrity and honesty in this place.