Election Expenses  Mr. Speaker, the leader of the Bloc is the father of in and out. He came up with this term as a way of explaining to Bloc candidates the need to take part in such a scheme to boost their Elections Canada rebates. In the last election, the Bloc transferred more than $700,000 to its local candidates and then sent them invoices totalling more than $800,000.

Election Expenses  Mr. Speaker, the Bloc candidates were not allowed to refuse because the leader of the Bloc forced them to participate in his in and out scheme. In May 2004, the Bloc sent $17,000 in invoices to the candidate for Québec, who is a now a member. A few weeks later, the hon. member for Québec sent a cheque to the Bloc for those invoices.

House debate  Mr. Speaker, if that is the case then I do not know why the member would vote against a motion to have an investigation into the books of the Liberal Party. Perhaps it is because of a letter that the Conservative Party has been able to get from Elections Canada, in which the director general of the Liberal Party of Canada in Alberta wrote local campaigns saying, “During the past election campaign, the Liberal Party of Canada in Alberta transferred funds and/or paid for services in kind directly to the candidate...”.

House debate  Mr. Speaker, the member will be quick to add in her supplementary that her party engages in the same so-called in and out techniques of which she accuses this party on the government side. That is why she put forward a motion at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs meeting on November 13, 2007.

Elections Canada  Mr. Speaker, to that end, I would like to support the case made in the House of Commons by tabling, in both official languages, Elections Canada's handbook for candidates, the version that was written in 2005, and the version that was subsequently altered by Elections Canada in 2007 after this recent dispute with the Conservative Party came to light.

Elections Canada  Mr. Speaker, I mentioned earlier in the House of Commons today that Elections Canada has attempted to change the rules around what qualifies for a local advertisement. I quoted the old rules that were contained in the 2005 “Election Handbook for Candidates, Their Official Agents and Auditors”, which I concluded--and I would like to table--

Elections Canada  Mr. Speaker, the 2005 election handbook for candidates states: Election advertising means the transmission to the public by any means during an election period of an advertising message that promotes or opposes a registered party or the election of a candidate.... In other words, local ads can focus on the candidate or the party.

Elections Canada  Mr. Speaker, the member for Beauséjour across the way, along with the New Brunswick Liberals, joined in an advertising transfer scheme in the 2006 election, organized by the national party. A copy of the cheque provided to Elections Canada from the local official agent is made out not to the newspapers in which the ad ran, but rather to the Liberal Party of Canada.

Elections Canada  Mr. Speaker, the advertisement said that the member for Beauséjour and his campaign had locally paid for it. In fact, none of his returns showed that payment had been made. Either it was false advertising and he did not actually pay for the ad that he claimed he had, or he failed to report some of his election expenses to Elections Canada.

Elections Canada  Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister and this entire party have known for many years that it is perfectly legal for parties to transfer money from the national to the local. In fact, we know the Liberal Party did just that, to the tune of $1.5 million. Interestingly, those local campaigns then transferred back about $1.3 million to the national Liberal Party.

Elections Canada  How disappointing, Mr. Speaker. The member has been asked four times to explain his very unusual financial transactions from the last election, during which a group of New Brunswick Liberals got together, organized by the national party, paid for out of the account of the national party, with no interaction between those local candidates and the newspaper in which the advertisement ran.

Election Expenses  Mr. Speaker, the leader of the Bloc is the true father of in and out and that member is the son of in and out. In a December 2003 National Post article, Andrew McIntosh wrote, “Bloc brass then advised all Bloc candidates, organizers and volunteers to use a system called 'La Methode In & Out' to inflate campaign spending to meet targets.”

Election Expenses  Mr. Speaker, it seems ironic that a sovereignist party gets most of its campaigns funded by Canadian taxpayers. According to Elizabeth Thompson, they used the term in and out, “to describe a lucrative arrangement cooked up by the Bloc to take advantage of a loophole in election financing laws to extract the maximum amount of taxpayer-funded refunds from Elections Canada.”

Elections Canada  Mr. Speaker, the woman the hon. member replaced as deputy leader of his party, Anne McLellan, is implicated in the Liberals' own in and out process. This was a scheme in which the Liberal Party headquarters organized the ad, dealt with all the invoices, ran the ad, without apparently even the knowledge of the local official agents, and then it was booked locally so Liberals could pad their taxpayer rebates and stay under their national limit.

Elections Canada  Mr. Speaker, the director general of the Liberal Party of Canada in Alberta wrote local Liberal campaigns saying, “During the past election campaign, the Liberal Party of Canada in Alberta transferred funds and/or paid for services in kind directly to the candidate...”. This included an ad in the Edmonton Journal.