:
Mr. Chairman, this motion is actually slightly different from the one that came forward in the summer. It has been artfully designed to make it more difficult to amend in order to allow a similar investigation of the Liberal Party and its own activities from either 2006 or 2004.
This, of course, is being done by the Liberals because the Liberals are fully aware that their party engaged in activities of a similar nature, which were perfectly legal, and in addition, in previous election, engaged in blatantly illegal acts, which included envelopes full of cash being given to 21 Quebec ridings in which the Liberal Party engaged in the de facto theft of some $40 million of money from the public purse. They are protected in these actions by the fact that the statute of limitations on these wrongdoings, these virtually criminal wrongdoings, took place for the most part in a period that is beyond the period that the Commissioner of Elections is allowed to investigate under the pre-existing piece of electoral legislation.
Therefore, they want to have one standard apply to others and...not really a lower standard applied to themselves, but indeed, they want to ensure that their own previous completely illegal actions, virtually criminal actions, which amounted to, as I say, theft from the taxpayers of many millions of dollars, be out of any scope of investigation by either the Chief Electoral Office or this House.
So they've designed this motion a little more artfully than they did in the summer to ensure that it's very hard to amend the motion to bring into account previous elections, previous investigations that should have taken place, and so on.
Therefore, the amendment I'm going to propose, Mr. Chairman, seeks instead to remove the unfounded allegations that are woven into the text of this motion and to replace them with less inflammatory language, all without actually changing the substance of the motion, which of course would not be in order.
I propose, Mr. Chairman, to remove the assertion that is made in the motion of an actual finding. It says in the motion that, “Elections Canada has refused to reimburse Conservative candidates for illegitimate election campaign expenses”. Of course, these are election campaign expenses that are alleged to be illegitimate.
Again, the word “illegitimate” is used very artfully. I suspect Mr. Kevin Bosch, who is sitting in the audience today, may have had a hand in this. Kevin can usually be relied upon to be involved in nefarious deeds when the Liberals are at work.
For example, Kevin appears to have been involved in--
I'm on debate, and what I'm debating is the substance of the motion before us. If the complaint and the request for discussion is for a discussion as to whether or not expenses have been made that are within what is permitted under the Canada Elections Act, that's fair. I suspect it would be beyond the scope of this committee, but that's a decision where I shared your opinion, Mr. Chairman, and the majority of the committee members did not.
My concern, of course, is that there is not one but two court proceedings under way on this very subject, where Elections Canada, on the one hand, is asserting that some expenses were made that were beyond the scope of what's permitted under the Canada Elections Act, and on the other hand, the Conservative Party of Canada asserts not only that these are permissible but that indeed they are permissible and reimbursable and Elections Canada is failing in its legal obligations under the Canada Elections Act to reimburse those expenses. I refer specifically to expenses made by riding associations for advertising, which are subject to a 60% reimbursement under the terms of the Canada Elections Act. In not doing so, Elections Canada is not following a legitimate interpretation of the law.
What's important to remember here is these are different interpretations of the Canada Elections Act that have not yet been decided by the courts. Just as the Conservative Party of Canada is not alleging, and would not allege, that Elections Canada is acting illegitimately in so doing, it is also the case that Elections Canada is not asserting that the Conservative Party acted illegitimately. It's certainly not the language that people out there in TV land are supposed to interpret this as meaning, which is illegally or unlawfully. These are legitimate alternative points of view, which are being dealt with through one of our legal tribunals--the courts--to rule on what in fact is the correct interpretation of the Canada Elections Act.
The Liberals are, frankly, short on scandals...no, they're long on scandals, but they're short on finding scandals that somebody else is involved in and are hoping they can turn this committee into a gong show, having failed to make the House of Commons into a gong show, at which their allegations will be picked up and treated seriously by the media. I think that's unfortunate.
In order to prevent that from occurring, Mr. Chairman, I propose that the motion be amended in the following manner. In the second last line of the English version, following the word “for”, the following words be added: “that are alleged not to be in conformity with the expense limits under the Canada Elections Act”.
I should stop here, Mr. Chairman. I should have said after the word “expenses”, that these words would be added in the last line, and that in the second-last line, the word “illegitimate” be removed. So it would now read:
...Elections Canada has refused to reimburse the Conservative candidates for election campaign expenses that are alleged not to be in conformity with the expense limits under the Canada Elections Act.
I can continue with debate later on, but that is the substantial change I'm suggesting.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
To address the amendment directly, Mr. Chairman, we have never alleged that the problem was with the limits. Elections Canada has found—so I don't think we need to use the word “alleged” because it is a finding of Elections Canada—that the expenses were not incurred by the candidates' campaign, but more properly by the national campaign. That is the issue here, Mr. Chairman. It's not whether the limits were too high or too low or whether the expenses were within the campaigns' limits. In fact, we will argue that the expenses exceed the national campaign limit because Elections Canada has rejected them as having been incurred by the local candidate.
Mr. Reid is very clever and very able at trying to sideline an issue, trying to obfuscate or trying to buy some time. We went around the mulberry bush, Mr. Chairman, in September. The issue is that Elections Canada has found that a number of Conservative candidates, some of whom are sitting members, put on their campaign returns expenses that Elections Canada has held to not be acceptable as incurred by a local campaign. Hence, they have rejected them and refused refunds to those campaigns, 60% of which would have come from taxpayers' money. Elections Canada has refused that. The Conservative Party is, in our view, wasting more taxpayers' money by trying to go to court to buy time, arguing that in fact they are entitled to these bogus refunds.
Mr. Chairman, the reason we want to look at this is that a number of Conservative candidates have actually asked and offered to come and explain why they were bullied into this scheme, why they were told that they had to participate.
[Translation]
Mr. Jean Landry, a Conservative candidate from Quebec, has repeatedly stated in the presence of television cameras that he was forced to go along with this scenario. He didn't think that these actions were legitimate and he indicated that he would like an opportunity to come and publicly testify to the fact that he was forced by the Conservative party to go along with this.
Similarly, last week I received a call from another Conservative candidate, Ms. Fortier, who told me that she wanted to testify. She offered to do so. She called my office to say that she was prepared to testify about this rather nebulous situation.
Mr. Chairman, we want to move forward and avoid the Conservatives' tactics which are merely aimed at delaying the proceedings. In our view, Mr. Reid's amendment totally changes the purpose of this exercise. The issue is not expense limits, but rather why Elections Canada formally refused to reimburse Conservative candidates for expenses incurred for local advertising which, in the opinion of Elections Canada, was really national advertising. Unfortunately, if we tally these expenses, we might find that the Conservative Party exceeded the national expense limit by more than one million dollars. That is the issue.
[English]
Mr. Reid is trying to change the issue. It's not about the limits. The issue is a technical one: why Elections Canada believes that 66 Conservative returns...and we believe in fact there are others that Elections Canada should look at, including a Conservative candidate in Guelph, who we saw last night was in fact turfed as a candidate. We believe that campaign also may warrant a review by Elections Canada. And we find it strange that he would simply unceremoniously be dumped as a candidate yesterday, but the Conservative Party can explain why they've moved so far from their grassroots democracy of some years ago.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
:
Mr. Chairman, Ms. Redman just asserted a moment ago that she opposes my proposed amendment because it is factually inaccurate. She didn't actually then go on to point anything out, so I'm assuming that she is not actually referring to some new factual inaccuracy she was going to point to but rather to something that had been pointed out in previous comments. I'm assuming that she's referring back to Mr. LeBlanc's earlier commentary in which he objected to my use of the word “alleged” in the motion, and he went on to use the terms that Elections Canada has “found” the limits were violated, and Elections Canada has “held” . Those are the two words he used.
Of course, “held” and “alleged” are actually synonyms, Mr. Chairman. Perhaps I'll send a thesaurus over to Mr. LeBlanc's office to assist him in these matters for future reference. Certainly regarding the word “found”, I suppose one could argue that findings in law are somewhat different. I would point out therefore to Mr. LeBlanc that Elections Canada is not a court; Elections Canada is an administrative body. It does indeed come up with interpretations of the law. It also stresses in those interpretation bulletins--and members of the committee will recall the fact that I actually drew attention to this point when Mr. Mayrand, our Chief Electoral Officer, was here as a witness before our committee prior to his appointment--that they are not in fact binding. They are their interpretations, which are subject to court review.
Elections Canada itself does not assert that it makes findings. It makes interpretations that are tentative and that it expressly states are tentative. They are sincerely held interpretations. They are interpretations that Mr. Mayrand and the other people who work there believe are the correct interpretation of the law, but they are not themselves an adjudicative body. They are not a judicial body. They are not a quasi-judicial body. They are a body that seeks to enforce the law, look for potential infractions of the Canada Elections Act if it finds them, and then at that point there are a variety of remedies available, but they ultimately involve going to court and settling the matter in court, which is what is going on now. Because they also administer the law in an active way, such as handing out rebates, it is completely legitimate for someone, again, with a genuine, sincere belief to think they have been denied a rebate that they are owed; and they can seek redress, but you have to go to some other body such as a court to do this because that's the way the system is set up.
Mr. LeBlanc would not have us use the court system. He would have us use this body, this committee, as a sort of parallel process that would decide on offences that are not actually under the law. They are under whatever interpretation the Liberals think they can spin of what is legitimate and illegitimate. The court is the court of public opinion. Of course their hope is that they can then control the nature of the hearing so as to ensure that a practice that is carried out by the Conservatives and also by the Liberals is seen as being illegitimate when the Conservatives do it, but there's no opportunity to demonstrate that the Liberals do the same thing by way of example. They also are anxious to make sure that their own prior practices, some of which, as I pointed out, were not merely in violation of the Canada Elections Act but were acts of theft from the Canadian public to the tune of millions of dollars, are also excluded from the investigation.
Actually, Ms. Redman made an interesting point, that we don't want to get involved in the audits. Well, no. Audits, appropriately, have seen someone like our colleague from , who appears to be channelling money in envelopes, to have over-the-limit expenses. Of course that's a Liberal MP, who, according to his own family members, was funnelling envelopes of cash to pay for various over-the-limit expenses.
Mr. Chairman, what's going on here is an attempt in the proposed amendment to remove the language the presupposes guilt and use language that is anodyne, language that simply states in a non-inflammatory way, a non-prejudging or prejudicial way, what the actual factual dispute is about.
It seems to me that this suggestion is vastly superior to the original suggestion. In terms of the point of the original suggestion, let's understand what's going on here. This is a partisan body, where all the votes are taking place on partisan lines, where the speeches are designed for the cameras as opposed to having a finding of fact that's legitimate and valid. What's going on here is an attempt to ensure that we can all leave at the end of this committee hearing with the ability for the Liberals to turn up before the cameras and say, “Oh, look, the committee is investigating the illegitimate actions of one of the parties here. This proves”--because the courts don't count, apparently, in the minds of the Liberals--“that this terrible, illegitimate practice, not illegal but just illegitimate, according to some standard that we have in our pocket and aren't going to share with the public, is taking place. We should all be scandalized and horrified and whatever.”
Mr. Chairman, the suggestions are inaccurate, frankly, but I do get the impression that the Liberal members have made up their minds as to how they're going to vote. On the basis that we're unlikely to get a fair or reasonable hearing even to changing the language in a way that doesn't affect the substance but only removes the presupposition of guilt, and since I think it's clear that we're not going to get a fair hearing even for that minor change, I'm going to withdraw my proposed amendment.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
There are a number of things that Mr. LeBlanc said that I think are factually incorrect, although I won't cast aspersions on him as to why he said them. But I do want to point out his use of excessive language, which I think is the underlying problem here, and this is the reason I proposed this amendment. He used the term “laundromat”, for example. I won't assume his intention. I'll say what I think the practical implications are of using value-laden or hyperbolic language.
Laundromat. Money laundering. I assume that some people out there might get the implication from the overheated rhetoric being tossed around this room by Mr. LeBlanc and others that something of that nature is going on. Let's understand what money laundering is. Money laundering is the activity of going out and creating imaginary activities, such as gambling winnings, in order to hide money that came from some illegal original source, such as buying and selling drugs, by way of example, or something of that nature. This is so far removed from what's going on here that even they aren't actually prepared to say it here, where they're protected by parliamentary privilege and all that sort of thing, because it's outrageous. But in terms of just putting out the rhetoric in the hope that it gets picked up and misunderstood, well, there's no problem doing that, Mr. Chairman.
What is going on is in fact--and when Mr. LeBlanc described it, he had to actually point this out in his remarks--that Elections Canada, which is not an adjudicative body but a body that interprets the act and tends to apply it and then has to, when its interpretation comes into conflict with other interpretations, refer it to a higher authority, provided an interpretation, and as he said, they have referred it to the Commissioner of Canada Elections. They've sent it to a higher authority who has some adjudicative power, although ultimately he too has to go to the courts.
So Elections Canada is not really one step away from actually being an adjudicative body, it's actually two steps away. It doesn't actually conduct legal proceedings before the courts. That's done by the Commissioner of Canada Elections. So here we are with the accusation. Well, it's all over; Elections Canada has made the ruling; let's not wait for those silly courts. I mean, let's get into the serious business of trying to impose some kind of double jeopardy here in this chamber and come up with a court that we hope will spin this issue in the short run as being some kind of horrible thing.
Of course, in the end, the courts will go along and they'll rule. They'll either rule, Mr. Chairman, that the Conservative Party and its various official agents were acting within the terms of the Canada Elections Act by spending money in a way that was legitimate...perhaps not a way that the Liberals had anticipated, or that they had the cash to do themselves in 2006, because in 2006, unlike in 2004, they were short of cash, as Mr. LeBlanc points out.
The thing that is relevant here is that Elections Canada will either have its interpretation upheld or not upheld. If it's not upheld, then they will actually owe money to the Conservative Party of Canada for legitimate expenses incurred by the Conservative Party of Canada. On the other hand, there's always the possibility--although I personally must say, based on a mature examination of the facts, that I think in this case Elections Canada is incorrect--that their interpretation of the law is in fact the one the courts uphold. If the courts do uphold this particular interpretation of the law, then what would happen is that there would be certain limited consequences under the law.
But we're not talking about anything as radical or extreme as what Mr. LeBlanc's words would imply. The word “illegitimate” is inappropriate, and the implications of something much, much deeper and more devious than that are just out of place. The only reason they can get away with saying them here is that this is a body that doesn't have the restraints that exist in the court system, which, Mr. Chairman, is why we don't actually adjudicate cases in the House of Commons or its committees. Indeed, Mr. Chairman, it is why we make a policy of not trying to have findings of fact at all in these bodies. It's simply inappropriate for this purpose. Our goal is to try to work on policy and to make sure that policy is enforced.
Mr. Chairman, I want to mention something else with regard to Elections Canada's interpretation of this. You would think, based on the comments of Mr. LeBlanc and some of the other Liberal members here, that getting an interpretation of the law from Elections Canada is kind of akin in its level of authority to going up Mount Sinai and speaking to the burning bush. You would think that we ought to be treating these interpretations with the same respect that would be shown to Moses as he came down the mountain with the Ten Commandments under his arm. This is the same group of people who were attacking and ridiculing the Chief Electoral Officer for his ruling on veiled voting, his interpretation of the law on veiled voting. So I don't know, is it their position that this is a guy who can't interpret the law at all, who just doesn't understand the law, or is it their position that the Chief Electoral Officer's interpretation of the law is a holy writ, notwithstanding the fact that the law itself says that his interpretation is meant to go through a process--two processes, actually, going to the Commissioner of Elections, who then makes his decision, and then off to the court system--before we get a ruling, because he's fallible.
They want to have their cake and eat it too, of course, and we suspect that they want to have their cake in the 2004 election, and then, when somebody else does the same thing in the 2006 election, say, “Oh, no, that's not legitimate.” This is part of the reason--not the whole reason, but it's certainly part of the reason--why the Liberals absolutely don't want the 2004 election discussed at all. There was a time, Mr. Chairman—I remember this very well, I was in Parliament at the time—when the Liberal Party was awash in cash and everybody else wasn't. They were engaged in actions, some of them completely legal, that were parallel to this action, and some of them, quite frankly, completely illegal. I don't just mean in violation of the Elections Act. I mean in violation of the law, period: the transfer of funds in envelopes--envelopes of cash--to 21 Quebec ridings by the Liberal Party.
Mr. Godin was quite correct when he said it is legitimate to transfer funds to ridings, but it's legitimate to transfer it when you record the amounts and when you keep them under a certain amount and when they are receipted. It is not legitimate to have envelopes stuffed with cash, any more than it was legitimate for all those Liberal operatives to turn up and have those envelopes of cash that the Gomery commission was looking into in that particular Liberal scandal.
To say that Mr. LeBlanc's comments miss the point would be an understatement, Mr. Chairman.
I can think of three good, solid reasons why they don't want to allow this motion to be amended to include their expenses along with our expenses and to examine 2004 plus 2006. They want it focused just on 2006, just on the Conservative Party, but there are four reasons, Mr. Chairman. As far as I can see, they are the following.
One, it would soon become apparent that the Liberals have done the very same thing themselves, which is okay because it's legitimate. But this is a pattern you see with these guys. Do you remember the Rosh Hashanah crisis? That was when it turned out that somebody had received a Rosh Hashanah card from the Prime Minister or from a Conservative MP. Anyway, this was a great scandal, and the member for Thornhill, who is a Liberal, was up. It was a crisis. Where did this come from? What nefarious means were used to get the name of this individual and send them a Rosh Hashanah card? Then it turned out that the very same member had been sending Rosh Hashanah cards to people who had not provided her with any of the information that she found to be so mysterious.
Mr. Chairman, what you see going on is that something that's acceptable when Liberals do it is a scandal when somebody else does it. Then when people notice that actually Liberals were doing it as well as those dastardly Conservatives, suddenly it's not an issue anymore and it just drops right off the agenda, and we just won't discuss it anymore. It's just their way of operating in this Parliament.
In the absence of any actual scandals to point to, they'll invent some, just dig into their own bag, find the acts that they've been engaged in themselves that weren't actually illegal, and then say those other guys are doing these things too. We'll just hope nobody notices we were doing it, and we'll accuse them of doing things that are illegitimate, present it as if “illegitimate” and “illegal” are the same thing, and then we can engage in a parallel system to whatever court proceedings are going on.
I'm sure we could embarrass anybody in this room if we said we're going to have this committee investigate the contents of their sock and underwear drawers. I think if we all had our sock and underwear drawers investigated, we would be equally embarrassed, so let's just focus on one guy's sock and underwear drawer and not on anybody else's and hope we can embarrass him. But the fact is that having unsorted socks in your sock drawer isn't necessarily against the rules. There are a whole bunch of other things that are, but having household messes and whatever are not illegal and they're not illegitimate. This isn't illegal, and this isn't illegitimate, but if we can focus on one particular party's actions, decontextualize them, then we think maybe we'll get some media pick-up. That's reason number one.
Reason number two, that the Liberals want to discuss 2006 and not 2004, is that they were awash in cash themselves in 2004. In 2006 they were short of cash, and things had changed. The Conservative Party, which is much better at raising money, apparently, than the Liberal Party is--at least raising money legally....
I hear one of my opponents commenting on this. I don't think anybody would dispute that the returns we got in just recently, which showed that the Conservative Party had raised about $3 million, as it reported to Elections Canada...was not all raised legally, and that the, I think, $800,000 the Liberals raised was not raised legally. The point is we're getting about four times as much cash as they are. And this is a phenomenon that's been going on for some time.
The Liberals were short of cash. They didn't have the option of doing certain things. So once they can't do something, then it changes from being a legitimate action to an illegitimate action. It's only good when the Liberals can do it. When, over time, circumstances change as well, that crisis, brought on by the fact that nobody wants to give the Liberal Party money because nobody trusts them to govern the country, becomes grounds for the actions of anybody else who is raising money and spending it legally, and it is now seen as an illegitimate action. But to make sure that the embarrassment that occurred when Susan Kadis was shown as having given out Rosh Hashanah cards, after accusing others of being nefarious for doing the same thing, is prevented from happening, we have to word this so that we exclude the period when we ourselves were engaged in these kinds of activities, because we ourselves had more substantial money at our disposal.
That's reason number two of the four reasons.
Reason number three, Mr. Chairman, is that the Liberals are not anxious to go into the past and potentially further into the past. You may recall that when this issue came up in early September, and we were having meetings of this committee at that time, proposals were made to amend a similar Liberal motion to go back further to elections, not just in 2004 but further back--these were the elections in which the envelopes of cash were flying around, these are the ones that are actually beyond the statute of limitations that's written into the Canada Elections Act—and to investigate all of those practices that occurred during the era of the sponsorship scandal, following the 1995 referendum.
We wouldn't want to get into that, Mr. Chairman, would we now, because there were things that were genuinely illegitimate, genuinely illegal, going on, and they were all by the Liberal Party. It wasn't the Bloc; it wasn't the NDP; it wasn't the Conservatives or the predecessor parties of the Conservatives. It was the Liberal Party of Canada in there doing things that are, by anybody's measure, and certainly by the measure of the courts, illegal acts with regard to campaign funding. So they don't want to get that done.
And I stress again, 21 Quebec ridings received envelopes of cash. We don't know which ones, because when former Prime Minister Martin drafted the mandate of the Gomery commission he made sure it had a mandate to investigate only certain aspects of the sponsorship program and not the parts that would have implicated the Liberal Party itself. The Auditor General had drawn attention to a range of different activities, and one of the chapters--I think it was chapter 7 of her report--was specifically excluded from the mandate of the Gomery commission. So Mr. Justice Gomery could look into certain things and just had to halt his mandate at a certain point.
That's a can of worms, Mr. Chairman, that the Liberals really and truly do not want opened again. Thus the need to ensure that it's 2006 and nothing else. We don't want a temporal context there, we don't want a multi-party context; we want decontextualized information. And we also don't want anything that involves those annoying little courts, which actually have to base their findings on what the law says, involved in this either, because our goal here is--
Mr. Joe Preston: To embarrass somebody.
Mr. Scott Reid: Thank you, Mr. Preston.
It's to embarrass somebody. It's not to actually find out what happened; it's simply to sift through that sock drawer, to dig through somebody's old love letters, to go through the contents of their garbage can, and that sort of thing, to take that out of context and see what sticks--just throw mud at the wall and see what sticks.
That brings me to point number four, Mr. Chairman, the four reasons the Liberals don't want to discuss their expenses along with ours, and they don't want to look, as the amendment to their motion suggests, at 2004 as well as 2006, and that is that it would remove their opportunity to set up a de facto double jeopardy here. The concept of double jeopardy and the prohibition on double jeopardy in Canada--and in all civilized countries, I might add--is based on the idea that if an assertion is made that you've done something that is not lawful, not within the bounds of the law, those who are prosecuted are allowed one shot at it, and of course, as you know, there's a proceeding in court.
I should mention, of course, the proceeding in court is the Conservative Party trying to get its money back, and not the reverse.
The Liberals realize there's a very good chance that what's going to happen is that the courts are going to rule in our favour. Well, they don't want that to happen. They can't stop that from happening, thank goodness, or else we'd be debating a motion to stop the courts from looking at this because this committee is so much better suited, in the Liberals' minds, to be dealing with issues like this. But the courts are going to ultimately decide how the law ought to be interpreted, and that's what this really comes down to: how should the law be interpreted? Laws get written sometimes in ways that allow for a variety of legitimate interpretations. Ultimately the courts have to decide which of those interpretations is legitimate.
Look, we on this committee interpreted the Elections Act, the part dealing with identification, differently from how the Chief Electoral Officer did when it came to the issue of veiled voting. I personally think, with appropriate respect, that the Chief Electoral Officer's interpretation was incorrect and ours was correct, but I'm respectful of his interpretation; that is, I think it was given legitimately. All of us are anxious to pass legislation that will deal with the fact that the Chief Electoral Officer has come along and interpreted a law, actually the same law, with regard to the addresses of rural voters, or the absence of addresses that cite a civic address, a physical location, from drivers' licenses and other pieces of ID. Now, this is something where the law was passed without an awareness that this could arise as a problem, and not just from us but from the experts. Mr. Mayrand and his predecessor, Mr. Kingsley, appeared before us, and it hadn't occurred to them either.
Mr. Chairman, I'm using this by way of analogy to point out that there can be multiple interpretations of the same law and that it's legitimate to have differing interpretations. If there were no differing interpretations, and if we all had the same interpretation of the law, there would be no need for courts. We could just have police and no court system. There would be no need to adjudicate disputes, because it would be clear: here's the law; you've broken it or you haven't broken it, and we'll deal with you accordingly, and that will be the end of that. Of course, the odd time there actually is a state that gets run that way, and we know those as police states. We don't do that here, Mr. Chairman; we have a court system. But the Liberals would like to set that aside because there's a very strong risk--
:
Mr. Chair, actually I appreciate Mrs. Redman's observation. You yourself had noticed that I was getting a little too detailed in my analogy and that perhaps the point had been made without the need for me to continue on through multiple examples.
But the point I was driving at is that there are different legitimate interpretations of the law. You'll notice I'm using the word “legitimate” now. Of course this goes back to my concern about the word “illegitimate”. There are legitimate different interpretations of the law, so you know, it makes it inappropriate to use the term “illegitimate”.
I'm bringing all this back to the point I was getting at, which is that there are four reasons why the Liberals are objecting to the examination of both their expenses and ours in both 2004 and 2006. I was on the fourth of those points, which is that there is a process for dealing with these things, and they want to have a discussion that essentially prejudges before the courts have a chance to judge.
Now, in the end, whatever it might happen to be, no matter whether it's in context or out of context, the judgment of this committee is going to be a preliminary finding. Ultimately the courts will rule as to whether the Conservative Party is deserving of those rebates that it is seeking before the courts or whether in fact the Conservative Party's interpretation was not the correct one. And when that happens, everything we've done here will all kind of fade away.
But, Mr. Chairman, I think the concern the Liberals have is that there could be an election in between then and now and they really could use a Conservative scandal, and this one just looks so juicy. The facts may not be on their side, but we can set up a set of hearings in which only some of the facts get presented, in which people will be asked questions.... And Mr. LeBlanc sort of hinted at this in his comments--or he didn't hint, he said specifically--that they will be asked, were you pushed, were people prodding you, were they bullying you? Whatever, these questions are all subjective. They're not questions of law. They're not questions that ask, did somebody illegally force you to do something? Did they tell you to doctor your books, for example? Those would be breaches of the law. No, it's all this sort of soft stuff. But it will make great TV, and with any luck, if we have an election between the time at which we have these hearings and the time at which the courts decide, bang, we're set, we have what has the appearance of being a scandal. If a bit later on the courts rule and it turns out it wasn't a scandal, well, who cares? We did better in the polls because we left the false impression that somebody was engaged in activities that were wrong, because we decontextualized the whole thing.
That's the point, Mr. Chairman. That's the fourth point, and frankly, that's the most important one. They're hoping to engage in a court of star chamber. They're hoping to engage in a McCarthyite witch hunt. It is inappropriate, Mr. Chairman, and that's why we're seeking to amend this to make it more open and to ensure that a context is provided by looking at Liberal financing practices for 2004 and Conservative financing practices in 2004. The Liberals aren't interested, because they think that Tom Flanagan has indicated that this particular financing method wasn't in use in 2004. But we're seeking to open this up, and if they go along with that, Bob's their uncle, we've got our hearings. But I think the hearings won't produce the make-believe scandal they think they can generate, and that's what I'm hoping to see changed.
For that reason, Mr. Chairman, I will be supporting the proposed amendment to the original motion.
Thank you.