The Conservative Party is expected to once again delay court hearings on Wednesday into Elections Canada’s charges that four top Conservative officers approved or masterminded a scheme to divert $2-million in advertising expenses for the 2006 election campaign.
PARLIAMENT HILL—The Conservative Party is expected to once again delay court hearings on Wednesday into Elections Canada’s charges that four top Conservative officers approved or masterminded a scheme to divert $2-million in advertising expenses for the 2006 election campaign.
A lawyer acting for the four Conservatives, including Toronto Senator Irving Gerstein, head of the party’s fundraising arm, and Ontario Senator Doug Finley, the director of the national election campaign, has so far twice asked for delays since the charges were laid last February under the Canada Elections Act, following an investigation of nearly three years.
A spokesman for the federal Public Prosecution Service of Canada declined to comment on the case, but indicated in an interview with The Hill Timeson Tuesday that another postponement is expected, following one last March and another in June, when the legal team acting for the Conservatives asked for a three-month delay to examine more than 27,000 pages of evidence documents.
The latest development in the Conservative case, in which Elections Canada claims the advertising scheme allowed the party to exceed its spending limit for the 2006 election by just more than $1-million, comes in the midst of a government attack against the NDP in Parliament over Conservative allegations the New Democrats contravened financial-control provisions of the Elections Act last June.
The Conservative Party originally claimed, in a letter to Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand last September that the NDP might have violated the act by accepting paid sponsorships from trade union affiliates at its June national convention in Vancouver.
But Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro (Peterborough, Ont.), Parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, notched the controversy up Tuesday when he stated, in front of Mr. Mayrand at a meeting of the Commons Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee, that “the NDP had in fact received tens of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions.”
Mr. Del Mastro, in one of several exchanges with NDP MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.), said Mr. Angus was present at the convention and would have been aware of the advertising and sponsorships “unless he was willfully negligent.”
The NDP claims the Conservative Party, which had not complained to Elections Canada about union sponsorships and advertising at the previous three New Democrat national conventions, filed the complaint with Elections Canada September, and forced hearings into their charges at the House Ethics Committee, to divert attention away from the court date that was approaching in its own Elections Act charges.
“They’ve got a real problem,” Mr. Angus told The Hill Times following the committee hearing Wednesday. “They’re going to have to get their day in court sooner or later, so the longer they drag it out, the more they hope people are going to forget. That’s why they’re looking at a channel-changing strategy.”
Mr. Mayrand, however, disclosed that Elections Commissioner William Corbett, responsible for investigating allegations of electoral and finance violations, is also “looking into” union sponsorships at the NDP’s 2009 convention.
Some of Mr. Mayrand’s statements at the committee, even though he declined to comment on the Conservative allegations or the current investigation, suggested that the question of outside advertising at a political convention may be problematic.
Conservative MP Colin Mayes (Okanagan-Shuswap, B.C.) zeroed in on the question of fair-market value for the union advertising signs, and questioned whether the size of the convention rated the fees that were paid.
He questioned whether “if you open that door, you’re just going to end up with huge corporations and unions that are going to take advantage of this and knowing that they are going to be seen as influencing a particular party, that to me is undue influence, would you agree?”
“I don’t disagree,” Mr. Mayrand replied. “Parliament may want to consider prohibiting advertising and sponsorship altogether at party conventions.”
Mr. Angus questioned the government’s decision to use its parliamentary majority to attack the official opposition, and also the CBC in a separate series of hearings at the same committee, in a committee that is one of three opposition-chaired committees intended to maintain oversight over the government.
"Dragging CBC through this ethics committee when we have a whack of government issues, next you'll see them going after unions, and this is a disturbing thing, there's governments all over the world that use majority power to attack the opposition, but parliamentary systems aren’t one of those forms of government.”
The Conservative allegation centres on whether or not Elections Canada will view at least $85,000 worth of “advertising packages” in which several unions, including the Public Service Alliance of Canada, paid the NDP in return for convention signs that recognized them as sponsors for convention events.
Advertising by unions or businesses at a federal political party convention is allowed under the act, Elections Canada says, as long as the transaction is conducted at a “fair market value.”
Union and corporate financial contributions to federal parties have been prohibited since 2004, and if the fair market value is found to be less than the amount the unions paid, it would be a political contribution and have to be refunded.
The Conservative Party charges, laid also against the party’s former director, Mike Donison, and its former chief financial officer, Susan Kehoe, stem from a cash-transfer scheme the party used to have 67 individual campaigns pay for $2-million worth of TV ads that were produced for the party’s national campaign. The party argues they were designed regional media buys, and benefited the candidates in the regions they were televised.
Questions about corporate hospitality suites that accompanied the Conservative national convention in Ottawa last June came up in a news scrum after the committee meeting, but Mr. Del Mastro declined to respond, saying he did not attend them.
Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey told The Hill Times that he could not say how many hospitality suites there were near the convention at the Ottawa Convention Centre because the party did not keep track of them.
“We do not track or record the number of hospitality suites as they were not set up or sanctioned by the Conservative Party,” Mr. DeLorey emailed. “These were independent suites that took place at the same time as the convention, these were not Conservative Party events.”
Mr. Angus expressed surprise that the Conservative party was unaware of the identity and nature of companies offering hospitality for MPs, Senators and party members.
Origin
Source: Hill Times
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