Tagged

CanWest has more on the Cons' developing election financing scandal. To start off with, let's note that as usual, the Cons' excuses aren't getting any more plausible with time:

The Conservative Party contends that it has followed the Canada Elections Act and that all advertising paid for by candidates carried "tag lines" indicating they were authorized by the official agents for the candidates.

The distinction is important because candidates are not allowed to claim advertising expenses they do not incur directly.

The latest defence can be easily seen as a poor attempt to distract from the two real issues in play. First, it tries to get around the question of whether the ads were in fact for the benefit of the national campaign or the individual candidate. Indeed, if the Cons did arrange for individual agents' "tag lines" to be placed on advertising which was known to be for the national party's benefit rather than that of the specific candidate, that only strengthens the case against those agents (along with anybody who encouraged the scheme).

Second, there can be no reasonable argument that the individual candidates "incurred directly" expenses which were knowingly paid by the national party. And based on the transfer system which seems to have been applied, that offers another area where the Cons look to be in trouble - no matter what their tag lines did or didn't say.

Meanwhile, today's coverage also notes that in addition to the Cons quoted yesterday who acknowledged that the expenses were national ones, at least a couple of Cons were completely unaware of advertising done in their name:

Elections Canada says auditors conducting routine verifications of election expense reports found that one candidate and the official agent of another candidate had no knowledge of the details of the certain advertising purchases from the party's media buyer.

What seems important about Elections Canada's investigation is the question of who orchestrated and bore ultimate responsibility for the scandal. While agents may bear ultimate responsibility for a candidate's campaign expenses, the fact that candidate campaigns in some cases weren't even aware of the scheme suggests proportionally more responsibility on the part of the national party.

We'll see where the scandal goes from here, as well as who gets swept up in it from the Cons' side. If there's any bad news today for the opposition, it's that the media seems to be framing the issue as "Cons vs Libs" rather than "Cons vs the law" - but if Elections Canada follows up on what it's discovered already, then it may not be long before some high-ranking Cons face the music for their actions.