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The Halifax Daily News adds to the list of Con candidates implicated in Conadscam. And even one of the Con reps interviewed for the article (who still seems to support both the party and the scheme) seems to be admitting facts which confirm the scandal:

The Liberals are accusing the federal Conservatives of laundering more than $20,000 through three metro Halifax ridings during last year's election. It's part of a tactic involving 68 constituencies that's under investigation by Canada's elections commissioner...

The campaign manager for Halifax Conservative candidate Andrew House said the federal party suggested the deal to that riding association.

"What the federal party did was it said, 'Look, it will benefit them through controlling the advertising, but it will also benefit the local association because you can maximize the spending,'" Jordi Morgan said yesterday.

"From our understanding of the legislation, it was totally straight up and there was nothing that was seen as underhanded or any of that."

The House campaign got a cheque for $4,733.48 from the Conservative Fund of Canada on Jan. 12, 2006. It transferred $4,736.48 back to the party's national fundraiser Jan. 23.

Rakesh Khosla's campaign in Halifax West shuffled $11,841.20 with the national party.

Official agent Jim Melvin could not be reached yesterday.

Robert Campbell's Dartmouth-Cole Harbour riding association exchanged $3,947.07.

To my recollection, Morgan is the first riding official to state flat-out that the sole purpose of the transactions from a riding perspective was to boost spending in order to be able to claim a greater reimbursement. And that admission looks to be a huge one, as the lack of any candidate-level interest in the ads themselves says plenty about who was intended to benefit from the actual advertising (not to mention who was "controlling" the scheme).

We'll see how many more stories come out in the next little while highlighting the local candidates caught up in the Cons' national scandal. But there's no reason to think the list will be exhausted anytime soon...and the Cons may soon find that the rightful negative publicity from their attempt to circumvent election spending limits will far outweigh the effect of the ads themselves.