Not only are the opposition parties lining up for that potential throne speech defeat, but there's also a chance that when the vote takes place on Oct. 18, the Conservatives may be short 17 MPs, thanks to an ongoing dispute with Elections Canada over advertising expenses in the last campaign. Harper has already had several public spats with Elections Canada on a variety of fronts, but having more than 10 per cent of his caucus stripped of voting rights would take that feud to a whole new level. He would be left with only 109 Tory votes in the Commons, which currently has 304 members, meaning he'd need the Liberals, with 96 seats, or the Bloc Québécois, with 49 seats, to guarantee passage of the throne speech. The NDP, with 30 seats, would not be enough. There are four Commons vacancies. Federal Liberals from Quebec, meanwhile, are holding an emergency caucus meeting in Montreal today, in part to struggle with how to emerge from this month's dismal showings in three by-elections while possibly having to plunge immediately into a general election.
Harper's comments yesterday appeared to indicate that he's reconciled to a tough fight to even hang on to his minority. Or they could be a roundabout form of reassurance for those voters who worry about giving any leader a majority. Liberals believe Harper may be turning his attention to the next election because Conservatives are anxious about the attention on how they conducted the last one.
Elections Canada is alleging that 67 Conservative candidates participated in a scheme in which local riding associations helped pay for national campaign advertising. The national and local campaigns have different spending limits, and, in Federal Court documents filed for a case initiated by Tory candidates seeking expense reimbursement, Elections Canada is alleging that the Conservatives may have gone more than $1 million over their $18 million legal limit by thrusting some costs to the local ridings. Elections Canada has the legal authority to remove an MP's voting rights in the Commons if he or she fails to comply with demands for more information or corrections on their campaign-expense returns. Le Devoir reported yesterday that Elections Canada has raised the possibility of removing voting rights in its case against the Conservatives, but the independent agency said yesterday it would not have anything to say until today. If Elections Canada did exercise that power in this dispute, however, it would mean that as many as 17 MPs – including Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier, Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon and Heritage Minister Josée Verner, as well as chief party whip Jay Hill – would all be ineligible to vote on the throne speech. This has almost happened before. Don Valley West MP John Godfrey, when he was a Liberal minister, had to scramble to get documents to Elections Canada so he could vote in a cliff-hanging confidence vote in the Commons in the spring of 2005.
The Tories insist their ad-financing scheme was legal. In his new book, former Conservative campaign chief Tom Flanagan boasts of how the party plays with the limits by moving money between the central and local campaigns. "Even though there is a cap on national campaign spending, it is easy and legal to exceed it by transferring expenditures to local campaigns that are not able to spend up to their own legal limits," he writes. The Tories shut down a Commons committee that tried to look into the controversy this month. "We do not respond to false allegations from the Liberal party," spokesperson Ryan Sparrow said yesterday.
The other MPs are: Quebec MPs Sylvie Boucher, Daniel Petit, Steven Blaney, Jacques Gourde, Luc Harvey, and Christian Paradis; B.C. MPs Ron Cannan, Dick Harris, Jim Abbott and Colin Mayes; Ontario MP Patricia Davidson; and Saskatchewan MP David Anderson.
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