Tories' scurrilous attacks on election boss are ludicrous The Gazette (Montreal) Fri 18 Jul 2008

The Conservative Party of Canada, starting with its leader the prime minister, should find the decency to knock off their scurrilous assault on the integrity of Elections Canada and its commissioner, Marc Mayrand.

The agency, whose mandate is to oversee the conduct of federal elections, holds that it has discovered persuasive evidence that the Conservatives - the party, not the government - fiddled the accounting of their spending in the 2006 election campaign that brought them to power.

This involved what was essentially an internal kickback scheme, it is alleged. The way it apparently worked was that party headquarters would give money to some Conservative candidates, ostensibly for local advertising, but the candidates would immediately send the amount back to headquarters, which then used it for national or regional ads. According to Elections Canada's accounting, the Conservatives overspent their legal campaign-expenditure limit by $1.3 million in this way.

Conservative spinners have maintained, successfully so far, that the party did nothing wrong, and indeed that other parties have done the same sort of thing. But when Elections Canada stood by its conclusion, and when no evidence of similar hanky-panky by others was forthcoming, the Conservative attack dogs turned on Mayrand and his agency, claiming that they were out to smear the party. As one of them put it this week, the agency is "totally preoccupied" with generating bad press for the Conservatives.

This is patently ludicrous. We've said before and still believe that the whole field of campaign spending laws is a mess - such laws are arbitrary, almost impossible to enforce, stifle free speech and lead not to a "level playing field" but to endless accounting trickery.

But the law is the law. The Conservatives ran in 2006 as the squeaky-clean party, fulsomely decrying Liberal malfeasance.

If the Conservatives did, indeed, play by the rules, they should make their case by sticking to the facts of the matter. Instead they are resorting to the classic scoundrel's defence: Impute motives to others, deny everything and make wild accusations.