Opposition eager to grill Tories on campaign financing scheme

And, despite Prime Minister Stephen Harper's recent warning about "Kangaroo court" committee inquiries in the Commons, Liberal MP Dominic LeBlanc says the opposition is prepared to go as far as it can in questioning the Tories over $1.3 million in questionable advertising expenses from the 2006 election.

LeBlanc noted Harper didn't object when one of his opposition Conservative MPs chaired another Commons committee during a highly charged inquiry into the sponsorship scandal under a Liberal government.

"When the chief kangaroo was the chair of the public accounts committee then, they didn't mind going to the zoo," said LeBlanc.

The list of witnesses include 31 who were issued summonses to appear after the Liberal chair of the ethics committee, Paul Szabo, was informed by committee officials they were either not responding to invitations to testify or had signalled they would not come without a summons.

Among the witnesses are Doug Finley, Harper's hand-picked national campaign manager, Patrick Muttart, a key campaign strategist and one of Harper's closest aides, and Irving Gerstein, a prominent Toronto businessman who chairs the party's fundraising arm that also acts as its financial agent.

Below them on the witness list is a string of Conservative campaign agents, organizers and defeated candidates who took part at the grassroots level in what Elections Canada has alleged was a scheme allowing the party to exceed its national campaign spending limit by $1.1 million.

The plan is also alleged to have allowed candidates who had no hope of winning, or even of collecting enough money to reach their own local campaign spending limits, to claim reimbursements from Elections Canada for advertising expenses the election agency says should have been assigned to the party's national campaign.

The scheme involved thousands of dollars in cash transfers from Conservative headquarters to candidates. The money was earmarked to pay for radio and television ads that had been produced for the party's national campaign and then broadcast regionally, ostensibly as part of the individual candidates' campaigns.

But agents for the candidates first had to fax signed bank wire-transfer agreements to headquarters, guaranteeing the party could initiate withdrawal payments for the ads from the candidates' campaign bank accounts, according to documents filed in a Federal Court case over the affair.

The Elections Canada allegations that the party skirted its lawful spending limit are contained in a 68-page affidavit that the assistant chief investigator for the federal elections commissioner signed last April to obtain a search warrant allowing Elections Canada to seize thousands of documents and computer storage systems from Conservative headquarters in Ottawa.

That investigation continues under elections commissioner William Corbett, a retired Crown prosecutor who was named to his Elections Canada post by former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, are in the final stages of a Federal Court civil lawsuit against current chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand, attempting to force him to reimburse 67 candidates for the radio and television advertising that Mayrand says should actually be logged in the party's campaign books.

Witnesses at the ethics committee this week will include a campaign agent in Vancouver whose comments first alerted Elections Canada to the possibility something was awry. The agent, Denny Paktakhan, told an Elections Canada auditor he believed $29,999 the campaign paid to party headquarters "contributed to TV national advertising".

"There was no way we can spend our limit so we were asked by the party if we can help contribute," Elections Canada documents quote Paktakhan as saying.

Another witness will be Sam Goldstein, the Conservative candidate in a futile campaign in the Toronto riding of Trinity Spadina. Gold stein refused to talk to Elections Canada investigators in September 2007, according to the Elections Canada affidavit.

But the previous month, he told a news reporter the $49,999 his campaign paid to the party for television advertising was not for his campaign. "It's national advertising is what it is," he said. He also said he believed the plan was intended to allow candidates to increase the amount they could be reimbursed for their campaign expenses.

The opposition majority on the ethics committee launched the inquiry on grounds that the panel has jurisdiction to review the conduct of 17 Conservatives who took part in the advertising transactions, won their election to the Commons and went on to become cabinet ministers and parliamentary secretaries.