Ottawa, August 19, 2010
Marc Mayrand
Chief Electoral Officer
257 Slater Street
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0M6
Dear Mr. Mayrand:
A media report recently revealed that the Conservative Party of Canada is allegedly soliciting political donations from the Prime Minister’s Office. Whether the calls were coming directly from the PMO or from Conservative Party headquarters, an investigation is required to get to the bottom of these allegations.
Section 92.1 of the Elections Canada Act requires that a donation in-kind to be declared to Elections Canada whenever an organization allows a political party to use its facilities to raise funds. If the calls were coming from PMO and no such donation in-kind was declared, this is in violation of the Act. If the calls came from Conservative Party headquarters, this means Conservative Party employees were falsely identifying themselves as working for the PMO. This constitutes fraud, which is a criminal offence. It is akin to shifty telemarketers seeking to trick Canadians out of their hard-earned money.
Further, we have received allegations the Conservatives have been calling people, claiming to be from an “Elections Centre” in an attempt to extract voter information. We believe this could be the Conservative Party’s attempt to make callers think they are getting calls from Elections Canada itself, and is also fraudulent.
We are asking your office to look into whether or not the Conservative Party is deliberately misrepresenting itself as either PMO or an “Elections Centre” in order to solicit donations and/or voter information.
We ask that you obtain the phone scripts from the Party, determine how much money was made using this technique, and have the funds returned if, as it appears, the Office of the Prime Minister was used – either in a physical capacity or in name only – to raise funds for the Conservative Party.
If your investigation shows this to be the case, we ask that you seek to charge the Conservatives the cost of using the PMO as an in-kind donation.
The allegations in the media have clearly raised many questions which, if left unanswered, threaten to undermine not only the integrity of the Prime Minister’s Office but of Elections Canada. I am requesting that you conduct a thorough investigation of these allegations so that Canadians can know the truth and so that voters can continue to have confidence in Elections Canada and the political process.
I thank you in advance for your consideration of this very serious matter.
Sincerely,
The Honourable Marlene Jennings, P.C., M.P.
Deputy House Leader for the Official Opposition and
Liberal Critic for Government Ethics and Democratic Reform
