MPS LAUNCH FORMAL COMPLAINT OVER CONSERVATIVE FLYERS

Rules Forbid Using Free Postage To Send Out Campaign Material

Flyers sent out by the federal Conservative party last week violate
rules that forbid members of Parliament from using their free postage
privileges to send out campaign material, opposition MPs say.

People in east Vancouver, Richmond, Port Alberni and across the
country were blitzed last week with pamphlets touting the Tories'
tough-on-crime approach to illegal drugs.

According to rules distributed to every MP by the office of the
Speaker of the House, such flyers may not contain "provincial,
municipal or local election campaign material." Nor can the flyers
request "re-election support."

But the Conservative flyer includes a depiction of an election ballot
with the names of four federal party leaders and an arrow pointing to
Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The question above the ballot reads
"Who do you think is on the right track on crime?" The flyer asks the
recipient to fill out the ballot and mail it back to the House of
Commons, again free of charge.

NDP ethics critic Pat Martin has lodged a formal complaint with the
Office of the Speaker after reviewing the drug-crime flyer for The
Vancouver Sun.

"That is way over the line," Martin said, adding that the New
Democrats have never depicted a ballot in MP mail-outs. "The
Conservatives are really thumbing their nose at the rules."

MPs are allowed to use franking -- free postage -- to send out four
householder flyers each year to their constituents. They are
additionally allowed to send out a number of flyers up to a maximum
of 10 per cent of the number of households in their constituencies,
so-called "10-percenters."

Most MPs would be allowed to send 4,000 to 5,000 10-percenters under the rules.

The 10-per-cent flyers have been historically used by opposition MPs
to promote their parties' policies and agendas, but were not often
used by governing parties that had large majorities in the House and
large advertising budgets, according to Ted McWhinney, a former
Liberal MP and constitutional law professor.

In recent years all the parties assumed some control over the content
and distribution of 10-percenters by having MPs pool their
10-percenter franking privileges once a month to send out large-scale
mailings outside the MPs' constituencies.

McWhinney calls that practice a by-product of the "increasingly
imperial nature of the prime minister's office." The parties have
taken so much control over the message that MPs deliver to their
constituents that it renders them "ineffectual," he said.

"When Canadians realize that communications from their MPs are really
just junk mail they will simply throw them away," warned McWhinney,
who wrote all of his 10-percenters personally during his two terms as
MP for Vancouver Quadra.

Liberal MP Mark Holland has also launched a complaint about the
flyers, claiming they are too partisan. "The Conservative Party is
using taxpayers' money to fund the printing and mailing of electoral
material," said Holland in a release.

But complaints about partisan content may not go far, according to
Colette Dery, a spokeswoman in the Office of the Speaker. "It is
expected that the content will be partisan," she said. "What it can't
be is a solicitation for a membership in a party or for fundraising
or for re-election."

The Conservative drug-crime flyer was distributed across the country,
according to Conservative party spokesman Ryan Sparrow. He did not
know how many of the flyers were printed. "Everything that goes out
from the House of Commons goes through House of Commons Printing
Services," Sparrow said. "They would not print anything that violated
the rules."