Drama, Drama!

This thing is serious. In an unprecedented move, senior Conservative Party officials staged a secret meeting on Sunday afternoon with hand-picked reporters to unveil the content of the search warrant that led the RCMP to raid Party headquarters for most of last week. You can watch the drama unfold here.

As everyone expected, the warrant alleged that the Conservative Party used an elaborate accounting scheme known as the “in and out method” to exceed the national election spending limit by over a million dollars. These allegations have actually been around for a long time, but their level of complexity prevented them from having much of an impact of the government’s numbers.

What Elections Canada is now claiming though, is far more damaging: apparently, the Party would have deliberately filed “false and misleading statements” on its financial returns.

It’s going to be very interesting to watch this issue develop over the next week. It may be a disaster for the Conservatives, or it may just disappear off the radar, but the fact that Elections Canada and the RCMP are involved leads me to suspect that it will stick around for some time yet.

We’ll have to wait until Monday afternoon at the earliest before the full set of documents pertaining to the search warrant are unveiled. The Tories can count themselves lucky that the House isn’t currently sitting, but I can still guarantee that this will be a crazy week.