OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – A Canadian Liberal MP was given a fine for falsifying campaign expenses even though years ago a Conservative MP who did the same thing was jailed for it.
Last week, the Commissioner of Elections for Canada issued a $600 fine to Nova Scotia Liberal MP Jaime Battiste for elections law violations.
According to the commissioner, a “mitigating factor was applied” because Battiste “cooperated with the Commissioner, including in particular by providing relevant evidence in support of the investigation.”
“The Commissioner also applied a second mitigating factor by considering the personal circumstances in Jaime Battiste’s life.” However, no details were provided.
Battiste is not a backbencher MP; he serves as the parliamentary secretary for Crown-Indigenous relations. He also ran for the leadership of the party.
His offenses are not from the most recent election but from the 2019 federal election, when he was cited for four breaches of the Elections Act.
The commissioner wrote that after an investigation it was determined the “declaration signed by Jaimie Battiste contained false and misleading information since the return inaccurately represented the expenses incurred and the monetary contributions received by the campaign.”
The commissioner noted that Battiste “signed a declaration he knew or ought reasonably to have known to be false.”
Also, evidence shows that Battiste made a $4,051 contribution to his own campaign that was deemed illegal.
Dean Del Mastro was the Conservative MP who was jailed for 30 days for a similar offense years ago. The commissioner said that because “each case is different, it wouldn’t be appropriate to draw parallels between the two sets of circumstances.”
Del Mastro noted that his jail term was hellish in scope, recounting that in 2019 he experienced the “craziest place on earth,” adding, “People scream all night. My cell had been graffitied inside with Satanic propaganda. All the walls, the ceiling, was like being inside the mind of a crazy person.”
“That’s what I got. I’m the bad guy,” he said.
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party from 2015 to 2025, was involved in multiple scandals such as the SNC Lavalin affair and enacting draconian COVID mandates. Less than four years ago, Trudeau was found to have broken the federal ethics laws, or Section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act. His successor, Mark Carney, is facing an investigation as well.
Recently, as reported by LifeSiteNews, MPs voted to launch an ethics investigation of Carney to look into whether or not there is a conflict of interest because of his personal “corporate and shareholding interests” while serving as the nation’s leader.
