Pierre Poilievre is the Conservative MP taking point on the whole in-and-out business.  Yesterday, he put the concern that Elections Canada investigators did not follow the rules that govern its investigators on the table:

Mr. Pierre Poilievre (Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board, CPC):

    Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister referred in his remarks to Elections Canada's failure to follow its own rules.

     I have here chapter 7 of the Elections Canada Investigators' Manual. Subsection 7.5, “Right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure”, refers readers to look at subsection 6.4 of chapter 8, which reads as follows:

It is the suspect's prerogative to refuse to produce or remit documents. In such cases, Investigators must advise the suspect that they accept the decision and record the matter accordingly in the statement report. They should also advise the suspect that the matter will be reported to the Commissioner who may consider requesting a court order...

    I have been in contact with the Conservative Party lawyers, who have indicated to me that they had no such advice in the lead-up to the Elections Canada visit to the Conservative Party headquarters.

    These are the rules that Elections Canada's investigators are obliged to follow before they take such a dramatic step of moving into a party's headquarters with other parties in tow with cameras. Elections Canada is obliged to follow these rules and unless it can produce evidence that it gave any sort of advice that it had been refused documents, then it has broken its own rules and then we have to ask whether or not it can interpret rules for other political parties.

    Mr. Speaker, I conclude by telling you that I have here this entire document, which I will table forthwith. This is the Investigators' Manual from which I have extracted the rules that appear to have been broken by Elections Canada. If Elections Canada cannot prove that it offered advice to the Conservative Party that it was in search of these documents, if it cannot prove that it had provided advance notice that it was going to report to the commissioner, who may consider requesting a court order, if Elections Canada cannot show that it has done those things, then it is in a very critical and very serious breach of its own rules.

    I conclude by saying if Elections Canada wants to interpret the rules as they relate to other political parties, it should start by following its own.

I suppose to that Pierre Poilievre discussed the issue with the Conservative Party lawyers and that, in their opinion, the question of the process described in the manual is a relevant one.

It is interesting to note that Pierre Poilievre states that Elections Canada investigators are "obliged" to follow this process.  I wonder if this is a debating point or an actual legal interpretation of the importance of the manual.

Government House Leader Peter Van Loan brought up the question of the manual on Mike Duffy Live last night.

It looks like the issue of the Elections Canada Investigators' Manual is being incorporated into the Conservative position in this debate.

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