At the time of the "raid" on Conservative headquarters by Elections Canada, I brought up the question of exactly how the man who led the RCMP and collected the evidence, Elections Canada Chief Investigator Andre Thouin, was employed.

Even though it was revealed after that Andre Thouin had been a contractor, the fact is that his contract had long since run out.  No new contract was disclosed by Elections Canada, but then the data only went as far as December 2007.

The same went for Raymond Lamothe, the other Elections Canada investigator who prepared and signed an application for a search warrant on April 9, 2008.  No current contract for him, either.

Well, the new data just became available, and I'm still unable to nail down just when these two investigators came to be employed by Elections Canada.  The data now runs to the end of March 2007.

This is one of those things that should be easy to confirm.

Just what is the relationship between Elections Canada and the chief investigators Andre Thouin and Raymond Lamothe?

We know that in October 2005, they were both hired as contractors, covering a period from 2005-10-03 to 2007-03-31, and each was paid $115,132.  According to the Elections Canada disclosure, those contracts ended at the end of March 2007.

I've gone through all the data posted by Elections Canada since then, and no new contracts are listed for either Thouin or Lamothe.  Maybe they are now contracted through a firm, but I went the data covering the period when the contracts would have been renewed or renegotiated, and I didn't see any of the right size for one or both investigators.  Any large contracts seemed to be for computer equipment and such.

The data was updated today.  I know because I check daily.  The contract disclosures come up to the end of March 2008 -- one year after the first contracts come to an end and two weeks before the raid.

Still I can't find Andre Thouin or Raymond Lamothe listed as contractors, or any obvious firm (T&L Investigations, for example) whose contract size compares to the original contract size for these two.

For example, I found a P and S Investigations, but that contract overlapped Lamothe's and Thouin's and ended at exactly the same date.  It might be that both Thouin and Lamothe now work for BMCI Investigations, who had a $15,000 contract from May 2007 to March 2008, but I didn't think BMCI contracted out their investigators.  In any case, the contract runs short and seems to be for far too little money to cover two full time investigators.

The government employee database GEDS still does not list Andre Thouin and Raymond Lamothe as permanent government employees. 

It should be straightforward to figure out how Andre Thouin and Raymond Lamothe, who were the chief investigators in Elections Canada's review of the so-called In-and-Out Scandal, were actually employed by Elections Canada.

On April 9, Raymond Lamothe swore out the search warrant.  That's a mere nine days after the last disclosed contract data ends.  I suppose it is possible that if Raymond Lamothe was not formally an employee, he could have be contracted out, then rushed through the preparation of hundreds of pages of material, then got in a car to drive from Ottawa to Toronto to have a Toronto judge sign the warrant.  The warrant was actually served on April 15, with Andre Thouin leading the way, given Elections Canada an extra six days to get his contract in place.

Nah, that just sounds stupid.

And it doesn't cover all the time Thouin and Lamothe spent interviewing people connected to Conservative advertising, representing themselves as Elections Canada investigators.

I'm sure these guys don't work for free.  I'm certain they were being paid, and that there was a legally sound relationship between these investigators and Elections Canada such that they could conduct investigations, swear out search warrants, and then collect evidence in a proper manner.

I just can't find a hint of how that relationship was established after their first contracts ended in March 2007.  The newest set of released data doesn't help.