Article content continued

He’s right. The opposition parties have already been campaigning for some time. Getting the campaign launched officially is fair and even prudent.

If Canadians can tolerate the 11 weeks of ads, debates, polls and media coverage, they may well come out of this election with a more informed vote. And if that is the case, then the fixed election date and long campaign will be fruitful

The problem with the prime minister’s position, however, is that the opposition parties haven’t been the only ones campaigning before the official campaign began. The Tories have made plenty of, ahem, good news announcements aimed at specific voting demographics in recent weeks. Every military barracks and airfield in the country, it seems, just happened to come into a few bucks for renovations over the course of July. Transit projects in big cities have suddenly received firm spending commitments. Parents everywhere were pleased to receive their share of the expanded Universal Child Care Benefit. Many of these taxpayer-funded “government announcements” were as transparently partisan as possible, without actually breaking any rules.

[np_storybar title=” Harper’s decision to start the campaign now has merit, to a point

” link=”http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/national-post-view-harpers-decision-to-start-the-campaign-now-has-merit-to-a-point#comment-2175437896″]

This overly-long election campaign is an unnecessary expense on the Canadian taxpayer. The Canada Elections Act provides for a partial reimbursement of paid election expenses. The candidate’s election expenses limit for a 37-day election period has been calculated by Elections Canada and it is $96,756. Now that the election is called, the election period turns out to be 78 days. The limit is then re-calculated as follows: 96,756 / 37 x (78-37) = 117676.22. Therefore the candidate’s new increased election expenses limit is: $96,756.00 + $117,676.30 = $214,432.22. This is for each riding and each candidate who receives over 10% of the vote. So we the Canadian taxpayer will be dishing out $72 MILLION to reimburse Political Parties like Stephen’s Conservatives thanks to this unnecessary extension. $72 Million!!!!!!!!! And this is assuming only one Candidate in each riding achieves over 10% of the vote. No wonder they don’t care about the longer period to advertise because they are not spending their money. By the way I am not even including the cost for Elections Canada to deal with this twice as long Election campaign which they originally calculated at $375 Million for a 37-day election.

-Aluggo