Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he has mixed feelings about the rise of third party, U.S.-style political action committees and the impact they could have on Canada’s political system.

Speaking in an interview with Quebec City radio station FM93, Harper was asked if he was concerned by the appearance of these groups, including HarperPAC, a political action group that includes a number of former Conservative government staffers.

“My attitude is a bit divided,” Harper told his interviewers, former Quebec cabinet minister Nathalie Normandeau and former Canadian Alliance aide Eric Duhaime.

“There is freedom of speech…but at the same time we limited donations to political parties to protect the integrity of the political system and now these groups can collect donations that are larger than that to do partisan things.”

“It is a difficulty but it is the law and it is the law that was determined by our predecessors and we have to live with that.”

At the same time, Harper suggested that the NDP and its leader, Tom Mulcair, are working with unions, which have begun running ads critical of his Conservative government.

“We have a law before Parliament to assure the transparency of union members’ money and Mr. Mulcair and the NDP oppose transparency in these unions because I am quite sure that the NDP is working very closely with those unions and their ads.”

That law, Bill C-377, is currently before the Senate, where Liberal senators have been trying to delay passage.

For years, Canada’s elections laws have capped the amount that individuals can donate to political parties or candidates and that political parties or third parties can spend during election campaigns. However, there is no limit on how much political parties or third parties can spend before the writ is dropped and the campaign officially begins.

That loophole in Canada’s elections laws has grown wider with the advent of Canada’s first fixed-date election. Whereas before, most parties and interest groups could only guess at when a prime minister would trigger an election, this time the date is known in advance.

The result has been the growth of interest groups on both sides of the political spectrum stepping up their spending in a bid to influence Canadians before the election campaign actually begins – leading to concerns on the part of experts like former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley that Canada could be headed towards the kinds of high spending elections seen in the United States.

Unions have banded together and plan to campaign against the Conservative government. The Canadian Labour Congress, for example, has launched its Better Choice campaign focusing on retirement security, jobs, health care and child care.

Lined up against the union effort is Working Canadians – a group that has launched ads attacking Justin Trudeau.

Conservative Voice is seeking donations, pointing out to businesses who are barred from donating directly to political parties that a donation can be considered a tax deductible expense for advocacy.

Engage Canada, launched by former Liberal and NDP staffers, is also seeking donations to fund ads and fact checks while HarperPAC launched this week with an anti-Trudeau attack ad.

None of the emerging groups will have to disclose how much they spend unless they choose to spend money during the actual election campaign period.

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