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Questions about whether former Mississauga-area Liberal MP Bonnie Crombie violated elections law in her bid to join city council have exposed a glaring hole in the Municipal Elections Act, experts say.

Ms. Crombie, who was defeated in the May federal election only to announce her candidacy for Mississauga’s vacant Ward 5 seat months later, paid for a team to conduct advance polls to gauge her popularity in the region shortly before jumping into the hotly contested race.

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“You want to go in so you can win,” she said in a July interview with the National Post, a couple of weeks prior to filing her nomination papers.

Ms. Crombie and her lawyer contend she broke no rules, even as other municipal law experts suggest she may have run afoul of section 76 of the Municipal Elections Act, which bars candidates from incurring election expenses outside the campaign period.

At issue is the definition of election expenses, referenced in the Act as “costs incurred for goods or services by or on behalf of a person wholly or partly for use in his or her election campaign.”